The UK government's climate intransigence

A recent petition calling for the repeal of the UK Climate Change Act has triggered a response from the government. But what the reply reveals is yet more of the intransigence that caused its crises.

Earlier this year, a petition on the UK government’s website called for the repeal of the 2008 Climate Change Act and Net Zero targets. It argued that allowing only “one side only of a two-sided scientific debate is not an acceptable basis for significant legislation that could have major impacts of the UK's economy and citizens”. The petition reached the 10,000 signatures required for the government to respond, which it has now done.

This post is a rebuttal to the government’s response, and I’m publishing it as a free Substack article, hoping that it will cause the government to re-think its reply (unlikely), and to persuade more people that they need to sign it.

Below, I quote the government’s reply in full in bold and italic text, and my response underneath it. Point-by-point refutation can be a somewhat dry form of fisking, but I do not want to precis the government’s reply before taking issue with it, because that can often lead to claims that arguments have been misinterpreted or taken out of context, and so on.

“The Government’s policy to support ambitious action on climate change reflects the mainstream scientific consensus, and delaying action will only put future generations at risk.”

The government’s opening statement is categorically ideological. Although the response goes on to superficially outline the consensus position, the key points in this paragraph, which are not supported (as shall be discussed) empirically are the ‘future generations’, the level of ‘risk’ that they will be exposed to, and the degree of ‘action’ required to mitigate that risk. The lack of quantification means that the government’s statement is only an idea, expressed in merely symbolic terms, about a presupposed moral imperative. Those presuppositions need to be interrogated.

The UK government is answerable to the current generation and is chosen by the current generation. Future generations cannot either give their consent to or express their dissent from the current UK government’s claim to be acting on their behalf. In other words, the UK government has departed from the democratic tradition, which rests on the notions of autonomy and agency of individuals within society, to make decisions about how to manage public matters, including shaping the future. In claiming to speak for ‘future generations’, the government has decided that the extant public lacks the competences and moral sense required to take part in such decisions, and that it is not to be accountable to the public.

The nonsense of the government’s position can be clearly explained with a thought experiment. Had alarmist interpretations of global warming existed prior to the industrial revolution, that revolution’s development would have been arrested for the sake of ‘future generations’. Yet the industrial revolution, in addition to the liberalisation of markets, has transformed human lives beyond comparison with earlier generations.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, infant mortality in Britain has fallen from more than 25% to less than 0.4%. Poorer countries throughout the world have followed this pattern of development in recent decades, thanks to their own technological, economic and social development. In 1978, 17.6% of children born in Mongolia died before their fifth birthday. Today, that figure is 1.5% and falling: the population that had previously lived nomadic, pastoralist lifestyles are no longer exposed to the risks of such a precarious mode of life far away from the resources, services, and opportunities available to them in towns and cities. And those who are still nomadic now enjoy the security afforded by fossil fuels and vehicles.

Put simply, far from making life more precarious, the industrial revolution, powered by the combustion of fossil fuels, has vastly diminished the risks we are exposed to. This diminishing of risks is quantifiable: reductions in infant mortality, increases in wealth and longevity, and decreased loss of life due to extreme weather and exposure to the elements. Concomitantly, putting the affordability and availability of energy resources further out of the current generation’s reach, for the sake of future generations, increases the risks that the current generation is exposed to.

Bjorn Lomborg has quantified this disparity between extant and imagined ‘future generations’ in more detail.

Scenarios set out under the UN Climate Panel (IPCC) show human welfare will likely increase to 450% of today's welfare over the 21st century. Climate damages will reduce this welfare increase to 434%.

That is to say that future generations (in the year 2100) will be four and a half times better off than us, but that climate change will slightly dampen this progress by about 3.5% net. Even under alarmist interpretations of society’s sensitivity to climate, based on equally alarmist emissions-scenarios, future generations are vastly better off than today’s generation, according to the IPCC’s methodology. In the following chart, you have to look extremely closely to see how climate change reduces future potential growth, whereas the consequences of policy are far greater.

Fig. 21. GDP per person, 2005–2100 for World, OECD, non-OECD, and Africa, without climate damage, and with climate damage deducted, for the coolest scenario, the sustainable SSP1 reaching 3.24°C by 2100, and the hottest scenario, the fossil-fuel driven SSP5, reaching 4.86°C by 2100 (IIASA 2018; Nordhaus 2010; Nordhaus, 2013; Riahi et al., 2017).

