Net Zero Watch: Net Zero’s dirty secret

 

In this newsletter:

1) Net Zero’s dirty secret: Britain’s green transition is powered by Chinese coal
New Scientist, 8 December 2023

2) The truth about Net Zero, at last
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 8 December 2023

 
3) Andrew Neil: More than 90,000 flocked to Dubai to preach about climate change... But the truth is the race to Net Zero is slowing to a crawl
Daily Mail, 9 December 2023
  
4) Oil is everywhere at COP28, vexing those seeking its demise
Bloomberg, 9 December 2023
 
5) John Kerry warns against ‘business as usual’ as UK and Germany lean into fossil fuels
Politico, 7 December 2023

6) US opts out of Dutch plan to end fossil fuel subsidies at COP28
Bloomberg, 9 December 2023

7) Planet Normal: Net Zero ‘violates all the laws of engineering’ says leading Cambridge Professor
The Daily Telegraph, 7 December 2023
 
8) Net Zero requires new high-voltage power lines to be wrapped around the Earth 2,000 times within 17 years
The Daily Sceptic, 9 December 2023
 
9) Bjorn Lomborg: Net zero is not the answer to climate change
Philippine Daily Inquirer, 8 December 2023

Full details:

1) Net Zero’s dirty secret: Britain’s green transition is powered by Chinese coal
New Scientist, 8 December 2023

 

New Statesman analysis of climate and trade data exposes how much the UK’s net-zero agenda depends on cheap foreign coal power, particularly from China.

The UK’s top four trade partners are Germany, the US, China and the Netherlands. All four of these countries have a significantly larger share of coal-fired electricity in their energy supply than the UK does. This means that goods produced in factories in those countries will typically have a higher emissions footprint than those produced in UK factories.

China’s power grid is particularly carbon-intensive, with coal-fired power plants running 60 per cent of its grid. The UK has capitalised on cheap imports made using low-cost Chinese coal power, with imports from China to the UK more than doubling in value over the past decade.

For its part, China has positioned itself as a leader in the production of clean technologies such as batteries and solar panels (80 per cent of the global supply of which is manufactured in China). These too are made using cheap coal-fired electricity, which helps China to undercut other countries. China is also trying to dominate the extraction and processing of minerals key to the energy transition. It is responsible for 60 per cent of global production of rare earth elements, which are crucial for low-carbon technologies.

“For other countries, the choice is between making use of China’s low-cost supply chain, but with the risk of reliance on China, or building their own supply chains using a combination of trade protectionism and subsidies to offset China’s subsidies and cost advantages,” said Lauri Myllyvirta of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
 
The UK’s reliance on China’s low-cost clean tech and mineral exports can be seen in HMRC trade data, which reveals how the UK imported large shares of its energy transition technologies and products from China in 2022 – including 64 per cent of rare earth metals and 49 per cent of lithium batteries.

Via its Belt and Road initiative, China was for many years by far the largest financier of new coal power plants worldwide – until Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, told the UN General Assembly in September 2021 that China would build “no new coal power plants abroad”. There have been loopholes, however, that have enable China to finance the construction of some coal-fired plants that power industrial facilities rather than the national grid. These are known as “captive” power plants.
 
China-backed captive power plants are a particularly significant phenomenon in Indonesia. The country uses captive coal power to smelt nickel, a metal central to the production of batteries used in electric vehicles. Indonesia is the world’s largest producer of nickel. A 2020 ban in Indonesia on the export of unprocessed nickel ore, designed to maximise the value of Indonesian nickel within Indonesia itself, has further increased demand in the country for nickel smelters powered by captive coal power plants.
 
Full story
 
see also: Net Zero agenda hands geopolitical control to China

 

2) The truth about Net Zero, at last
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 8 December 2023

Climate enthusiasm hits the political wall as voters face the costs.

The great and good of politics and business have converged on Dubai this week for the global climate conference known as COP28, and by now they must wish they hadn’t. The event has done the one thing such confabs are supposed never to do, which is expose the truth about climate change and the race to net-zero carbon emissions.

The truth-teller in chief is the event’s host, Sultan Al Jaber. He’s become a figure of hate on the eco-left since letting slip that he’s a net-zero skeptic. “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5 [degrees Celsius],” he said of the climate industry’s global temperature target during a virtual event last month. He warned that attempting to wean the world off fossil fuels would “take the world back into caves.”

