The bit that Polly Toynbee is missing about the energy transformation
Whether there should be an energy transformation isn’t the point here, not at all. What matters is the method used to find out whether there should be one, then the method of deciding upon the detail of how it is done. It is the method, not the goal, that matters that is.
Polly Toynbee talks about fracking disparagingly:
Keeping his Cop26 pledges means rejecting the frackers: Jacob Rees-Mogg in this cabinet, Steve Baker and loud noises off from Nigel Farage. The right’s fracking fascination is a mystery when it would take years for the gas to flow, if it works at all without damage, amid ferocious local opposition. Why aren’t mighty turbines just as excitingly macho? The Renewable Energy Association’s CEO, Nina Skorupska, tells me that the companies she represents, “could construct more than the terawatt-hours imported from Russia within 18 months if the obstacles were unblocked”.
And also of the joy that more windmills would bring. Well, maybe both those points, fracking bad, windmills good, are true and maybe they’re not. Polly’s complaint, as we can see, is that the decision is currently being driven by political prejudice. Or, to be more accurate, that’s what Polly claims is driving the varied people shouting about the decisions.
We can also be less vituperative about it. The political argument above is about whose plan should succeed. But that’s the wrong way to approach the problem in the first place - the plan should be to have no plan.
The grand experiment we call the 20th century showed us that GOSPLAN does not work. That West and East Berlin started from the same point in 1945 - a bombed flat plain of rubble - and the one was 3 to 4 times richer than the other by 1989 was that experiment. Planning by nerds with slide rules - even by today’s spreadsheets - is not the way to build a socioeconomic system that maximises human utility.
What is required is that free market system, where anyone can have a go. Yes, certainly, internalise the externalities with Pigou Taxes. There will be planning laws, of course there will be. But those concerning earthquakes (or seismic tremors, to taste) must be the same for fracking, geothermal and mining operations. Planning laws for fracking pads must be the same as those for windmills and seashore connectors to offshore and oil and gas pipelines.
That is, the system can indeed and should set rules. But those rules need to be neutral as to the technology employed and by whom. Capitalist and socialist of varied forms (consumer or worker coops for example) and government owned and whatever other variation anyone desires to try.
Set the rules in that neutral manner and the outcome of the process will be the correct one. For we have created that correct structure of incentives and therefore the outcome is, by definition, the utility maximising one. That might mean net zero in 2040, might be in 2150. Perhaps electric cars, or hybrids, or fuel cells, or synthetic petrols from green hydrogen by electrolysis, will win out as the preferred technology. Or buses - stranger things have happened in history. Or fracking or solar or wind or fusion or whatever.
Our aim is to maximise human utility over time, as the Stern Review pointed out. This does require setting the general rules as Nordhaus gained the Nobel for saying. 93% of polled economists insisted that rule setting, not plans, was the way to do this. The IPCC’s own economic models point out that a properly priced globalised neoliberalism produces the optimal outcome.
That is, we don’t want to make a decision on what the plan is. We want, instead, a plan not to have a plan. Which is the point that near everyone in politics is failing to grasp - which is also why politics is such a lousy way of solving problems. It’s not that the answers are wrong, it’s the inability to even understand the question in the first place.