Lomborg cites Ted Nordhaus’s analysis, above, which shows that climate change reduces future GDP in Africa by 9.9% under a fossil fuel-driven scenario, causing an approximately $5,000 loss of GDP per capita by 2100, from $120,000. A more aggressive climate policy, however, may reduce GDP by only 4.1%, but net GDP growth is only slightly more than 50% of that produced by the fossil fuel-driven scenario.

The UK government’s statement is therefore wrong, as Lomborg, Nordhaus and the IPCC have shown. Policies do not reduce risks to future generations and may in fact reduce future welfare (increased risk). Even policies that are seemingly intended to reduce the risks that future generations are exposed to are capable of doing far more harm to future generations than climate change. When the government’s symbolic claims are given numerical, objective substance, the claim falls apart. Functionally, it is equivalent to claiming that you must surrender some proportion of your wealth, because somebody in the future is only going to be ten times wealthier than you, rather than eleven times wealthier.

This ‘risk’ to future generations can only be demonstrated by comparing counterfactuals – which is what I call Ecohyperreality – with the thumb on the scales. It is a very nuanced conception of ‘risk’, which is typically understood as frequency x impact, but which has been corrupted by green ideology to mean deviation from an implausible optimum. In this conception of risk, both frequency and impact can diminish, yet ‘risk’ can estimated to have increased, because it is possible to merely conceive of frequency and impact being reduced further. It’s like saying that a millionaire is ‘poorer’, because he could be a billionaire.

The government’s reply continues:

“The Government’s policy to support ambitious action on climate change reflects the mainstream scientific consensus and thousands of studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments. The IPCC is the authoritative source of information on climate science. The IPCC has established that human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years. This warming of the climate is attributed to the build-up of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to fossil fuel combustion, cement manufacture and deforestation. The evidence for this is set out in chapters 2 and 3 of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Working Group 1 report. The IPCC Sixth Assessment reports can all be accessed here (https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/).”

This is a vague argument, as often happens, which fails to point to any evidence of how the UK government has interpreted the IPCC’s Assessment Reports beyond this statement. Chapters 2 (Changing State of the Climate System) and 3 (Human Influence on the Climate System) of IPCC AR6 WGI span 276 pages.

The claim that warming is ‘unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years’ is a factoid, with no particular significance. The IPCC do state it, as the following chart shows, but it is a contestable claim, in terms of its provenance, which the IPCC does not state, and its consequences (as we have discussed), and its veracity.

The last fifty years have seen the development of computers and satellites, whereas the early Twentieth Century temperature record is compiled from handwritten thermometer records, almost entirely from the Northern Hemisphere. Note that the temporal resolution of the C20th is stated as ‘years’, whereas the resolution for the preceding millennium is ‘decades’, and before that, ‘centuries’. The putatively ‘unprecedented’ recent rate of increase would necessarily invisible prior to 1000CE, and arguably, given the extent of the error margins, also invisible prior to 1900. And this also obscures the fact that global temperature in the recent decades is in fact measurable in days. And besides the temporal resolution, does science really believe that paleoclimatology and dendroclimatology have resolutions of tenths of a degree calibrated to today’s instruments? Does even mercury in a glass tube have such accuracy?

The claim thus looks more like IPCC authors trying to make a political point than, as they were tasked, synthesising the scientific literature. And of course, IPCC AR6 WGI Chapter 2 does not represent a scientific consensus, but the work of two coordinating lead authors, 14 lead authors, 123 contributing authors, two review editors and three chapter scientists – 144 researchers in total. Chapter 3 consists of two coordinating lead authors, 11 lead authors, 40 contributing authors, three review editors and two chapter scientists – 58 in total. And no part of those chapters enjoys even a consensus of those 144 and 58 scientists in total. There was no poll, and any particular paragraph may be the work of just a handful of individuals or perhaps even one. The process is opaque, and very far from the final word from ‘science’.

