UK’s Net Zero Official Cost Equivalent To Spending £1 A Second For 31,000 Years

The truth is out. An official report has admitted for the first time the scale of the cost of reaching net zero by 2050.

A study by the National Infrastructure Commission, released on Tuesday, concluded that hitting the 2050 target will roughly double the amount of money we would have spent anyway on infrastructure over the next 27 years to £2 trillion: an additional £1 trillion spent on the green agenda. [emphasis, links added]

For a word that skips off the tongue so easily, a trillion is mighty big (1,000,000,000,000).

Imagine you were to spend a pound a second: how long would it take you to spend £1 trillion? The answer is more than 31,000 years.

So to have spent a trillion pounds by today at the rate of £1 a second, you would have to have started when woolly mammoths roamed free.

Most of that trillion will go into replacing petrol cars with electric ones and gas boilers with electric heat pumps, and into generating, transmitting, and distributing the extra electricity needed for these two uses.

It also includes a host of other capital projects, including better household insulation.

With all that electric demand, we would need extra power stations, extra pylons, and upgrades of household electrical circuits.

And we would need subsidies for installing the heat pumps and buying electric vehicles.

Oh, and £74 billion would be spent on closing down the gas grid: the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC), which was set up to promote economic growth, has been so captured by the green lobby that it is now a National Dismantling Commission.

With the exception of home insulation, very little of that £1 trillion would actually improve your lifestyle in any practical way.

It does not promise to give you cheaper or more reliable electricity. It would not save you any money, or give you any more spare time — or make you more productive.

It would generally replace smaller things with bigger things — more pylons, heavier cars, bigger radiators, wind farms instead of gas turbines — so it would actually clutter the world more.

It’s not like the fortunes we spent setting up the railways in the 1840s, or the electricity grid in the 1950s, or the internet in the 1990s. These gave us something new and useful.

Net zero merely gives us exactly the same product in a different way.

The NIC claims pursuing net zero will provide energy in a cheaper, more reliable, and more secure way, but this is nonsense: as I have written on these pages before, going back to coal would deliver those goals, whereas wind farms don’t work when the wind does not blow and heat pumps don’t work as well in very cold weather.

In effect, therefore, we would get a lower-quality product.

So it’s like replacing all the UK’s coffee shops with more expensive, bigger ones that serve exactly the same coffee and have slightly longer queues.

The £1 trillion spent on this, of course, is money we would not be able to spend on schools and hospitals.

This point seems to be lost on almost all our politicians who persist in implying that somehow building a lot of larger coffee shops to replace all the Starbucks and Costas would make us all richer.

‘The economic benefits of net zero far outstrip the investment required,’ intoned Theresa May at the Tory party conference.

Earth to Theresa: investing in something is a cost, not a benefit. The benefit comes from the improved product your investment generates, if any.

That is not to say nobody benefits from all this spending. Net zero is proving very effective at rewarding the few at the expense of the many.

Those who finance, plan, build, and sell these decarbonized products and services (which includes lots of Chinese firms) are making out like bandits.

As are those who preach about them. The rest of us are going to be paying for it all.

Read rest at Daily Mail