It is morally wrong to blindly adhere to net zero – we must abandon it before it’s too late.
At COP28, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman was right to call out delusional Western leaders with their pie-in-the-sky nonsense.
Last week, I was lucky enough to interview Michael Kelly, emeritus professor of engineering at Cambridge University and fellow of the Royal Society, for the Planet Normal podcast. The transition from fossil fuels would, he said, be “the biggest engineering project undertaken in British history” – and we are nowhere near ready for what amounts to the Industrial Revolution on steroids.
Prof Kelly has published a devastating, jaw-dropping paper called Achieving Net Zero: A Report from a Putative Delivery Agency. Because the British government has singularly failed to do a cost-benefit analysis of what it will take for the UK to be carbon neutral by 2050 (sound familiar?), Prof Kelly decided to imagine that he’d been appointed CEO of a new agency with the explicit goal of meeting that target.
Among his horrifying conclusions: the cost of the UK reaching net zero by 2050 will comfortably exceed £3 trillion (at least £180,000 for every household), a workforce comparable to the entire NHS will be required for 30 years, including a doubling of the present number of electrical engineers. The country would effectively have to “go on a war footing and a command economy will be essential, as major cuts to other forms of expenditure, such as health, education and defence. will be needed”. The electricity supply will have to increase by about 67 per cent in order to maintain transport at today’s level. The national grid needs to be 2.7 times bigger in 2050 than it is currently if the UK economy as we know it now is to continue to function. That is eight times the rate at which new capacity has been added over the past 30 years, including all the renewables to date.
Oh, and every home in the country will have to be rewired, plus all street distribution and local sub-stations. It has been estimated it will cost £700 billion to carry out this work, and we don’t have the manpower to do it. Without that spending, we will have to live with frequent circuit breaks, and suboptimal performance of domestic appliances. Folks, do your washing at 3am and buy a battery-powered torch for the blackouts.
If this sounds mad it’s because it is mad. To use Prof Kelly’s starkest image, if we take the cost of HS2 now as being about £100 billion, then achieving net zero will require 36 HS2s or more than one a year until 2050. You may recall, we tried to deliver just one HS2. And failed.
The struggle to reach agreement at COP28 is a harbinger of growing international resistance to this folly. Now is the time for a complete rethink on net zero. It is morally wrong to stubbornly adhere to a goal which will cost trillions of pounds, and isn’t even achievable. Not in the timeframe. The damage to peoples’ lives from this misguided target will be incalculable, and civil unrest a likely consequence. We need to start again with proper cost-benefit analyses. Engineers of the calibre of Prof Kelly should be given the task of working out what is feasible with a longer horizon, and be free to express their honest view. The Climate Change Committee, which exerts a powerful hold over the thinking of clueless MPs, should be scrapped. Enough with the Green grandstanding.
Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman was right to call out delusional Western leaders with their Just Stop Oil nonsense. (“Let them do that themselves. And we will see how much they can deliver.” Quite.) It would mean living without plastics, without appliances, without most clothing. Much of the twinkly joy of Christmas would be lost, along with the sparkly wrappers of Quality Street. I don’t want to live in that dreary, dark world, and nor do most people.
At COP28, there are many who are convinced that we face a climate catastrophe in the next few decades if net zero is not delivered. Well, I say we are certain to have an economic and societal catastrophe if we persist in trying to reach that goal by 2050. Humanity cannot bear it. DT.
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