Miliband's blank cheque...

How much is Labour's Net Zero agenda going to cost? Nobody really knows.

Apologies for the recent radio silence. I was hit by the mother of all chest infections in the week before Christmas — probably caused by all the dust I’m making sorting out my house. And this was followed by the failure of a recent root canal treatment that no painkillers could touch.

This was particularly annoying, as I felt like I was just about getting my pace ready for the new year, and writing lots, with many projects being lined up. I very rarely get coughs, colds and flus, so when I do get them, I seem to be quite completely incapacitated — like a big pathetic lump.

Anyway, I seem to be back on my feet. Last night I was on GB News to talk about the Daily Mail’s recent research that seemed to identify £37 billion of public money being spent on Ed Miliband’s favoured policies.

But I argued the £37 billion is no surprise whatsoever. The National Energy System Operator (NESO, formerly National Grid ESO) produces an annual projection of the path to Net Zero, called Future Energy Scenarios. In 2020, NG ESO estimated that the cost of Net Zero would be £3 trillion.

These scenarios make many assumptions, not least of which is the public’s willingness to make sacrifices, and to switch to EVs without being forced to. But in any event, we should look at these kind of cost estimates in the same way that HS2 costs were estimated — out by more than 200%. In which case, Net Zero, which is a far more complicated undertaking than HS2, will cost in the order of £10 trillion. At best, Net Zero is an HS2 per year.

The Daily Mail’s analysis is somewhat lacking. Not even newspapers, it seems, really have a grasp on what Net Zero requires of the public. Perhaps that’s because the numbers are so astronomical as to seem to be bonkers. But as I have pointed out before, the numbers don’t really tell the story, which is not that Net Zero requires a lot of money to produce drop-in replacements for our ways of life; environmentalism requires a radical reorganisation of society — the entire economy — that cannot really be estimated in terms of simple cost.

The conversation with Patrick was about to get interesting, but we had to cut it short. I think he was trying to balance the problem of ‘denialism’ against the putative necessity of climate action. I was about to counter by by pointing out that whether or not climate change is real, climate policy is almost certainly worse. Maybe next time.

Happy New Year!