The fallacies behind green costs

"Green costs" is my shorthand for the prices we are having to pay for the government's low carbon measures, as taxpayers and consumers. It's worth while reminding ourselves how flimsy the basis for them is.

First, the correlation between "global temperatures" and atmospheric carbon dioxide is poor. Correlation with solar activity looks better. But in reality global climate is a hugely complex system which science is only beginning to understand. The computer models which are the supposed scientific basis for low carbon policy have to be regularly revised, as we saw only last week, and they seem to be poor at predicting temperatures.

Nor, then, can we assume that some change in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide would lead to a predictable change in temperature.

Even if politicians accept the dodgy science, the economic justification for pauperising ourselves doesn't hold water either. Even the IPCC admits that "the costs and benefits of mitigation ... are broadly comparable in magnitude". And, asks Nigel Lawson rhetorically in his book

How great a sacrifice is is either reasonable or realistic to ask the present generation, particularly the present generation in the developing world, to make, in the hope of avoiding the prospect that the people of the developing world, in a hundred years time, may not be 9.5 times as well off as they are today, but 'only' 8.5 times as well off?

Finally, note that the UK is responsible for 2% of emissions, while the Hadley Centre claims that "only by a reduction of 70% in [global] carbon dioxide emissions would we be able to stablilize its concentrations in the atmosphere".

This is hubristic hobby policy.

That's the background to the green costs we're tracing - pointless extra costs imposed on the population at a time when disposable incomes are shrinking.

For instance, the annual cost to the British taxpayer and energy consumer of support for renewable energy of one kind or another is already nearly £1bn a year to meet less than 2% of UK energy needs.

To see others, click on the "green costs" link below.