The net-zero apostles say the political leader and head of the state oil company in a major petroleum-producing country never should have been invited to host COP28. But then someone has to drill the oil that powers the private jets that ferry the bigwigs to these confabs.

The bigger embarrassment for the climate left is that voters agree with Mr. Jaber. If you haven’t paid much attention to COP28 this week, perhaps you’ve read about the collapse of the net-zero agenda around the world.

In no particular order:

• The European Union’s Green Deal is on the rocks, barely four years after it was unveiled to great fanfare. Key elements of the program, especially concerning land conservation, have withered on contact with the European Parliament, and enthusiasm for the rest is waning. Brussels frets it can’t keep pace with the subsidies in America’s Inflation Reduction Act—because Europe doesn’t have the money.

• In the United Kingdom in September, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak ditched an electric-vehicle mandate that had been due to kick in by 2030. This still didn’t spare him a revolt by his own Conservative Party members of Parliament this week as more than two dozen voted against a backdoor attempt to impose on auto makers a quota for sales of new EVs. The quota passed but Mr. Sunak is on notice.

Mr. Sunak’s administration also promises to issue new licenses for oil and gas drilling in the North Sea—a policy the opposition Labour Party seems unlikely to reverse if Labour wins an election expected next year. Labour has scaled back its own green spending pledges because the party suspects voters would be wary of such a large fiscal commitment.

• The goal is to avoid the embarrassment that befell the center-left in elections in the Netherlands last month. That vote was a rebuff of Frans Timmermans, the politician previously in charge of the EU’s Green Deal. Voters instead turned to a politician on the right, Geert Wilders, who has little time for net zero. The election may have been motivated more by immigration concerns, but voters previously had elevated a new anti-environmental-regulation farmers’ party to be the largest faction in the Parliament’s upper house as a protest against emissions restrictions in agriculture.

• Germany is slipping into political disarray after a court ruling in mid-November disallowed the budget gimmick Berlin planned to use to finance its net-zero pledges. By forcing tens of billions of euros of green spending back onto to the government’s balance sheet from the slush funds where politicians hoped to hide the expense, the ruling has confronted voters with the true costs of net zero. The choice now will be between social welfare and climate, and the fiscal and political math imperils Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition.

The common denominator is reality. European countries, like the U.S., are discovering that no matter how hard they push on the net-zero string, costs never come down, green jobs never materialize to replace industrial employment, and the subsidy bill never declines. Meanwhile, Europe’s economies already are highly efficient in carbon emitted per euro of gross domestic product—and China and India keep building coal-fired power plants anyway.

Developing economies don’t have the luxury of net-zero fantasies and understand they need fossil fuels for their people to enjoy rising prosperity. The alternative is the cave of Mr. Jaber’s telling, and it turns out that no number of elaborate climate summits will persuade ordinary people to return to the darkness.
 
3) Andrew Neil: More than 90,000 flocked to Dubai to preach about climate change... But the truth is the race to Net Zero is slowing to a crawl
Daily Mail, 9 December 2023
 

Dubai marks the beginning of the end of the whole COP process. The circus has achieved next to nothing since it was launched in 1995. It is now destined to descend into irrelevance.

More than 90,000 folk gathered in Dubai this week for Cop28, the annual United Nations-sponsored climate change jamboree which is meant to produce agreements to reduce emissions of CO2 and, thereby, mitigate the global rise in temperatures.

That's well over twice as many as gathered in Glasgow only two years ago for Cop26 — a remarkable increase. I wonder why.

I'm sure it's nothing to do with the fact that Dubai is somewhat sunnier and warmer in December than Scotland's largest city, with beaches and swimming pools Glasgow can only dream of; or that it has massively more five-star hotels, glitzy restaurants and well-stocked bars — plus extensive flight schedules with the rest of the world for those unable to cadge a lift on one of the hundreds of private jets that headed for Dubai and reduced to the indignity of flying commercial.

The fact that Dubai is the business hub of a country (United Arab Emirates) which owes its wealth and influence entirely to fossil fuels — and which is ramping up its output of oil and gas — certainly hasn't deterred thousands of climate activists from flooding in from all over the world to join the jamboree.

Some of them were shame-faced enough to point out that, though they had emitted copious amounts of CO2 to get there, they were being ferried around in electric vehicles. They didn't mention that more than 80 per cent of the UAE's electricity is generated by natural gas.

Dubai marks the beginning of the end of the whole Cop (Conference of the Parties) process.