Moreover, the appointments to the IPCC are made by governments. And the UK is vastly over-represented in both chapters. Of the 144 researchers that worked on Chapter 2, 37, or nearly 26%, are affiliated to the UK. 16 authors, or nearly 28% of Chapter 3 researchers were UK-affiliated. And a number of those are civil servants, rather than independent scientists. For examples, Richard Betts from the UK Met Office, Piers Foster, who is now interim chair of the Climate Change Committee, and Tamsin Edwards, who is Thematic Research Lead for Climate and Environment in the UK Parliament. These individuals’ roles are neither distinct from government, nor independent from the political agenda. And most of the researchers in the UK contingent to chapters 2 & 3 of IPCC WGI AR6 would not have roles at UK universities at all, let alone with the IPCC, had their research demonstrated any independence from the policy agenda whatsoever.

The proximity of UK scientists to government and policymaking, and the UK government’s desire to ‘champion’ climate policy on the global stage are both problems that undermine its deference to the IPCC. Independence has been all but abolished from UK climate research by UK governments’ (and other forces’) political agendas. Those agendas required a consensus, and summoned it into existence, mostly by exclusion. If you are not aligned to the political agenda, you will not get a job at the Grantham Institutes at LSE or Imperial, or in the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at its host universities, or at the Smith School, the Martin School, or the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford. You will not be welcome at the Bath University Centre for Climate and Social Transformation. The former research councils, now lumped into the single entity, UKRI, did not fund work that is outside the scope of their business plans, which clearly stated their commitment to ‘sustainability’. Countless opportunities and research budgets of hundreds of £millions each year are unavailable to climate recalcitrant. No PhD for you, denier… Forget it.

“As discussed in chapter 4 of the above report, if the CO2 concentration continues to rise unchecked the world could face a global surface temperature rise of about 3°C or more above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century. The serious consequences of this for human societies and ecosystems are set out in the IPCC Working Group report on impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation.”

Chapter 4 of IPCC AR6 (Future Global Climate: Scenario-based Projections and Near-term Information) is the work of just 68 researchers, 15 of whom (22%) were appointed to the IPCC by the UK government. We have discussed in brief what the ‘serious consequences for human societies’ of a temperature rise of the order of 3°C or more are: they imply a loss of approximately 2.5% of net 21st century GDP growth, equivalent to global average GDP per capita only rising to $78,000, rather than to $80,000.

The problem for such alarmism hidden behind scientific authority is that we have already seen approximately half of that warming, albeit perhaps only temporary, yet have not seen any of the dire consequences that countless researchers have claimed would be the outcome. As we point out over at Climate Debate UK in our map of the structure of the climate debate, as one moves away from global warming science towards prognostication, uncertainty increases, errors multiply, and ideology exerts an increasing influence. There is no evidence of the promised increased frequency and intensity of storms. It has been hard for researchers to demonstrate any climate impacts, even such as floods, droughts, and wildfires, according to the IPCC itself. Moreover, the human consequences of these events have been diminishing, as we explain in our film, Why There is no Climate Crisis.

Climate prognostications, of course, emerge from ideology, like the countless prophecies of doom that the green movement produced before climate change came to dominate global environmental politics. The most famous failed predictions were produced by The Club of Rome, in its Limits to Growth hypothesis in the early 1970s. Despite its failures, however, governments, especially the UK’s, have been extremely reluctant to subject green ideology to any scrutiny. And British institutional science, seems more inclined to reward the failed prophets of doom than to allow their work to be scrutinised. This week, for example, The Royal Society awarded Anthony Fauci and Michael Mann foreign membership – a privilege that the same organisation awarded to Paul Ehrlich just a few years ago – despite the controversies and worse that these men are involved in. British institutional science has been completely politicised. And this problem afflicts researchers across the planet.

Is there any reason to give any credence at all too the prognostications in the IPCC Working Group report on impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation, as the government’s reply to the petition argues? It’s a 3,000 page document. I’ve read as much of it as I can. And I don’t see much evidence of science as much as more ideology.

Take for instance this headline claim from WGII SPM, which I have been tracking for a long time, as it has been a persistent claim of IPCC ARs, and takes a central role in climate advocates’ arguments.

Biodiversity loss and degradation, damages to and transformation of ecosystems are already key risks for every region due to past global warming and will continue to escalate with every increment of global warming (very high confidence). In terrestrial ecosystems, 3 to 14% of species assessed [33] will likely face very high risk of extinction 34 at global warming levels of 1.5°C, increasing up to 3 to 18% at 2°C, 3 to 29% at 3°C, 3 to 39% at 4°C, and 3 to 48% at 5°C.

