BORIS MUST CUT THE CLIMATE NOOSE IF WE ARE TO AVOID ECONOMIC NIGHTMARE

Rupert Darwall: Net Zero Mania Threatens To Derail Lockdown Recovery
The Daily Telegraph, 5 May 2020
Boris Johnson has only one chance to ensure rapid and sustained economic recovery from the lockdown - and that is to scrap every obstacle that stands in the way of economic growth, the biggest of all being the net zero climate noose.
When economies emerge from the pandemic, aggressive climate policies should be the priority, according to Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary and Boris Johnson’s deputy. Sounding like a modern day King Canute, he has urged governments to turn the tide on climate change. "There’s no choice between cutting our emissions and growing our economy," Mr. Raab claims. "That’s a myth the UK has helped to shatter over the past decade."
In fact, the last decade saw Britain rack up its worst productivity performance since the Industrial Revolution. Ministers don’t tell us how we cut them by exporting our industrial base – emissions relating to imports from China are 276pc higher compared to 1997.  The Government can forget about re-shoring vulnerable supply chains as it would push up our emissions.
 
France’s Emmanuel Macron, by contrast, is a good deal more honest, having described the choice on climate as profound and brutal. Decarbonising inflicts costs on the poorest in society and it shrinks blue-collar job opportunities, worsening the North South regional divide.
 
Britain legislated its commitment to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero after a mere ninety-minute debate in the House of Commons last June. Unlike the original 2008 Climate Change Act, the Government did not provide an economic impact assessment of net net and its  analysis of the costs, of what it would to do the economy and  an  estimate of the potential climate benefits to Britain.
 
Lack of scientific and economic rigour and objectivity is par for the course development of net zero and  adoption of  the 1.5°C target. In the run up to the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, the president of the Maldives held the world’s first underwater cabinet meeting to dramatise the threat to low-lying islands from rising sea levels and lobby for the 1.5°C limit and incorporated in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Yet there was no satisfactory scientific basis for the sinking island fable. As Charles Darwin explained in the 1830s, coral atolls are formed by gentle subsidence of the seabed and, surprise, surprise, islands such as the Maldives have seen their land area expand.
 
After the politicians had decided on the policy, scientists, in the shape of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),were  invited to provide a special report in 2018 on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.
The IPCC had a problem. Its existing 1.5°C carbon budget – the amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted to keep global warming from rising  more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels – was all but used up.
 
Obviously there was no point in agreeing a limit only to have it busted almost immediately.  Helped by computer climate models running too hot and over-predicting warming since 2000, an IPCC lead author admitted, the IPCC found a way of more than doubling the 1.5°C budget and keeping the climate show on the road. Although the IPCC only had medium confidence in its revised 1.5°C budget, it claimed high confidence that emissions had to reach net zero by 2050.
 
Perhaps that’s because the IPCC sees net zero as providing, it says, the opportunity for "intentional societal transformation" and makes little secret of its ideological hostility to capitalism and economic growth. Like the government, the IPCC doesn’t put a price tag on net zero, but the few numbers it produces are eye-popping, with costs ranging up to sixty times the hypothetical climate benefits estimated by the Obama administration.
 
Indeed, the IPCC concedes that net zero will hit the world’s poor hard with higher food prices and delay the transition to clean cooking, one of the biggest causes of avoidable deaths in poorer countries. There is no ethical, economic or social justification for such policy overkill and its immense destruction of human welfare.
 
Fortunately net zero isn’t going to happen whatever politicians here might think. The West’s pre-pandemic emissions account for around one quarter of global emissions. Buying into net zero will turn Europe into a continent of zombie economies, but the rest of the world isn’t going to follow.
 
The Prime Minister has only one chance to ensure rapid and sustained economic recovery from the lockdown - and that is to scrap every obstacle that stands in the way of economic growth, the biggest of all being the net zero climate noose. If he fails, he and his government will be toast, his political career be ruined and the Conservatives will be remembered for this policy-made economic disaster. Keeping Boris’s commitment to net zero won’t be pretty.
 
Rupert Darwall is a Senior Fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of The Climate Noose published by the GWPF