For all its relentless global gallivanting and grand-sounding declarations, the circus has achieved next to nothing since it was launched in 1995. (Remember the 'Glasgow Climate Pact'? Nope, me neither). It is now destined to descend into irrelevance.

Of course, Cop will continue to gather in exotic climes, an annual boondoggle for green grifters, renewable energy hucksters, two-faced fossil fuel executives, snake oil 'scientists', political and royal virtue-signallers, billionaire hypocrites, a compliant media addicted to green propaganda and disingenuous green-washers.

There are too many vested interests — and so much fun still to be had — to close the circus down. They will also assemble in increasing numbers: on current growth rates there will be 45 million people at Cop46.

But as a vehicle for dealing with climate change, it's over.

Despite all the warm words and protestations of earnest resolve to make a difference, it's becoming increasingly clear that nobody is taking any notice of it. The more Cop talks and grows, the faster CO2 emissions expand.

Electricity generation in China and India — still hugely coal-fired in both countries — and booming oil and gas production in America have caused the biggest increases in global greenhouse gas emissions since 2015, when the Paris climate agreement was signed.

This negotiation was seen at the time as a sign of achievement by the Cop process, but is now in pieces.

More than £5 trillion has been spent globally on renewable energy over the past couple of decades, including vast sums on 300,000 wind turbines. Yet fossil fuels still account for more than 80 per cent of the world's energy consumption, which is broadly where it was at the end of the last century.

As Cop28 convened in Dubai, it was revealed that the world had used record amounts of coal, oil and natural gas in 2023. U.S. energy officials now predict that CO2 emissions will continue to rise for the next 30 years.

As I write, the usual wrangling over the final communique is under way in Dubai. The delegates are arguing about whether it should settle for a vague and meaningless 'orderly and just' phasing out of fossil fuels or simply avoid the issue altogether. How this is resolved really doesn't matter.

The Saudi energy minister has already categorically ruled out any phase-out — and he speaks for the world's biggest oil exporter.

The UAE's Sultan Al Jaber, president of Cop28, greeted delegates with the claim that there is 'no science' to indicate that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global warming to 1.5c. He added that those who argued for phasing out fossil fuels wanted to 'take the world back into caves'.

These statements are, of course, controversial and contentious (though none of the green activists in Dubai glued themselves to the streets in protest — again, I wonder why).

But they are hardly surprising: the Sultan is also head of the UAE's state oil company, just one of the many anomalies surrounding gathering in Dubai to discuss climate change. There is, however, a blunt honesty about his remarks which is rarely emulated by dissembling Western politicians.

John Kerry, President Joe Biden's climate tsar, regularly travelled the globe in a private jet lecturing the rest of us on how we need to get to net zero. He never mentions that America is producing record amounts of hydrocarbons.

In September, it pumped out 13.2 million barrels of crude oil per day — the highest level ever. It is also now the world's largest producer and exporter of natural gas. So just why Kerry is fit to lecture us on net zero is far from clear.

Plain folk are tired of climate change lectures from the high and mighty. King Charles touched down in Dubai to urge us all to do more to reduce our carbon footprint. Naturally, he flew by private jet. The implication of what he says is that you should cancel that Ryanair flight to Benidorm.

He then spent time with the Emir of Qatar, who has an entire fleet of private jets, and the Sultan of Brunei, who has 7,000 luxury cars. But you need to trade in your dirty old banger for an electric vehicle you can't afford.

Nothing has done more than the hypocrisy of the rich and powerful — intimately wrapped up in the Cop process — to undermine public support for climate change policies. Politicians still mouth the platitudes of net zero, but they are retreating from the strategy at an ever faster rate of knots.

Full post
 
4) Oil is everywhere at COP28, vexing those seeking its demise
Bloomberg, 9 December 2023



There’s no way of avoiding oil and gas at the giant expo park hosting COP28 on the outskirts of Dubai.

At the world’s most important climate summit, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries — whose members supply almost 30% of the world’s oil — has a pavilion for the first time.

There, staff were giving out a children’s book about oil. A grey-haired cartoon professor named Riggs takes young readers through topics as arcane as the lightness and sourness of crude, before explaining why oil is important: "Without oil, we would not be able to continue to enjoy the same standard of living.” The book proved so popular that the pavilion ran out of copies just four days into the two weeks of COP28.