Footnote 33 advises that “Numbers of species assessed are in the tens of thousands globally”. Well, how many tens of thousands? How is it possible that, despite this being a headline claim of the IPCC for many years, and the IPCC representing the scientific consensus, the actual number of species assessed remains a mystery.

Scientists aren’t even very clear about what a species is, and how many there are in total. The number may be as low as 3 million or as high as 100 million. And the notion of ‘extinction’ is equally vague. A species may be counted as ‘extinct’ by some models if it is no longer in a place that it was once found. Moreover, so-called ‘assessments’ of species’ vulnerabilities to environmental change are undertaken by researchers with manifest ideological agendas, whose methodology has been insufficiently scrutinised. This had led to a number of furious controversies.

When the ocean acidification (OA) scare emerged, some enthusiastic researchers forgot their scientific training. According to one review in a series that examined the scientific evidence of OA, which ‘assessed 465 OA studies published between 1993 and 2014’, 95% lacked scientific rigour. Another in the series found that studies which found less impact from OA ‘are typically more difficult to publish and, when published, seem to appear in lower-ranking journals’ – a problem known as publication bias. The IPCC, which synthesises the state of scientific knowledge by reviewing existing scientific literature, is therefore necessarily vulnerable to such effects, which seem particularly pronounced in population biology. Similarly, recent studies that reviewed investigations of the effect of CO2 on fish behaviour results in accusations of fraud.

The most comprehensive study of populations’ vulnerability to extinction, cited by the IPCC, is the Living Planet Index (LPI). The LPI Is compiled by the conservation charity WWF and the Zoological Society of London, which ought to raise questions about the provenance of research. A recent (and rare) criticism of the LPI found that, though the survey of populations claimed a radical decline in population numbers since 1970, nearly all of this reduction can be explained by the decline in just 356 out of 14,700 populations. When those species are removed from the analysis, the claim that there has been a near 70% loss of wildlife in the past half century fell apart.

The government’s concern for ‘the serious consequences of this for human societies and ecosystems’ then, cannot be taken at face value. It hides behind an ambiguous reference to IPCC WGII, but takes no account of intense controversies and debates in research relating to both human society’s and ecosystems’ vulnerabilities.

Those debates exist, and the IPCC does not – and cannot – negate them. Some may of course balk at the mere mention of Bjorn Lomborg, but Nordhaus’ credentials – a Nobel Prize-winning environmental economist – are impeccable. The government wants to use the IPCC to answer the claim that only accepting “one side only of a two-sided scientific debate is not an acceptable basis for significant legislation that could have major impacts of the UK's economy and citizens”, but its expectations of science are more than it can bear. Arguably, the government does not understand what the IPCC is, what it does, and what its reports say. Its vague pointing at the general direction of the IPCC in answer to the petition are just that: handwaving.

“The Prime Minister has reiterated that net zero is a priority for this Government. The UK is the first major economy to halve its emissions – having cut them by around 53% between 1990 and 2023, while also growing its economy by around 80%. More than ever, we are determined to adopt a fair and pragmatic approach to net zero that minimises the burdens on working people. The measures announced by the Prime Minister on 20th September 2023 (https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-on-net-zero-20-september-2023) will help avoid imposing significant costs on families.”

We already knew that Net Zero is a priority for this government. The petition says that it’s not a priority for a substantial part of the population who it is being imposed on. The response appears to suggest that concerns about this imposition are negated by the observation that emissions have been cut by 53% while GDP has increased by 80% since 1990.

Let us take the claims in turn. First, emissions-reduction. The ONS offers three metrics of UK greenhouse gas emissions: territorial, residence and consumption/footprint.

While it is true that domestic (territorial) greenhouse gas emissions fell by 50% between 1990 and 2020, consumption-based emissions reduction fell by just 36%. In other words, we have cut emissions by just a third, and the rest have been exported. This decarbonisation has been achieved in substantial part by deindustrialisation and by driving consumption-reductions through rising prices.

Second, ONS offers a time series of GDP which shows UK GDP rising from $1.266 trillion in 1990 to £2.273 trillion in 2023 – an increase of 80%. Hurrah! Rejoice!

Not so fast. ONS also offer a series of GDP per capita.

