The Sec of State suffers a petty delusion

From MiliEd:

This deal will also help speed up the clean-energy transition globally, which is, crucially, right for Britain because of what it offers in terms of investment and economic opportunity, including exports. For us and others around the world, taking advantage of this transition is the route to good jobs, economic growth and higher living standards.

To beat on an old drum. Jobs are a cost of doing something, not a benefit of the thing being done. Creating “good jobs” is therefore creating costs by whatever the plan is. So too is investment a cost, for exactly the same reason. So cheering about the investment the plan requires is just highlighting the costs of the plan.

As to exports, we’re unconvinced. If everyone and their as yet uneuthanised Granny is subsidising these new technologies - as the recent COP just agreed everyone would - we do tend to think that the opportunity for profitable exports is going to be limited.

But the biggie is that this isn’t going to raise living standards from where we are now. Think on it just for a moment. Think on what the base problem is.

We currently identify emissions as an externality. Something which we do not include in the prices and costs that everyone faces. We’re also demanding that all of those costs should indeed be faced and paid. It’s probably right that this is so too. By hauling those externalities into a priced part of the marketplace we will, by our current measures of the economy, produce economic growth. Simply because what we count is priced economic activity.

But that simply is not the same as increasing living standards. Quite the opposite. We’re now demanding - again possibly rightly - that people pay for, now, what they used to be able to do for free. They, we, must now divert economic resources from whatever else it was we were doing to cover the costs of these new and non-emittive technologies. It’s also not true that these are, overall, cheaper. Not in terms of what is internalised in the current economy that is - for if it were all cheaper then we’d not have a problem, we’d all be doing it already. It also most certainly wouldn’t require massive subsidy nor sending cheques to Mr. J Foreigner.

Dealing with climate change is going to cost real money. Therefore it’s not going to raise living standards. QED.

Tim Worstall