The Frightening Cost of Net Zero

Time to spell it out in terrifying detail.

I was reminded last week in a conversation with a GB News editor about just how little understanding there is in the mainstream media of just how much Net Zero could end up costing the country.

To some extent this ignorance has been deliberately engineered. The original Climate Change Act in 2008 included no sort of cost-benefit analysis at all; it was passed almost unanimously through Parliament on the basis that when you are saving the planet, costs do not matter. It was the same story when Theresa May amended the 2008 Act to set a Net Zero target.

The idea that the public should know the cost of decisions made by their MPs was regarded as abhorrent by them and still is.

Since then, much of the media have been complicit in refusing to discuss the issue of cost. Nevertheless, there have been attempts to put a figure on it. In 2019, then Chancellor Philip Hammond warned May that reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 could cost the UK more than £1 trillion.

On the other hand, the Climate Change Committee has claimed the cost would be more like £200 billion over thirty years. However, this excludes the costs we are already paying and is based on unrealistically optimistic assumptions about the future cost of renewable energy.

So, who is right?