‘Net Zero could destroy civilisation’

Heatwaves in the UK, floods in Texas and wildfires in southern Europe have all been held up as portents of a coming climate apocalypse. Ed Miliband, the UK energy secretary, warned earlier this month that the British ‘way of life’ is under threat and ‘no sector or part of society is immune from those risks’. But is climate change really proving to be as dangerous as the eco-alarmists claim? And can it justify the extortionate costs of Net Zero, the drive to decarbonise every aspect of our lives?

Matt Ridley – author of Birds, Sex and Beauty and Viral – says cooler heads are needed in the climate debate. He recently joined spiked’s chief political writer, Brendan O’Neill on his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show, to discuss the myth of the climate crisis, the folly of the green transition and more. What follows is an extract from their conversation. You can watch the whole thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: Where do you think the discussion on climate change stands right now, as there has finally been some political pushback against it recently?

Matt Ridley: If you are sitting on boards of businesses or on the committees of charities, Net Zero is there the whole time as an agenda item. It’s still got a huge influence over all sorts of organisations. It’s constant and of course, it’s never debated. ‘We must do X for climate change’ has become a mantra.

And by the way, it’s also a very convenient excuse for politicians. For instance, if you don’t do prescribed burns in California and the Palisades then has wildfires, you can say, ‘Oh, climate change was to blame’. If you don’t give flood warnings in Texas and children die, ‘Oh, it’s climate change’. I think that Net Zero is an enormous part of all of our lives, but in a slightly unseen way, where it’s influencing the quiet decisions taken by business, by the third sector and so on.

Ed Miliband put a ‘State of the Climate and Nature’ report before parliament last week, which compared trends from the last decade with what they call the 20th century – between 1961 and 1990 – averages. He did this in order to show us just how terrifying this threat is. But I read it without much terror. It described how things had become a little bit warmer, a little bit wetter, slightly warmer in winter, not quite so warm in summer, less windy. There are a few more days when you might have to cut your lawn, but a few less days when you might have to heat your house. It did not sound very frightening, frankly.

This has been my problem all along. The evidence that climate change is a dangerous phenomenon has become weaker and weaker. Meanwhile, the evidence that it’s going to be terrifyingly difficult to maintain our civilisation while giving up on carbon is now pretty overwhelming. It cannot be done.

I worked out that if the world was using the same rate of spending that Ed Miliband does at your and my expense through our electricity bills – about £25 billion a year just to decarbonise the electricity system – it would spend £100 trillion a year. That’s roughly how big the global economy is. So we’d have to devote the entire global economy to decarbonising, and we wouldn’t be able to make anything from toothpaste to hamburgers.

The other bonkers thing about the current Miliband policy is that he is trying to stop drilling in the North Sea, but he is quite happy to buy gas from Norway. It’s the same damn field of gas under the seabed. It’s complete insanity.

O’Neill: Is it possible that Net Zero will be abandoned simply out of necessity or for practical reasons?

Ridley: I think that Trump’s America will be the test of this. UK GDP and US GDP per capita were pretty similar in the early 2000s – we weren’t far behind them. The US is now a third, maybe even more, richer than us. And a lot of that is down to energy costs. If America booms after ditching Net Zero, and we continue to stagnate, it will be hard to ignore.

Energy cost is such a vital part of an economy, because the economy is a thermodynamic phenomenon. It makes useful but improbable structures out of randomness, whether that structure is this conversation or the table I’m sitting at, and for that, you always need energy. So to have electricity prices three, four or five times higher in Britain than in America or China is a huge millstone around our neck. The first political party that really starts to deal with that in Britain will, I think, reap dividends.

Brendan O’Neill was talking to Matt Ridley. Watch the full conversation here: