MiliEd’s plans get a firm thwack on the logical botty

Professor Helm:

On top of all this, the UK’s net zero electricity target by 2030 is not going to be achieved. In failing to meet a very short-term target, it is going to maximise the costs of trying. If a target is set to do the practically impossible in around 60 months, then the logical consequences is that it will cost whatever it costs. The target is supreme. This is not pay-what-can-be-afforded, but rather pay-whatever-it-costs. The faster the required pathway, the more each part will cost. Want some transformers? Suppliers have full order books. What will it cost to pre-empt other customers in Europe and the US? The top price is the answer. Want the stuff produced at breakneck speed? Pay the overtime and additional labour and equipment to the manufacture.

There is much more there. We recommend reading all of it. But this particular part of it. It’s an essential part of the Nordhaus and Stern analyses of the problem. Given that the British government did pay Nick Stern - now M’Lud such for having written it - to write the 1200 page report it would, we think, behove British government planning if it understood, even contained, the major point made.

Beating climate change will produce benefits. Beating climate change will have costs. Humanity is best served when the benefits of the beaten are greater than the costs of the beating. Thus the target is not emissions by some date, a temperature by some other, it’s the costs and benefits of the beating or beaten.

It is price that matters. This carries with it the insistence that as the price rises we should do less of it. Also, that we should be efficient in our methods because that’s the way we’ll do more of that beating.

Which is why a simple carbon tax and leave be of course. Prices are the efficient way to change human behaviour. Prices also - obviously - contain all that information about what is worth doing and what is not.

As Helm notes here, and as both the govt’s own commissioned report and that Nobel-winning work insist, doing everything in a hubba-hubba-hurry is the wrong way to expensively increases costs over benefits.

Not that we expect this firm beating on the logical fundament to make any difference. There are those out there firmly insistent upon ignoring reality, sadly including our current Sec of State on the matter.

Tim Worstall