An Inconvenient Truth: Fossil Fuels Aren’t Going Anywhere

Sir David Attenborough may be seen as an infallible ecological pope in this country; but elsewhere not so much.

When the British government got him to lecture the G7 leaders assembled in Cornwall in moral support of the host’s proposal that they declare a fixed date by which they would have phased out all coal-fired energy, it did not have the desired effect. The Americans refused — backed by the Japanese.

President Biden has a little local difficulty with that one. His party’s wafer-thin majority in the legislature is dependent on the “conservative” Democrat Joe Manchin, from the coal-producing heartland of West Virginia, who happens to be chairman of the Senate energy committee.

To make this clearer still, Manchin released the following statement after the G7 had rejected the UK’s suggested wording: “Fossil fuels, including coal, will be part of the global energy mix for decades to come.” He’s right, you know.

If the assembled leaders had needed any reminder of the risks of pushing their electorates too hard in the direction of “net-zero”, it was provided, even as they were meeting in Carbis Bay, by a referendum in intensely democratic Switzerland on legislation to increase a surcharge on car fuel and impose a levy on airfares.

The Swiss are regarded as among the world’s most “eco-friendly”: they are passionate recyclers and big on all forms of renewable energy, notably hydroelectric.

Yet the people voted by 51 percent to 49 percent against a proposal to pay more taxes on activities tied to fossil fuels, even though the country’s environment minister said this was essential to Switzerland’s commitment to cut its contribution to greenhouse gases to half of 1990 levels by 2030, and every element in the political establishment — even the Swiss Automobile Association — campaigned for it.

The BBC’s Berne correspondent declared that this was “a huge shock … voter rejection undermines Switzerland’s entire strategy to comply with the Paris agreement [on climate change]. Today’s results are a savage blow to environmentalists.”

A huge shock, really? Europe presents itself as the leader of climate change consciousness — the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, backed Boris Johnson’s proposals at the G7 meeting and tut-tutted afterward that the failure to agree on them “was not our doing” — but whenever it’s time for consumers to pay the full price of their leaders’ rhetoric, the result is the same: rejection and revolt.

Emmanuel Macron’s grandiloquent pronouncement, when he was trying to increase fuel taxes, that “we have no planet B” was ridiculed by the gilets jaunes: “The president talks about the end of the planet but we worry about getting to the end of the week.”

And for all the British government’s claims of “global leadership in the battle against climate change”, it is an embarrassing fact that ever since the fuel price demonstrations of 2000 — when lorry drivers and farmers blockaded oil refineries in protest against inexorable increases in petrol and diesel taxes — no administration has reimposed the “fuel price escalator”, a policy launched by the Conservatives in 1993 explicitly with a view to “saving the planet”.

George Osborne and Philip Hammond were just two Conservative chancellors who humiliatingly abandoned proposed fuel tax rises in their budgets rather than face public wrath.

The latest Conservative chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has a bigger problem even than that. The government has committed itself to banning all new gas boilers for homes by 2025 and to having them ripped out of existing residences in due course.

But the cost per household will be about £10,000 — and perhaps as much again for those without the wall insulation that the replacement electric heat pumps require, which will also be mandatory.

Sunak was asked about this repeatedly by Andrew Neil on Wednesday when he appeared on the presenter’s new channel, GB News.

“Who pays?” Neil kept pushing. It must have been a novel and even surprising experience for the interviewee. On the BBC, Sky, or Channel 4, ministers are never asked about the price of meeting their climate change commitments, as it is simply assumed that no cost to the consumer is too high to “save the planet”.

The normally unflappable Sunak did look a touch discomfited, not least when he was asked if he agreed with the Treasury estimate under Hammond, that the cost of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 would be at least £1 trillion.

Hammond had leaked that in an effort to deter Theresa May, in her last weeks as PM and desperate for a “legacy”, from committing the UK to achieving net-zero by 2050. He didn’t succeed.

There was not even a parliamentary debate on the matter in either house, still less primary legislation: it was passed via a statutory instrument.

This is the polar opposite of the democratic Swiss approach. All it does is defer the conflict between the government and the governed.

One of the arguments deployed by the winning side of that Swiss referendum was that their country was completely insignificant, globally, in terms of carbon emissions, so why should they face painful “voluntary” increases in costs to penalize drivers and flyers when, for example, China is augmenting its use of coal, the most heavily CO2-emitting fuel of all?

The figures are startling. China has not just been boosting its coal-fired energy production in recent years; it also has another 247 gigawatts of coal power in planning or development.

That addition alone is larger than the entire US coal-fired energy capacity and six times that of Germany (Europe’s biggest coal producer). Beyond its own territory, Beijing is financing new coal-fired capacity across Asia as part of its Belt and Road initiative.

The G7 did agree last week to cease financing any coal projects in the developing world. To which China says: thank you very much — we’ll pick up the slack.

Beijing, when taken to task over this, rightly points out that its CO2 emissions, per capita, are about half those of America. But China is already producing 27 percent of the global total, a proportion that is only increasing.

Meanwhile, the UK is now responsible for just 1 percent of emissions. This means our commitment to rip out our gas boilers and also to move rapidly to all-electric locomotion, without even having worked out how we will renewably produce all that extra electricity for homes and cars, resembles a much-loved sketch from Beyond the Fringe.

For younger readers, this is the one in which Peter Cook, playing a military officer, tells his hapless junior, played by Jonathan Miller, to make the ultimate sacrifice: “Perkins, we need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war.”

Only I doubt British voters will be as gormlessly acquiescent as Perkins was, when called upon to make their sacrifice to impress the world with our moral leadership. Even if Sir David Attenborough tells us we should.

Read rest at The Times ($)