Between 1990 and 2023, GDP per capita rose just 50% compared to the governments claim of national GDP increasing by 80% over the same time. But worse, a look at the chart shows that most of the increase happened in the first half of the time period. Indeed, between 1990 and 2007, GDP per capita rose by 42%. In the 16 years since, GDP per capita rose by just less than 6%. On some analyses, the story is even worse: Britain’s per capita has been stagnant since 2007.

What is the significance of 2007? First… It is the year before the financial crash, which of course had an impact on GDP. Second, it is the year before the passing of the UK Climate Change Act, and it would seem likely that this has impeded recovery, despite promises of green growth, green industrial revolution, and green jobs.

So the government is wrong. Emissions have fallen by merely a third and per capita GDP has increased by at best 5.6% -- 0.35% per year in the era of emissions-reduction policy. If you were lucky enough to experience this bonanza, the benefit was likely entirely lost in the form of rising energy prices.

In his September 2023 speech, Rishi Sunak claimed,

 in a democracy, we must also be able to scrutinise and debate those changes, many of which are hidden in plain sight – in a realistic manner.

This debate needs more clarity, not more emotion.

But more than just clarity and debate, said Sunak, his new pragmatic realism would “require a wholly new kind of politics”

“A politics that is transparent, and the space for a better, more honest debate about how we secure the country’s long-term interest.”

But where is this ‘new politics’? Where is this ‘space’ for ‘more honest debate’?

His government has fibbed, and manifestly eschewed debate and clarity, and is hiding behind the IPCC. The same as every government before it that took us into this mess.

Nothing he said in his speech, besides kicking the can down the road, explained how the ‘balance’ he wanted to strike between green ideological ambition and the costs to households would be achieved. He talked a good talk about recognising the problem. But he was far more forceful in reiterating his support for Net Zero than committing to protecting people from the costs.

“The Government understands the importance of affordable energy bills for households and businesses and is focussed on delivering for energy consumers. We are taking a comprehensive approach to bring down future bills. This includes reforming retail markets to be more effective for consumers through the Review of Electricity Market Arrangements (REMA) Programme. We are also investing across the energy system and supporting the progress of new technologies to deliver a smarter energy system, and energy efficiency to reduce costs for all consumers.”

We have heard all this before. No new technologies have materialised. These are empty promises. And we have had several market reforms – the latter which aimed to mend the problems of the Renewables Obligation by introducing the Contracts for Difference scheme, which guaranteed a price to renewable electricity generators. Yet domestic energy prices have continued to rise. Consequently, in 2017 the then May government introduced the price cap – a policy idea that Labour complained the Tories had stolen from them. All the same, two years later, despite the clear effect of policy on prices, the last days of the dismal May administration were marked by Parliament’s capitulation to Extinction Rebellion, and the Net Zero amendment to the Climate Change Act.

In 2019, there was extremely clear evidence that the more a county produced power from ‘renewable’ sources (excluding hydropower), the higher its electricity prices were. Yet MPs and the government continued, in defiance of the facts, promising countless upsides. The following chart shows international comparisons of electricity price versus the proportion of each country’s supply from wind and solar.

This needs to be remembered when understanding Rishi Sunak’s September speech.

“We can do all this in a fairer, better way – and today I can set out the details of what our new approach will mean for people”, said Sunak, “That starts with electric vehicles. We’re working hard to make the UK a world-leader”.

People are already choosing electric vehicles to such an extent that we’re registering a new one every 60 seconds. But I also think that at least for now, it should be you the consumer that makes that choice, not government forcing you to do it. Because the upfront cost is still high – especially for families struggling with the cost of living. Small businesses are worried about the practicalities. And we’ve got further to go to get that charging infrastructure truly nationwide. And we need to strengthen our own auto industry, so we aren’t reliant on heavily subsidised, carbon intensive imports, from countries like China. So, to give us more time to prepare, I’m announcing today that we’re going to ease the transition to electric vehicles. You’ll still be able to buy petrol and diesel cars and vans until 2035.

But the PM’s ambitions to make the UK a ‘world leader’ did not last long. As I pointed out recently here, there is simply no evidence that people are buying EVs out of choice. Private buyers accounted for less than 20% of sales of new EVs, the remainder were sold to fleets. This was made possible only by the extraordinary subsidy scheme that allows already wealthy people to write of the cost of leasing an EV against income tax.

Sunak promised merely the mildest possible deferment of the ultimate data of the abolition of new petrol and diesel car sales. But it has already crashed. Last week, the Telegraph reported that, though the governments complete ban doesn’t apply until 2035, the ramping up of the sales mandate was already having the effect of a complete ban.

