The Climate Change Committee should be guided by the science

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has an impressive line-up of highly intelligent people. On 9th March it issued a 131 page report which “illustrates what a reliable, resilient, decarbonised electricity supply system could look like in 2035, and the steps required to achieve it.”

The use of the subjunctive is important: this is what the committee wishes for, not what they expect to happen. For example, the second key message is “the Government must give equal focus to low-carbon flexible solutions as to the full delivery of its existing renewables and nuclear commitments.” Existing renewables have already been delivered and the Treasury has ensured that the Government has no nuclear commitments beyond Hinkley Point C which was approved back in 2016.

The first 10 of the 25 priority recommendations, basically, tells the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) to do its job. Those of us under the impression that the PM should be the one to get the DESNZ to do its job are obviously living on the wrong planet.

The CCC’s first key message in its previous year’s report was “The UK Government now has a solid Net Zero strategy in place.” Where has it gone? That report’s 619 pages did not have space to disclose what it expected net zero, i.e. 2050, electricity demand to be. In their 6th Carbon Budget, however, they expect electricity demand to double, to just over 600TwH p.a. from 2018 to 2050. We are not told the basis for this forecast, just “CCC Analysis”. Unfortunately, it does not look right. If the overall demand for energy remains about the same as now and electricity’s share moves from 15% (2018) to nearly 100% (2050), as it must for zero carbon, the increase will be closer to seven times.

The CCC are enthusiasts for the role of hydrogen, which gets no less than 833 mentions in their 2023 report. But 2022 report showed that it is three and a half times less efficient for heating homes than electricity. Producing green hydrogen using electrolysis uses more electricity than it replaces which means it is useful for storage, if surplus wind is used, but not for much else. Generating electricity from blue hydrogen rather than the gas used to make it, is less efficient than simply using the original gas. In short, the CCC enthusiasm for hydrogen is wildly over-stated.

There are many good things in the CCC report and it would be churlish to continue to find fault beyond concluding that it is unreliable. They are right that preparing these strategies and forecasts, and making the necessary decisions, are matters for DESNZ and HM Treasury, not a parliamentary committee. For that purpose government should be advised by a science and technology committee akin to SAGE for COVID-19, not the green lobbyists, however talented, that make up the CCC.

We should learn from the COVID-19 SAGE experience in two respects: 1) the members and the relevance of the science and technology expertise should be published and 2) their advice to DESNZ and HM Treasury should be promptly published so that it is open to peer review. As it happens, such a team already exists informally; it would not be a big step to take it public.

Markets are the cure for this, not the cause

The new thing the cool kids are saying about the internet:

…what’s been happening on the internet for at least 25 years, namely the inexorable degradation of the online environment and our passive, sullen acceptance of that.

Examples? Everywhere you look. Take Google search that, once upon a time (1998), was elegant, efficient and a massive improvement on what went before. You typed in a query and got a list of websites that were indicated by a kind of automated peer-review called PageRank. Now, the first page of results from a search for “high-quality saucepans” produces a myriad of “sponsored” items, ie advertisements.

….

Thanks to Cory Doctorow, the great tech critic, we now have a term for this decay process in online platforms – enshittification. “First,” he writes, “they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” Enshittification results from the convergence of two things: the power of platform owners to change how their platforms extract value from users and the nature of the two-sided markets – where the platforms sit between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other and then raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

No. Well, yes and then no.

This isn’t about a particular type of market - the two sided of Jean Tirole and all that. Nor is it something about capitalism, the owners deciding to grab as much value as they can.

This is about organisation. As the late, great, C Northcote Parkinson pointed out, or Pournele’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Organisations, by their very nature, become established and then they are run to maximise the utility of the organisation and the people in it. That just what happens among human beings.

Getting this right is important. For it happens to bureaucracies, political parties, entrenched class interests (if we want to take it that far) too. There is also no real cure for the problem. Organisations just do that.

Therefore what we need is a method of getting rid of organisations that become so. Which is why markets are the cure. Any organisation that stops pleasuring its consumers will, eventually at least, go bust in a competitive market. It is only those which do not face competition and thus the threat of replacement who can continue in this manner down the decades.

That is, there’s a truth to Doctorow’s observation. But the implication of it is not that there’s something wrong with companies for that can take care of itself. Rather, how do we subject bureaucracies to the only known cure, the threat of extinction?

Whaling does indeed tell us something about oil and fossil fuels

The Guardian asks:

The modern oil industry was born in 1859, yet it would take more than 100 years – and the near-extinction of a species – before it replaced blubber. As we now seek to replace oil in turn, are there lessons to be learned?

Yes, absolutely. The clue is here:

But it is worth remembering that whaling did not end because the industry found its conscience or progress made everything better. Whaling ended because there were no longer enough whales to turn a profit

Not wholly and not quite. What really happened is that oil became both cheaper and better than whales as a product to use. Therefore people stopped using whales - thus no profits to be had - and used oil instead.

So, what is necessary to stop us using oil? That the alternative, whatever new technology that is, be better and cheaper. This is not only necessary it is sufficient. Humans like cheaper and better, it’s what makes us richer. So, create the technology which is cheaper and better and people will entirely naturally stop using oil and use instead the new.

Well, get on with it then.

What does anyone expect?

This amuses more than anything else:

Teaching unions have criticised a “politically motivated” review of the way sex education is taught in schools, after Conservative MPs voiced concern that children were being exposed to “graphic” material including “lessons on oral sex”.

This is not to comment upon how sex is taught in schools nor what is age appropriate. Of course we have views on that but that’s not the point to be made here.

The education budget is getting on for £60 billion a year at the moment. That’s £60 billion lifted from the populace - by politics - and allocated to education - by politics - and therefore there is politics involved in what is done with it.

How could it be anything else but politically involved? All discussions of what is taught in taxpayer funded schools is going to be politically motivated simply because we’ve put the entire school system into the hands of politics.

It is, obviously, possible to have entirely non-political schools. Those are going to be the ones that don’t take money from the political process. That is, not-state schools.

This applies across all areas of life of course. It’s also blindingly obvious. If politics provides the funding then politics is going to be deeply involved in how it is spent. The only way to have a part of life not subject to “politically motivated review” is to have a part of life that is not funded by the state and politics.

Seriously, what do people expect? That everyone’s going to chip in the thick end of a hundred billion quid and not ask for some oversight in return?

An alternative formulation of the point is that fine, you think this is an area of life that shouldn't be touched, determined or reviewed by politics. Fine, have at it - the only way you’ll get that is by not funding it through politics.

Superabundant Wind

The Departments of Business and Energy have made the rather good observation that the decline in British industry is, in part, due to UK energy prices being higher than our competitors.

They plan to “supercharge” industry by reducing the energy costs of the 300 or so largest manufacturers, not by taking the money from primary producers like Big Oil and their extravagant profits of late, nor from the Treasury (heaven forfend!), but from ordinary households who, once energy prices start falling, will not notice.

The Energy Intensive Users Group (EIUG) have a case, albeit unquantified, but only 210,000 members.  It is not clear who the other 90,000 plus beneficiaries will be or how they are to be selected.  And is it fair to other companies who do not have the time, or inclination, to join the EIUG but are just as penalised?

The cost of the measures will eventually be funded through consumer bills, with the cost to the average household expected to be an extra £3-£5 a year. As there are about 28.1M households in the UK, the “carefully crafted” supercharge for the 300 or so manufacturers would be rather over £100M p.a.

The Departments of Energy and Business have not shared their “careful crafting” but this would seem a relatively small incentive and certainly ineffective in supercharging industry.  Trinomics produced an interesting review of EU member state energy subsidies in 2018, i.e. when the UK was still in the EU, which did not appear to support the action now being taken.

Rather than clobbering the poor old consumer, it would be far better to network what should be the lowest cost electricity production, i.e. wind farms, directly to these 300 or so large manufacturers. The odd thing is that, thanks to government intervention, the three Europe countries with the highest electricity prices: Denmark, Germany and UK, have the highest share of wind generation. The Trinomics research shows that government interference in energy marketing is the main reason for higher costs. If government really wants to supercharge manufacturing, it should simply butt out of pricing energy.

The reality is that the Energy Department is living in fantasy land and have yet to grasp that energy shortage forces prices up and only a superabundance will bring them down. The new policy is based on their energy strategy white paper of 2020 in which the figures simply did not add up.

This month, the National Audit Office, in the course of demanding an update, said the longer the energy department “goes without a critical path bringing together different aspects of power decarbonisation, the higher the risk that it does not achieve its ambitions, or it does so at greater than necessary cost to taxpayers and consumers.” And the NAO is assuming we will need only 60% more electricity by 2050 whereas, if total energy demand is static, the electricity demand will grow by 100%.

The truth of all this is a little embarrassing: the government confuses making announcements with making decisions.  When it comes to energy, the wind comes from Whitehall does not drive turbines. On-shore wind farms are officially approvable but are effectively banned.  Just one was built in England last year and no plans are on the table. 

Great British Nuclear has been announced countless times since April 2022 but no decision has yet been made.  Sizewell C was consulted upon in 2012 followed by four further round of consultation concluding in 2019. In November 2022 the Chancellor announced a decision would be made “within weeks” and that has now been postponed until, probably, 2025.

Our government seems to be under the impression that a superabundance of energy will drive prices down and that will come from off-shore wind and nuclear because they say so.  The reality is that Whitehall wind achieves nothing and the lights will go out unless action is taken soon.

Workforce composition effects are imporant, d'ye see?

A certain confusion here:

The number of women working in the City has fallen by a third since the 1990s as administrative roles like secretaries disappear from the Square Mile.

Yes, OK, computers have meant that a certain type of job simply no longer exists.

Women’s average wages in the finance sector have more than tripled since 1997, rising from £16,000 to over £50,000 in 2022.

Over the same period, the average earnings of a man in the City have just over doubled from £33,500 to over £80,000.

While that’s true that’s very misleading. Because the reason women’s average wages have risen more than men’s is because the lower paid - and largely female - jobs no longer exist.

The point being that looking at average wages of all women against average wages of all men can indeed be misleading if we don’t also take into account those workforce composition effects. Those whines about a 15% (or whatever the whine is this week) gender pay gap across the nation make this very mistake. They fail to take account of the way in which men and women fo make up different portions of different parts of the workforce - do different jobs that is.

Yes, this is important. Italy, for example, has a very low, by European standards, gender pay gap when measured in this manner. Across all jobs done by all people. The reason being that the Italian married woman with children is very much less likely to work than her European contemporaries. Those who do continue to work tend to be in the professions, have careers rather than jobs. Effectively, lower paid Italian mothers simply aren’t in the workforce and so don’t pull average female wages down.

Yes, important. For that then leads on to a policy prescription. If we wish to lower the gender pay gap - by this measure of all women against all men - then we desire to have those lower paid women leave the workforce when they become mothers. For that’s how it does work in those places with a lower gender pay gap by this measure. That, in turn, means that we don’t want subsidised childcare in the slightest. Rather, we want families to face the full freight, the full costs, of childcare so that those on lower incomes do leave the workforce rather than drag the average pay down.

A lower gender pay gap means no subsidy to childcare, not more.

Of course, we can also look at this the other way around. No, we should subsidise childcare so that mothers can continue working. Fine - but we’ve then got to accept that we’ll have a substantial gender pay gap by this measure.

We could even conclude that measuring the gender pay gap by all women against all men in employment is a silly thing to do precisely because of this effect - that gap falls when more mothers leave the workforce entirely.

But workforce composition effects do matter. Average female pay in the City has risen because the low paid and largely female jobs have disappeared. The same will be true - as it is in Italy - of the population wide gender pay gap. If mothers aren’t in the workforce at all then it will shrink. This indicates no subsidy to childcare, not more, if our goal is the shrinking of that mismeasure of the gender pay gap.

We do, in fact, actually have to make a choice. What is it that we’re going to worry about by which measure? Our temptation is simply to observe that choices in life have both costs and benefits and let people work this all out for themselves. But even for those who disagree with this laissez faire position the central point still stands.

Lowering the population wide gender pay gap means reducing childcare subsidies, not increasing them - for that way the lower paid mothers leave the workforce and so don’t contribute to the gender pay gap. That’s simply true, whatever we might think about the way things ought to be.

Bad economic policy impoverishes

In this modern world there’s really no excuse for population poverty other than bad economic policy. Sure, it takes some time to reverse however many centuries of such bad policy there have been but it can be done. As those booming recently poor places, growing at 5 and 10% a year, show us. It’s also possible, of course it is, to institute bad economic policy which then, over time, will make a place poorer - Venezuela and Zimbabwe have shown us the dangers of MMT for example.

Or there are slower versions of bad policy:

The EU executive is considering a target that would see 40% of the bloc’s clean tech made in Europe by the end the decade, as part of a response to a wave of subsidies from the US and China.

According to a draft of the EU’s Net-Zero Industry Act, which is due to be unveiled next week, 40% of green tech needed to meet the bloc’s climate and energy targets should be made in the EU by 2030.

This is to get the point and purpose of production entirely the wrong way around. This is to assume that producing something makes us richer. It doesn’t. Being able to consume something is what makes us richer. As Adam Smith pointed out, the sole purpose of all production is consumption. Once we’ve grasped that then the purpose of trade becomes clear. If someone else can produce what we desire to consume better, cheaper, faster, than we can, then we should gain our consumption from that production of that other person. This does not change whether it’s the other adult in the same household, someone in the same village, county, country or some near random stranger 11,000 miles away. If we can gain our consumption better by gaining it from them then it’s from them that we should gain our consumption.

Here the EU is making the opposite assumption. That gaining our more expensive, later, worse, consumption from someone nearby is better. That it is going to be more expensive, worse, later, is proven by the very fact that they’re looking to have a law about this. If it was already going to be preferable on speed, cost and quality grounds then there would be no need for a law, would there?

Basic economic theory really does matter. Otherwise the political types are going to institute bad economic policy, that very thing which makes us all poorer.

Oh, and it’ll reduce the amount of climate change mitigation done too. As the Stern Review pointed out, humans do less of things as they become more expensive. So, limit climate mitigation within the EU to the more expensive domestic production and less of it will be done.

Both broiling us and impoverishing us just isn’t a good outcome from economic policy now, is it? But as we’ve already said, bad government is really the only cause of poverty in this modern world. Perhaps we should stop having bad economic policy?

All the single (household) ladies

According to a 2019 government report, fewer than one in five of all new mothers follow a full time career after maternity leave. Women who were previously in full time employment often either choose to become part time or stop work altogether. This might seem normal and a result of them having a child, not being a woman. 

However, if we compare women's work trajectories after having a child to new fathers, the gap is wide. 3 years after having a child, 90% of men are in full time work or are self-employed compared to a mere 28% of women. So why are women so much less likely to return to the working world?

The childcare crisis in the UK is a big part of the problem. The cost of childcare in the UK is the highest in the OECD, with a UK couple where one parent earns the average wage and the other earning ⅔ of the average wage spending 29% of their combined income on full time childcare. 

It then becomes more economically logical for one parent to stay at home and look after their children themselves. Largely a result of the wider societal and cultural trends, it often lands on the women to stay home and look after the children.

As women stay at home to look after their children they are sacrificing potential skill development time. Fathers on the other hand, who go back to their full time role continue with little chance and thus, as women stay stagnant and men progress in their careers, the gap between them widens.

Not only do women suffer by losing transferable skills and end up with less savings in their pensions, but wider society also suffers from lost economic output. The Centre for Progressive Policy found that the UK is losing at least £9.4bn in additional earnings per year through mums not returning to work after having a child.

The best way to give women the chance to reach their full potential and rejoin the workforce after having children is to reduce the cost of childcare. This can be done by relaxing the child:staff ratios in the UK. Our current minimum child:staff ratio in the UK is 4.5:1 which in comparison to countries such as France (whose child:staff ratio is 8:1) is one of the most restricted in Europe. By relaxing child:staff rations by simply one child, costs could reduce by 9-20%, providing working mothers with ways to balance their work-family life.

Another method would be to adapt the current government subsidy schemes for childcare. The UK government aims to provide payments to struggling families to help them afford childcare. However, the scheme is deeply flawed and is filled with strict, inflexible requirements for parents to follow. This includes only allowing them to access the scheme through approved childcare providers and only for 38 weeks (the equivalent of school term time). So all parents looking to work throughout school holiday time are once again faced with a difficult decision and taking that length of time away from work is not an easy task.

Instead of continuing with this dysfunctional subsidy scheme, a much more beneficial scheme for parents would be to provide parents with direct cash payments that they can use in the way they choose. They can access the child providers they want and at the times they want. This is a much more flexible system and provides parents, particularly mothers with greater ability to rejoin the workforce while affording childcare services.

As it's International Women's day today it's the perfect time to reiterate that the childcare crisis needs addressing. On this day we celebrate billions of women and the contributions they make to our society, yet there's always that thought at the back of our minds that there would be many more contributions if we just simply fixed this issue.

Excuse us while we shriek with laughter

We’ve spent at least a decade pointing out that iron fertilisation of the ocean is a possibly useful, if partial, reponse to the dangers of climate change. We’ve also been pointing out that it is, by the usual readings of international law, illegal to even experiment to find out how useful, how partial, an aid to a solution iron fertilisation is.

Over that time more theoretical work has been done but no practical, at least as far as we know. That paucity of iron in the Southern Ocean is now thought to be a driver of the glacial cycle for example.

