What just about everyone is getting wrong about climate change

The Telegraph has an interesting report today on the costs of decarbonising Britain's electricity generation system over the next 15 years. It's vast and it's not a sensible thing to do. But in their discussion there's this, which shows just how badly everyone is approaching this question:

All political parties (apart from Ukip) support the 2008 Climate Change Act which commits Britain to reduce emissions by at least 80pc from 1990 levels by 2050. Analysis by the Department of Energy and Climate Change has shown that, to hit those targets, there must be significant decarbonisation of the power sector by 2030. The Committee on Climate Change has set a target of reducing carbon intensity from 450g of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour to 50g by 2030.

This is entirely the wrong way around.

Let's not get into the science of this, that's always a boring and unproductive shouting match. Instead, let's just say the IPCC is correct and then look at the economics of it. And there we find that this approach is *still* wrong. Because it is not correct to announce a target for emissions: it is correct to announce a cost that we're willing to pay to reduce them.

This is the Stern Review argument. There's some future damage to come from emissions. How much should we be willing to spend now to reduce such damages? We reach our answer (which translates into that $80 per tonne carbon tax) and that's it. We should not spend more than that to reduce emissions. We should not have a target for emissions: we should be targeting only those emissions that we can reduce below that cost.

And yet every political party except Ukip is targeting the emissions number. This is simply wrong, it's an entire misreading of what the settled science on this issue is. The settled economic science as laid out in that Stern Review and backed up by every other economist who looks at it (Nordhaus, Tol and so on). We set the price of the actions we're prepared to undertake and go and do those things that cost less than that to do.

The reason for this is that the actual logic that says we should be doing anything rests upon that estimation of the cost of future damages. Spending more than that cost makes the future poorer than it could or should be. It is quite literally impoverishing our grandchildren.

It's not the first time this has happened of course. When the political classes have entirely misunderstood the entirely reasonable (please note, economists might differ on what the price of emissions should be but not on the logical approach itself) result of economic research and so garbled the implementation as to end up doing the opposite of what they should be doing. But it's impressive to see them doing so all the same.