Vertu Motors said sales of electric cars had “stalled” in the UK, raising the risk that manufacturers will miss sales targets mandated by law. Under the zero emissions vehicle (ZEV) mandate, 22pc of carmakers’ sales must be electric this year with the target rising annually until it reaches 80pc in 2030. There is some wiggle room, with carmakers able to trade carbon credits. But with manufacturers risking fines of £15,000 per car for breaching the rules, Vertu warned that many might simply throttle supplies of petrol and diesel cars to artificially boost their compliance.

Quoting Vertu’s chief executive, the Telegraph give the lie to Sunak’s claims: “If you choke off petrol and diesel supply, then clearly I think prices probably will go up and actually used car prices definitely will go up.”

“The costs of global inaction to tackle climate change significantly outweigh the costs of action. Indeed, delaying action will only put future generations at risk. The Net Zero Review by HM Treasury, published alongside the Net Zero Strategy in October 2021, provided an analysis of the costs and benefits of the transition, found here (http://www.gov.uk/government/publications/net-zero-review-final-report). As the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) noted in its July 2021 Fiscal Risks Report (https://obr.uk/frs/fiscal-risks-report-july-2021/), “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”.”

As has been shown above, the costs of inaction do not outweigh the costs of action: the evidence shows that a debate exists, and that even under radical emissions scenarios, emissions-reduction policies arguably cause a greater loss of welfare than is caused by climate change. It is of course orthodoxy in the British establishment that “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”, because by-and-large, such analyses are written by fanatics – people driven by green ideology, not by objective research.

This orthodoxy was established in 2006 by Nicholas Stern’s review of the Economics of Climate Change. In other words, the debate called for by the petition has mostly been resisted by UK government’s commitment to the Stern Review. The Review has faced widespread criticism, but neither Stern himself nor UK government agencies have permitted debate to inform either their analyses nor interpretation of environmental economics. One evaluation of the Review, by Professor Richard Tol concluded that

the Stern Review is very selective in the studies it quotes on the impacts of climate change. The selection bias is not random, but emphasizes the most pessimistic studies. The discount rate used is lower than the official recommendations by HM Treasury. Results are occasionally misinterpreted. The report claims that a cost-benefit analysis was done, but none was carried out. The Stern Review can therefore be dismissed as alarmist and incompetent.

Stern had merely selected studies that support his contentions to find that whereas climate change mitigation policies will cost 1% of GDP, climate change itself will cost between 5 and 20% of GDP.

My point here is not simply that Stern and all the orthodox studies that have followed its methodology and precepts are wrong. The point is that there exist many researchers in this field, on either sides of the broader climate debate, who have a lot to say about it, but which policymakers and civil servants routinely ignore. Tol, in fact, joins Lomborg and Nordhaus in being categorically pro-climate change mitigation policy, yet typically, the response is to interpret such arguments as ‘climate change denial’, rather than counters to the radical green ideology that dominates in Westminster. Institutionalised intransigence characterises the last 20 years of policymaking, and the government’s response to the petition, by pointing only to the fruits of that intransigence, epitomises it, and makes the petition’s point all the more forceful. The government’s doubling-down will only cause the democratic deficit to expand, and the consequent societal tensions it will create will become increasingly unpredictable and dangerous.

“Government policy and spending ambitions will support up to 480,000 green jobs in 2030. We have a clear strategy to boost UK industry and reach net zero by 2050 – backed by £300 billion in public and private low carbon investment between 2010 and 2023, with a further £100 billion of private investment expected by 2030. Since September alone companies have announced plans for £30bn of new investment across the energy sector, including to advance green technologies and support green industries of the future.”

None of this is of any consequence to the petition other than to demonstrate the government is committed only to Net Zero, not to addressing criticisms, let alone people’s needs. Every government since the Climate Change Act has simply lied about the growth of green jobs and scale and benefits of ‘low carbon investment’. As has been shown on this Substack, the government’s own agencies can produce no evidence of green economic growth or green jobs.

What may appear at first pass to be green growth is merely driven by policy. Where a market has not been mandated by policies, such as wind power, there is no sign of growth. Of course, if you pass a law requiring every home to have a widget, then the widget-economy appears to grow!

