It's not what you spend that matters, rather what you achieve

Leave aside whether the whole enterprise is worth undertaking for a moment and consider this complaint about climate change in isolation:

British companies are lagging far behind their European neighbours in low-carbon investment after contributing only 3% of the continent’s €124bn (£104.2bn) green spending last year.

A report has revealed that German-listed companies invested 11 times more in low-carbon investments such as electric vehicles, renewable energy and smart energy grids than UK firms.

London-listed companies spent €4bn on green research and technologies compared with €44.4bn from German groups, including the carmaker Volkswagen, which invested more than a third of Europe’s total low-carbon spending in 2019.

There’s the obvious point that a maker of cars shifting to making battery powered cars is going to invest quite a lot in the process. And also that the major manufacturers of cars in the UK (say, Nissan and Jaguar Land Rover) aren’t actually listed in London which is going to rather skew those figures.

Instead concentrate upon the complaint there. Those people over there are spending more than these here, isn’t that terrible? The answer being no, not at all. What is wanted is a reduction in emissions, not lots spent on attempting to reduce emissions. We’re interested in the effectiveness, the end result, not the effort put in.

And the thing is, the UK has reduced and is reducing emissions rather more than Germany. That it’s doing so at lower cost shows that it is reducing emissions rather better than Germany.

Thus neatly proving one of the points made in the Stern Review. Planning is less efficient than market processes suitably prompted. Therefore we should use market processes suitably adjusted to deal with this problem, as with near all others, rather than planning. Because less efficient means more expensive and humans tend to do less of more expensive things, more of cheaper. Using the more efficient market processes - suitably adjusted - means that more climate change mitigation will take place. Use the system that reduces emissions more cheaply and more emissions reduction will take place.

That the UK reduces emissions more at lower cost than Germany means that Germany should be adopting our methods, not we Germany’s spending.

But then logic is in short supply in this discussion, isn’t it?