The Right is Still Foolishly Rejecting Fossil Fuels

The Centre for Policy Studies wants "market solutions" – but only if they're carbon-free

The fracturing of the Net Zero policy agenda continues this week, with a new report from the one-time Thatcherite think tank the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). With a press release boasting that it has been “endorsed” by Ed Miliband’s Conservative opposite, Claire Coutinho MP, the report, ‘Power to the Markets‘, claims to offer “a new centre-Right vision for energy policy”. And, in parts, it may well deliver. It even makes no fewer than 12 references to the late Nigel Lawson, whose anti-statist determination to remove government from industrial and energy policies are credited with producing the lowest prices for consumers. Surely, such a homage to the founder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation and Net Zero Watch represents a terminal point for the climate-Right-of-centre? Sadly, despite very many words spread over 112 pages, there isn’t much evidence of the Conservative-aligned think tank’s reflection on what it hitherto supported.

The report begins with a review of what went wrong. If there is anything interesting in this long-winded preamble through the history of Britain’s energy policy failures, it is nothing that could not have been read on these pages or offered by Net Zero Watch and the Global Warming Policy Foundation, or individual voices such as Kathryn Porter and David Turver, among many others. These independent perspectives were developing while think tanks, including the CPS, were urging Net Zero on on the Green Blob’s coin. And in the absence of much new amid so much waffle, I am forced to wonder, not just what is the point, but if the point is to convince you that a point has been made.

Take, for example, the recommendation that “the explicit goal should be energy abundance and enduring cheap prices”. Here, have a standing ovation! But why wasn’t it? Similarly: “Markets will do a better job of picking the capacity mix than government.” Amazing! But then it turns out that the report constrains the market’s choice to “renewables, nuclear or new technologies”.

I am pretty sure that I have pointed out here that there is no “market” left in the UK energy “market” quite a number of times. As EU and UK policies required coal-fired power stations to be reduced to rubble as quickly as possible, only state largesse could summon up wind and solar farms at the speed required by the Westminster consensus’s emissions-reduction targets.