Green jobs, per subsector of the ‘green economy’:

Despite successive government promising ever more green jobs, over the last decade, very few green jobs have been created, and many of those have been conjured out of thin air, merely by reclassifying existing economic sectors as ‘green’. Between 2010 and 2020, only 50,000 net green jobs were created.

And as David Tuver has pointed out, many of those green jobs were created at astronomical expense.

“The public will play a key role in the net zero transition. A significant proportion of the emission reductions will require the public to make green choices and the UK government will be supporting the consumers all the way. Our priority is making green choices significantly easier, clearer and more affordable, and working with industry to remove barriers.”

This is of course, utter nonsense, not worthy of much comment. The government has not, and has no plans to ‘support consumers’ any part of the way. All policy since the Climate Change Act has required far more from consumers than the consumer has signalled willingness to commit to. Hence, every domestic energy efficiency policy to date has been an abject failure, despite the promises of vast amounts of free money. And that is a fact that Rishi Sunakl himself admitted in his September 2023 speech:

No one in Westminster politics has yet had the courage to look people in the eye and explain what’s really involved.

That’s wrong – and it changes now. 

[…]

We seem to have defaulted to an approach which will impose unacceptable costs on hard-pressed British families.

[…]

Even the most committed advocates of Net Zero must recognise that if our solution is to force people to pay that kind of money support will collapse, and we’ll simply never get there.

[…]

The last Carbon Budget process was debated in the House of Commons for just 17 minutes and voted through with barely any consideration given to the hard choices needed to fulfil it. It was the carbon equivalent of promising to boost government spending with no way to pay for it. That’s not a responsible way to make decisions which have such a bearing on people’s lives. So, when Parliament votes on carbon budgets in the future, I want to see it consider the plans to meet that budget, at the same time.

However, the government seems to have already forgotten what the Prime Minister promised.

“The DESNZ Public Attitudes Tracker shows that people are willing to make green choices. In Summer 2023, a large majority (74%) agreed that they could make changes that would help reduce climate change. When shown a list of behaviours related to reducing climate change, almost all people (98%), said that they did at least one of these in their everyday life. The most recent wave of the DESNZ Public Attitudes Tracker (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-winter-2023) shows that 80% of people in the UK are either fairly concerned or very concerned about climate change and 62% of the public consider climate change and the environment to be one of the most important issues facing the UK (ONS 14-25th February 2024 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/bulletins/publicopinionsandsocialtrendsgreatbritain/14to25february2024).”

In fact, DESNZ’s Public Attitudes Tracker shows diminishing concern for climate change and support for renewable energy.

Though these surveys would seem to indicate strong (but diminishing) support for green policies, the strength of those commitments is not tested. This is important, because the difference between respective sides of the democratic deficit is the difference between ideological intransigence and residual trust in the state and its agencies.

When surveys have asked the public to ask what they are willing to sacrifice for Net Zero, the results are very different. A poll that followed Sunak’s speech published by KCL revealed that green concerns are not a priority for voters when they are asked to rank their concerns.

And, despite an ideologically homogenous news media and cross-party Westminster consensus denying the public debates on climate and energy policy for the past quarter century, a full third of voters expressed a preference for relaxing Net Zero.

46% of respondents agreed that Sunak was right to relax Net Zero targets, which suggests that the above results understate the public’s scepticism.

But a more devastating 2021 poll found that preferences are inverted when respondents are asked to state their willingness to pay for Net Zero.

“The Climate Change Act requires that we publish the level of the Carbon Budget 7 twelve years before the period to allow policy makers, businesses, and individuals to prepare. The statutory deadline for setting the Seventh Carbon Budget is June 2026. In recent correspondence with the Environmental Audit Committee, the Secretary of State for DESNZ stated her support for proper democratic consideration of carbon budgets. We have committed to additional Parliamentary scrutiny for Carbon Budget 7, which is in line with this government’s commitment to delivering on these targets in a way that brings people with us and ensures democratic debate about the way we get there.”

This statement reiterates a promise in the PM’s September speech to spend more time and energy ‘debating’ the costs imposed on the public. But MPs, their parties, and the governments led by seven Prime Ministers have had all of this century so far to debate climate and energy policy. What they instead decided between themselves was an agreement to not debate policy, and to instead represent the interests of the green movement, that had spent £billions in lobbying them for climate policies…

The above agreement, organised by the Westminster-based green lobbying outfit, the Green Alliance, epitomises Parliament’s contempt for the public and for democracy. As I have argued elsewhere, MPs and ministers have been candid in revealing their vision of green politics. That vision is a compact between government, business, and so-called ‘civil society’ organisations, such as the Green Alliance, in the full knowledge that the public are both excluded from that compact, and do not share its ideological premises.