Oil and gas executives have tended to keep a low profile at the annual U.N. climate change gathering, but they have little reason to hide at COP28, hosted by the United Arab Emirates — one of the world’s largest oil exporters — and led by the CEO of its national oil company. At least 2,456 representatives of the fossil fuel industry have been granted access to COP28, according to an analysis by the Kick Big Polluters Out activist group. The number is nearly four times higher than in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, last year. If they were a country, they would outnumber all national delegations at the conference except for Brazil and the UAE.

Heads of major oil companies have attended as part of country delegations. The CEO of TotalEnergies, Patrick Pouyanne, is part of the French delegation, while Darren Woods, CEO of Exxon Mobil, is accredited to the UAE’s. Other industry representatives attend under the umbrella of influence groups such as the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), which registered at least 110 people for the summit.

As COP28 enters its final few days, the most contentious issue is whether the final agreement will pledge to phase down fossil fuels. To many of the thousands of climate activists among the 100,000 or so people registered to attend, the prominence of the oil and gas industry is a travesty — giving the industry most responsible for climate change a seat at the table.

Oil exporters are pushing back. Saudi Energy Minister Abdulaziz bin Salman said this week that the text shouldn’t agree to a phase down, while OPEC’s secretary-general wrote to members asking them to resist the idea.

"You don’t invite the tobacco lobbyists to a health convention when you’re writing health policy,” said Emily Lowan of Climate Action Network Canada. "They have clear stated interests against the very premise of these negotiations, at this COP in particular, related to agreeing on the language on the phase out of fossil fuels.”

Others take industry’s statements of good intent at face value and argue the coalition tackling the climate crisis needs to be as broad as possible. Either way, there’s no way of avoiding oil and gas at the giant expo park hosting COP28 on the outskirts of Dubai.

Full story
 
5) John Kerry warns against ‘business as usual’ as UK and Germany lean into fossil fuels
Politico, 7 December 2023

‘Nobody should be going backwards,’ Kerry told POLITICO. ‘We must meet the Paris goals.’

LONDON — John Kerry, the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, warned against a "business as usual" approach on fossil fuels as he was pressed on the U.K. and Germany’s record.

Speaking to POLITICO’s Power Play podcast, the former presidential contender flagged the risks of a lack of “concentrated effort” between nations to hit the global warming goals set by the Paris Agreement.

Pressed on whether the U.K.’s decision to announce further licensing rounds for fossil fuel drilling and Germany’s continued coal generation suggested Europe was in danger of zig-zagging on its climate pledges, Kerry declined to directly criticise individual countries.

But he warned: "I worry a little bit that in various places around the world there's too much business as usual. There's not enough concentrated effort to all help each other with this transition."

War in Europe and the Middle East, as well as the COVID pandemic had, Kerry said, "all taken a toll on our ability to just be focused on this in the way that we ought to be.

"But, we can't go back," he added. "Nobody should be going backwards. We must meet the Paris goals."

Full story
 
6) US opts out of Dutch plan to end fossil fuel subsidies at COP28
Bloomberg, 9 December 2023

The US opted out of a Dutch-led coalition that aims to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, starting by extricating countries from the international agreements in which they are embedded.

Around 50% of government subsidies for oil, gas and coal are a result of global pacts, like those in aviation and shipping that exempt the fuels from tax, according to a statement by the coalition launched at COP28 in Dubai. Member countries will be required to report the amount of subsidies before next year’s summit.

The Netherlands had been pushing for the US to join the group, according to people familiar with the matter. US President Joe Biden has repeatedly pressed to eliminate a raft of tax incentives for the oil and gas industry — reviving a campaign former President Barack Obama launched more than a decade ago.

But the effort depends on support from the closely divided Congress and has been fought by oil industry leaders who argue they shouldn’t be singled out, since many of the targeted deductions are not unique to the sector and have corollaries through the tax code.

The Netherlands has been at the forefront of combating fossil fuel subsidies after it tallied its own and found they totaled around €40 billion. Now the country wants the European Union to undertake the same assessment as a first step to phasing out support for dirty fuels. Activists say that figure dwarfs support for renewables.

Other countries who signed up for the coalition include France, Canada, Spain and Austria. The group wants to involve international organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, as well as create a common methodology to measure support for polluting fuels.

Full story
 
7) Planet Normal: Net Zero ‘violates all the laws of engineering’ says leading Cambridge Professor
The Daily Telegraph, 7 December 2023



Columnists Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan are joined by Professor Michael Kelly to discuss the realities of achieving next zero by 2050

“Net zero is not going to happen because, although it might not violate the laws of physics, it certainly violates all the laws of engineering projects…And the people who say it is going to happen are simply kidding themselves.”

