The Climate Change Committee’s 2015 Fifth Carbon Budget Over-Estimated the Price of Gas in 2025 and Under-Estimated the Price of Renewables

The Climate Change Committee got it badly wrong in 2015

[NB: figures in bold in this article are figures that have been produced in the past, and have been adjusted by the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, to put them in today’s prices for easy comparison.]

How different things were a decade ago. Net Zero was not yet a thing, and the 2008 Climate Change Act required only an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050. Ed Miliband had just led the Labour opposition to a catastrophic defeat. Britain’s Referendum had not yet been called. Ahead lay the pandemic of authoritarianism, and in its wake, the price crisis and repolarisation of geopolitics, in which, following the coming and going of Trump 1.0, a senile president of the USA flirted with World War 3 and 90% of the UK’s news media couldn’t wait, and still regret the passing of his reign. Back then, in 2015, you could make a solid bet that things could only get worse, but you wouldn’t believe the detail if a time traveller had told you what the near future would bring. Most notably (for our purposes here), whereas virtually no controversy surrounded the climate agenda in the mainstream back then, now the legacy parties’ dominance of politics is being challenged by a party that is offering a reversal of the agenda, and is far ahead of them in the polls.

A lot happened in that decade. A lot can happen in a decade. And that is why I’ve always been extremely sceptical of prognosticators – especially deeply conflicted prognosticators who are engaged by idiot governments to prognosticate on behalf of particular policy agendas. None of the above was predictable. Yet authors of rigid policy agendas are encouraged to anticipate a smooth road into an easy future. Yet there were these bumps in the road. What kind of fool would gamble his reputation on long-term predictions?