And then there’s this:

The creeping threat of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt

Visible from space, an explosion of harmful seaweed now stretches like a sea monster across the ocean. Could robots save us from it – and store carbon in the process?

Yes, a part of this is indeed from iron fertilisation - naturally:

Increased sea surface temperatures, upwelling and changing currents have combined with nutrients caused by human activity such as sewage and soya farming in the basins of the great rivers of North and South America, and Africa. Sand blown from the Sahara also brings with it iron and other essential minerals.

More biomass, more fish, some at least CO2 sunk to the bottom of the ocean. The basic premise does stand up, even if we’ve a natural experiment here, not a controlled one.

And sargassum’s ability to suck up carbon is behind what it probably the wildest and most ambitious plan to date: capture it using robots, bundle it up and sink it to the bottom of the sea.

Well, one of the things we really would like to do is work out whether other biological routes work better at that carbon sequestration thing. Maybe diatoms for example,. Or plankton. Does deliberately adding iron (probably ferrous sulphate, free from a number of people, the distribution method being a lascar shovelling it over the side) aid in creating more of this benefit and by which biological route?

Oh yes, that’s right, isn’t it? We’re not allowed to go and test any of these things because ferrous sulphate into the oceans is dumping waste at sea and that’s far more important than actually solving climate change. Silly us we forgot that.

Alternatively, we might start wondering whether there are those who don’t want to actually solve climate change. The alarum is far too convenient a political power to lose. But to think that would be cynical now, wouldn’t it?

Clarity of thinking might aid in designing political policy

From New Zealand:

Let me use an example: it will be almost impossible to farm in a world that is three degrees warmer.

That’s an absurd statement. Temperature differences across viable farmland are already larger than three degrees. So, we know that we can farm at three degrees warmer. True, we might need to change cultivars, or even exactly where specific crops are grown, but the idea that farming is impossible - or even near so - with a three degree increase is nonsense.

As can be proven more locally. The temperature variation across New Zealand is already larger than three degrees. Perhaps Auckland methods might move south to Wellington and so on but the claim of impossible is that nonsense.

Sadly, this gets worse.

A slew of opportunistic right-wing voices is lining up to use recent disasters to argue that the government should shift its efforts away from cutting emissions towards adaptation. This is as unscientific as it is dangerous. It is also utterly out of touch with the needs of the people they purport to represent. It is a disingenuous, harmful and bad faith argument that distracts from the conversations we need to be having.

The claim is then that mitigation is the thing, that adaptation simply isn’t the solution at all. Which could even be true - no, we do not believe that but we’re willing to at least consider it as a logical position - but what then follows is again nonsense:

Second, even if we limit warming, there will be effects we cannot avoid. The world has already warmed by about 1.1 degrees. Even if we stopped polluting the atmosphere tomorrow, the climate will continue to change. Extreme weather events will increase and overlap, each one testing the limits of our resiliency and recovery. We need to plan for this.

Our focus needs to shift from short-term preparedness towards creating stronger communities. Resilient, affordable, inclusive communities that can meet everyone’s needs despite the challenges of the disrupted climate.

We need to get serious about this new approach. Otherwise, the changes we experience will be forced on us by extreme weather disasters, rather than our efforts to create vibrant, connected communities, even as climate change shapes how we live.

The solutions must be necessarily wide ranging. Some will require changes to our legislation, so developers stop building in high-risk areas. New rules, so that when we do build, we’re constructing more resilient homes and buildings designed to handle extreme weather. Greater use of areas that filter and store water for increasingly long and severe droughts will be critical. More housing is essential for our cities, but we also need to make sure we’re meeting this demand without car-dependent sprawl that concretes over natural areas, or builds in flood-prone areas.

The nonsense being that that’s all adaptation. The very thing we’re told that we shouldn’t be doing instead our efforts must be on mitigation. Don’t do that but also gird your loins to spend a fortune on doing that - logic, eh?

James Shaw is New Zealand’s minister for climate change

Ah, yes, that clarity of thinking just is so useful in the construction of political policy, isn’t it?

As we’ve been saying for a couple of decades now. Assume that the insistences of a problem are correct. The answer is a carbon tax at the social cost of carbon. They gave Nordhaus the Nobel for pointing this out, we are supposed to all follow the science, aren’t we?

Everyone’s entirely at liberty not to believe the insistences but those shouting that we’ve got to do so and also follow the science might like to try doing so.