On the latest Planet Normal podcast, which you can listen to using the audio player above, columnists Liam Halligan and Allison Pearson are joined by Professor of Engineering at Cambridge University, Michael Kelly to discuss the realities of the UK achieving net zero by 2050.

When asked for an estimation on what it would cost to upgrade the UK electrical grid to incorporate more electric cars, Professor Kelly has some eye watering numbers.

“I’m quite comfortable that the expansion of the grid to cope with the electrification of heat and ground transport is about £1.4 trillion, which is about 30 HS2s a year… we only have 40 thousand electrical engineers in the country today, so we need another 20 thousand and another 20 thousand civil engineers. And they take about ten years to train”

Listen here
 
8) Net Zero requires new high-voltage power lines to be wrapped around the Earth 2,000 times within 17 years
The Daily Sceptic, 9 December 2023
 
By Chris Morrison
 
Achieving Net Zero means building 80 million kilometres of new and refurbished power lines within 17 years, equivalent to wrapping the Earth 2,000 times with new electricity grid capacity. All the high voltage lines built in the last century will need to be built again by 2040 to benefit from all the intermittent power produced by the vast number of wind turbines. The ecological costs of all this can only be guessed at.
 
Electricity cables are made of aluminium and copper and strung on giant pylons made of steel and supported by large concrete bases. For their part, wind turbines are a menace to both avian and oceanic wildlife, consume vast quantities of raw materials, have a limited lifespan and are an increasing blight on both inland and offshore landscapes.

If the International Energy Agency (IEA) gets its way, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The roll-out of high voltage lines will be on an unprecedented scale. In a report on global electricity grids issued to coincide with COP28, the IEA states that “an unprecedented level of attention from policymakers and business leaders is needed to ensure grids support clean energy transitions and maintain electricity security”. Major changes in how grids operate and are regulated are said to be essential. Annual investment in grids, which has remained broadly stagnant, needs to double to more than $600 billion a year by 2030.

The Australian science journalist Jo Nova is in no mood to be understanding: “Remember, it’s not their fault that renewables need far more land, more space, more backup and more infrastructure – it’s our fault we didn’t build a world ready for their holy energy.”

The IEA paints a world where electricity grids are becoming a “bottleneck” for transitions to Net Zero emissions. While investment in renewables has been increasing rapidly, global investment in grids “has barely changed”. In Europe, policymakers can speed up progress on grids by “enhancing planning, ensuring regulatory risk assessments allow for anticipatory investment, and streamlining administrative processes”. In plain English this means ripping up local planning laws in over-populated Britain and blanketing the country with millions of giant electricity pylons. These will be required to bring energy to urban areas from power intermittently generated far away in the North Sea and off the Scottish coast.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the British Government recently set out “major plans” to speed up connections and rapidly increase capacity on the electricity grid. The press release cunningly linked it with a £960 million government investment in “green industries”. The new package is “expected” to bring forward £90 billion of investment over the next 10 years. The Government promised that it will “reward” those living closest to new infrastructure with up to £1,000 a year off their electricity bills. In another part of the release, this is downgraded to communities “could” benefit, and the bung is limited to 10 years.

Whatever the money is spent on, it is likely to be chickenfeed compared with the growing £12 billion annual subsidy paid by electricity consumers to the producers of renewable energy. But the next British government will face an empty exchequer and soaring state debt. Lack of finance along with the end of low interest rates and free money printing is likely to kill many of the green fantasises currently being peddled by collectivist Net Zero fanatics. It is becoming clearer by the day, to an increasing number of people, that renewable energy is unreliable and uneconomic, and has an insatiable requirement for financial subsidy.

Emeritus Cambridge Professor Michael Kelly has long been a critic of the blind, un-costed rush to Net Zero. The U.K. electricity grid will require upgrading from top to bottom, he wrote in a recent GWPF essay. Leaving aside the massive roll out of long-distance transmission lines required, he noted the inadequacies of all the local cabling and sub-stations built before the need to charge electric cars and run heat pumps. “The whole distribution system will need to be upgraded… the work will be extraordinarily expensive, but without it there will either be regular brownouts, or drivers will be told where and when they can charge their batteries,” he explained.
 
