British taxpayers will be forced to squander more than £300 billion over the next 15 years on pointless climate change schemes – more than double the cost of HS2, the Heathrow airport extension, and Hinkley Point C combined.
This is the massive public spending scandal exposed in a report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation by MP Peter Lilley. It’s all thanks to the 2008 Climate Change Act which has committed Britain to the ludicrous goal of reducing its carbon dioxide emissions by 57 per cent by 2030.
Lilley was only one of a handful of MPs to vote against the Act which was largely written by an activist from the hard-left environment campaign group Friends of the Earth (Bryony ‚Äì now Baroness Worthington), introduced under the last Labour government by the then Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband ‚Äì and enthusiastically supported by the then Opposition leader David Cameron who was warming up to lead the “greenest government ever”.
Astonishingly, as Lilley details in the report, no one at a senior level in government since has ever submitted the Climate Change Act to any kind of cost benefit analysis, let alone thought to question whether Britain’s handicapping its economy in this way will make the blindest bit of difference to climate change.
As former Cabinet Secretary Lord Turnbull points out in his introduction to Lilley’s report, much has changed since the Climate Change Act was passed:
• Temperatures have risen but below the range of most climate change models.
• Many of the predictions about the harmful effects of climate change have been exaggerated.
‚Ä¢ Fossil fuel prices which were expected to continue rising to the point where renewables reached ‘grid parity’ have fallen under the impact of new extraction technologies, thereby raising the costs of the subsidies required.
• No other country has followed us down the extreme unilateralist path.
• Severe damage is being done to our energy-intensive industries, most recently steel.
• Two of the technologies essential to achieve the carbon dioxide target at reasonable cost are struggling (nuclear power) or research has been abandoned, as in the case of carbon capture and storage.
Yet Britain remains legally bound by this exercise in green virtue-signalling passed all but unanimously by a House of Commons either too lazy, ill-informed or ideologically blinkered to appreciate just what damage it would be doing to Britain’s people, landscape and economy.