Extra time to debate the costs of climate policies is going to be of little consequence if Parliament does not reflect on recent policy failures, and is incapable of understanding how it came to be so dominated by ideology that it eschewed debate, not just within its own chambers, but also in civil society, in academia, and in the news media.

Conclusions

The governments response to the petition calling for debate to be recognised by Westminster was authored by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. As many have observed this new department is founded on an oxymoron. Net Zero can only come at the expense of energy security, where energy security is determined by the availability and price of energy. This tension has been obvious to all outside Westminster for decades, yet trying to bring Westminster’s attention to it has been impossible for the reasons explained above.

Now that tension is coming to the actual point of crisis that those who do not buy into the infallibility of climate science and politics have long predicted. The government has realised it, and is now doing all that it can to rescue Net Zero while doing the minimum it can to assuage concerns from a growing, and increasingly organised (but a long way to go yet) part of the public. The opposition parties will not realise it until they are in government, after their turn in doubling down on the policy agenda escalates the crisis. Meanwhile, the civil service, academia and the corporate/civil society blob are variously trying the worn-out modes of public engagement: smear (calling people ‘far right’ and ‘conspiracy theorists), fear (upping the alarmist rhetoric), handwaving, and demanding censorship.

The response reveals that the government has either learned very little about why resistance to green politics is heading towards the point of crisis or has no means to reflect the public’s concerns while facing the intransigence that governments and Westminster have institutionalised. So the result – the response – is an extremely condescending attempt to excuse its own, and the political establishment’s intransigence, by hiding behind the IPCC, and other UK state agencies’ analyses – the very same thinking that created this mess.

In other words, it is the state doubling down on the state religion, that the state created, in full knowledge of the state religion’s shortcomings. The petition observes that the orthodoxy of the state religion excludes its critics, and demands that debates be heard. The response merely reproduces the orthodoxy, and eschews debate.

This long article is a response to the government’s response. In each case, I have not set out an exhaustive reply – the post is long enough – but outlined the major criticisms that exist of the government’s argument that the debate in each area has been settled and is therefore unnecessary. I do not argue that the debate is settled, I argue that, contrary to the government’s claims, debates exist. They have been inconvenient to the government’s flagship policy agendas, and to the Westminster consensus. But they have not been answered by the government or Westminster. Only its characteristic intransigence have prevented debates from reaching Westminster and its policy-making machinery.

And that is an indictment on Westminster, which should now either be honest and admit that democracy has been cancelled, or it should suspend policies that lack democratic legitimacy and a sound basis in science and observational evidence.

Parliament and the government will insist that the basis of their policies rest on the authority of institutional science. But as we have seen, those institutions are now the most infested by ideology, and they are no longer competent to produce or evaluate scientific evidence in the public’s interest – which they are in fact openly hostile to.

Moreover, the scientific consensus on climate change – if that is really what the IPCC’s work represents – was summoned up in order to meet political needs. That is to say that the politics and ideology preceded the scientific case, it did not emerge from it. The UK government more than most has been instrumental in providing that consensus-building with the resources of state machinery – £billions upon £billions of funding.

Meanwhile that consensus has been enforced, not by the scientific process revealing the truth and sidelining error, but by the elision of dissent from the academy and public institutions of all kinds. Where the IPCC has been inadequate to meet the political need for consensus, panjandrums and new institutions, such as The Stern Review and research organisations like the CCEP have been recruited and established to fill the vacuum. Parliament, rather than debating, defers to the Climate Change Committee, and an army of civil servants, whose standing orders are, like the IPCC’s, to provide the claims necessary to support the extant policy agenda.

Debate has been excluded from public life with ruthless zeal. And that has led the government into error after error after error. Consequently, the UK public has no reason to consider that its response to the petition, or any of the evidence given in its defence of its intransigence was authored in good faith.

Please sign the petition. Please get people you know to sign the petition. Please share this article. Only by using the remaining instruments of democracy available to us can the Net Zero policy agenda be prevented from creating more harm.

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