Full post
 
9) Bjorn Lomborg: Net zero is not the answer to climate change
Philippine Daily Inquirer, 8 December 2023

The spectacle of another annual climate conference is ongoing in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) until Dec. 12. Like Kabuki theater, performative set pieces lead from one to the other: politicians and celebrities arrive by private jets; speakers predict imminent doom; hectoring nongovernmental organizations cast blame; political negotiations become fraught and inevitably go overtime; and finally: the signing of a new agreement that participants hope and pretend will make a difference.

This circus has been repeated since the 1990s. Despite 27 previous conferences with iterations of ominous speeches and bold promises, global emissions have inexorably increased, punctuated just once, by the economic shutdown of COVID-19. This year is likely to see higher emissions than ever before.

Almost every rich country preaches far more than it delivers. This is exemplified by the European Union, which has promised more than anyone else, yet — when forced by Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine to cut off gas imports — went looking in Africa for more oil, gas, and coal. Meanwhile, almost every poor country understandably prioritizes prosperity, which means abundant, cheap, and reliable energy—which still means fossil fuels.

Underpinning the climate summit farce is one big lie repeated over and over: that green energy is on the precipice of replacing fossil fuels in every aspect of our lives. This exaggeration is today championed by the International Energy Agency, which has turned from an impartial arbiter of energy data to the proponent of the far-fetched prediction that fossil fuels will peak within just seven years.

The claim ignores the fact that any transition away from fossil fuels is occurring only with enormous taxpayer-funded subsidies. And while major energy players like Exxon Mobil and Chevron Corp. are moving back to investment in fossil fuel, big bets on green energy have failed spectacularly. Over the past 15 years, alternative energy stocks have plummeted in value, thus sending the pensions of ordinary workers tumbling due to virtue signaling pension companies while general stocks have increased more than four-fold.

What won’t be acknowledged in the UAE — because it has never been acknowledged at a global climate summit — is the awkward reality that while climate change has real costs, climate policy does, too.

In most public conversations, climate change costs are vastly exaggerated. Just consider how every heat wave is depicted as an end-of-the-world, cataclysmic killer, while the far greater reductions in deaths from warmer winters pass without being remarked on. Yet the costs of climate policy are bizarrely ignored.

Analyzing the balance between climate and policy costs has been at the heart of the study of climate change economics for more than three decades. Renowned economist William Nordhaus is the only climate change economist recognized with a Nobel prize. His research shows that we should absolutely do something about climate change: Early cuts in fossil fuel emissions are cheap and will reduce the most dangerous temperature rises. But his work also shows that highly ambitious carbon reductions will be a bad deal, with phenomenally high costs and low additional benefits.

Climate activists, who insist we should listen to the science, have consistently ignored this research and encouraged rich world leaders to make ever-greater climate promises. Many leaders have even gone so far as to promise net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Despite this likely being the single costliest policy ever promised by world leaders, it was made without a single peer-reviewed estimate of the full costs. Earlier this year, a special issue of Climate Change Economics made the first such analyses. It shows that even with very generous assumptions, the benefits of pursuing net zero will just slowly inch upwards over the century. By mid-century, the benefits—meaning the avoided costs from climate change—could reach about $1 trillion each year.

But the costs would be much, much higher. Three different modeled approaches show far higher costs than benefits for every year throughout the 21st century and far into the next. By 2050, the annual costs of the policy range between $10 and $43 trillion. That’s 4 to 18 percent of global GDP. Consider that the total tax intake of all governments across the world today is about 15 percent of global GDP—and politicians would potentially have us spend more than that. Across the century, the benefit is 1.4 percent of global GDP while the cost averages out at 8.6 percent of global GDP. Every dollar in cost delivers perhaps 16 cents of climate benefits. Clearly, this is an atrocious use of money.

The only thing that could avoid this summit being a retread of 27 other failures is if politicians acknowledge the real cost of net zero policy—and instead of making more carbon cut promises, vow to dramatically increase green energy research and development.

This would help innovate the price of low-carbon energy below that of fossil fuels so every country in the world will want to make the switch. Instead of subsidizing today’s still-inefficient technology and trying to brute force a transition by pushing up the price of fossil fuels, we need to make green technologies genuinely cheaper.

Sadly, that seems a far-fetched hope. Instead, this climate summit looks set to be another wasted opportunity producing yet more hot air.

The London-based Net Zero Watch is a campaign group set up to highlight and discuss the serious implications of expensive and poorly considered climate change policies. The Net Zero Watch newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.netzerowatch.com.