“Not dark yet, but it’s getting there”. Is Net Zero compatible with mass prosperity?
I want to begin this lecture by paying tribute to Lord Lawson, Nigel Lawson, who sadly died last month. It is a striking, and in many ways rather depressing, illustration of how much politics has changed since his time in government that his great memoir, “The View from No.11”, contains no index entry for “global warming”, “climate change”, or even “environment”. That changed very soon after he stepped down and he got involved in the debate with gusto, set up this Global Warming Policy Foundation, and was one of the few politicians – most of the others are in this audience – who were willing to subject the consensus political response to climate change to real debate. To the extent we are still able to debate these issues rationally, it is very much thanks to Lord Lawson’s efforts over the last 30 years. He is very much missed by all of us.
It is an honour to deliver the GWPF Annual Lecture this evening. I do so in the footsteps of very many distinguished predecessors and true experts, Steven Koonin just last year, Richard Lindzen, Matt Ridley, and many more. Mentioning these names shows why, well before I became a trustee of the Foundation myself, I was an avid reader of these lectures, as a beacon of rationality and reliable fact in a world which seemed so devoid of them. So it is with trepidation that I now put a foot into this debate myself.
I am encouraged, however, by the fact that it is not only scientists who have spoken here. There is a wider perspective which we need to hear and which, for example, Cardinal George Pell – another sad loss this year – brought in his lecture in 2011. The climate change issue cannot be left to scientists. How it is handled affects the whole of society. That is where I come in.
I came into politics late, and through Brexit not climate. But 30 years dealing with the EU gives you a very good nose for bad economics, for lobbying, rent-seeking, for la pensée unique, for corporatism, and indeed for a suspicion of capitalism and markets more broadly. All those things seem to me to be also highly characteristic of the way we – by which I mean this government, but also the West and its allies more broadly – are handling the challenge of climate change. That is why I care so much about this issue. I care about the risk that we are legislating ourselves into economic decline. It is therefore on that aspect, the economics, that I will focus primarily tonight.
Hence the title of my lecture: “Not Dark Yet, but it’s getting there”. This is of course a lyric from the eponymous Bob Dylan track – a song which is a reflection on his own mortality and his declining powers as a human being. I invite us tonight to make the same reflection about our society. It is not just about whether we literally go dark, as we can no longer keep the lights on – but also whether we in the West can sustain the confidence to face our challenges and to succeed as the world’s leading economies and societies, or whether we alternatively into miserabilism, degrowth, and economic decline.
So tonight I’ll speak mainly about how we are handling the consequences of the scientific view of climate, rather than whether that view is well founded in the first place. Still, every speaker on this subject must nevertheless make their view clear, if only as inoculation against some of the wilder accusations that inevitably come one’s way. So: it seems to me that the physics of the greenhouse effect is extremely well established. The ability to predict what that means for the climate is less so, but it seems overwhelmingly likely that there has been human agency in the global temperature rises of the last century or more.
That said, as Steve Koonin, distinguished physicist and under-secretary for science in the Obama administration, notes in his book “Unsettled”, “the science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it”[i]. He later describes “over-the-top statements about “climate emergency” and “climate crisis”” as “increasingly divorced from the science”[ii] – a view which seems very reasonable to me.
Overall I take it as a desirable goal to reduce the amount of carbon we emit, but in a way which is proportionate to the threat, if threat there is, and which sustains economic prosperity and growth. Climate change is a problem, one of the many we face: it is not existential and it doesn’t mean extinction is coming.
The science is, in my view, distinct from the political goal of “net zero 2050”. That is an arbitrary target conceived to meet another arbitrary target i.e. to keep temperature rises to 1.5 degrees. The causal connection between those things is very much open to debate, so are the necessary trade-offs, and so is the methodology by which we get to the target. I refuse to accept that questioning the specific target of Net Zero 2050 can be or should be off-limits. Indeed, only propositions which subject themselves to debate are worthy of being taken seriously in the first place. So we must keep asking: is Net Zero 2050 an achievable goal at an acceptable cost? And are we going about it in the right way?
My answer, perhaps not surprisingly, is no. I am going to argue that the route we have chosen to deliver net zero is inevitably wasteful and damaging; that it is totally implausible that it will boost growth and much more likely that it will reduce it; that as a result governments are pursuing completely incompatible political and economic objectives, but will not be able to do so for ever; that when the crunch comes they may well double down on further economically damaging measures in order to meet the goal; and, therefore, finally, that people like me must prepare for that moment when we will need to try to get onto a more rational path with a rethink of net zero methods and, almost certainly, timetable.
The route we have chosen to deliver net zero is inevitably wasteful and damaging.
For the full speech of 14 pages with the source references, please click on this link or on the one below if you want to download the pdf file:
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