2021-03-05
Did Conservative ministers mislead the people about the true estimated costs of the UK achieving "net zero" emissions by 2050?
The Sun believes so.
Now it is true that these figures as now reported were the result of computer modelling by "scientists", so we must hope that their modelling skills were better than those employed at Imperial College for the Covid estimates, but the good news is that if these estimates were indeed overblown by a similar magnitude then the government was probably too cautious in publishing an estimate only £20bn below the modelling result.
Sadly however I am aware of no evidence that the likely error would be on a par with that achieved by Imperial College, so the Sun may well be correct - I guess it all comes down to the likely motivation which led the government to allegedly quote a lower figure than communicated by its expert advisors.
More seriously, this story does tend to support the notion that the "Net Zero" objective is political as opposed to being based solely on the science, otherwise there would have been no need to obfuscate - government policy could have been simply adjusted to refine the objective in the light of the new "scientific" findings.
Does it matter? Everything matters, we don't need many mistakes like this to add yet another £100Bn to our national debt.
"Victoria Hewson, Head of Regulatory Affairs at the Institute of Economic Affairs, added:
"To scrutinise new environmental regulations properly, Parliament and the public need access to all the relevant information.
"It is disappointing that the Government chose to withhold this crucial cost assessment for so long, and that the Treasury's view seems to have been based on such vague projections"
Quite so.
It's time to find an effective way to hold our politicians to account.
