Matt Ridley: Stop taxing the poor to fund useless climate programs

Editor’s note: this article was originally published in the Daily Mail, but it contained errors introduced by its editors. Below is the correct text, directly from Matt Ridley:

The climate boondoggle is one of the most regressive wealth transfers in history: never in the field of human commerce, or at least not since the sheriff of Nottingham, has so much tax been paid by people so poor to people so rich. Perhaps Ed Miliband is hoping that by giving lots of money to rich people, he can then impose a wealth tax on them in a sort of economic perpetual-motion machine.

There appears to be no end to his generosity to the rich. He has recently announced an increase in subsidies for electric cars, electric heating and electricity bills, and this week he quietly let slip that he will raise the amount he pays for new wind farms and index-link the payment for an extra five years.

What’s that? You don’t have a wind farm? Bad luck. Landowners who do can trouser £150,000 per wind turbine per year in rent for twenty to thirty years. One is arguing in court that £10m a year for his wind farm is not enough. The companies that run the “farms” make even more money. (As a landowner myself I am acutely aware that my ecological and economic distaste for these eyesores has cost me dear.)

Under the delayed AR7 auction for new wind projects, Mr Miliband is promising to pay up to an astonishing three times as much as the Climate Change Committee forecast he would: £113 per megawatt-hour for offshore wind instead of £38. The average electricity price is around £70. Meanwhile Richard Tice MP has sent shock waves through the wind and solar industry by warning them that if Reform gets into power he will cease their subsidies.

Don’t be fooled by the Miliband largesse: it’s not his money he is handing out; it is yours. The cost of paying all these huge subsidies is added to your electricity bills – which is why they are now the highest in the western world for both industrial and domestic power.

Mr Miliband argues that sluicing vast sums from the poor to the rich (not that he likes to put it that way) is necessary to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and to show “leadership” to the world in fighting the “climate crisis”.

All right, let’s do the sums: Britain produces 0.8% of the world’s emissions. Electricity supplies roughly 20% of our energy and wind supplied about 25% of our electricity last year.

Let’s be generous and assume that windmills cut emissions by maybe 60% over their lifetimes compared with gas turbines, though once you take into account the back-up from gas when the wind does not blow, the building and maintenance of power lines to connect distant wind farms to cities, the coal that was consumed in making the turbines and the energy cost of maintaining them, it’s probably way less than that.

(As for solar, a reputable study concluded that north of the Alps, solar panels probably supply little more energy over their lifetimes – if any - than went into their manufacture and operation. They only generated 5% of our electricity last year, mostly when we least needed it, on summer afternoons. They are contributing next to nothing to emissions reduction.)

http://www.templar.co.uk/downloads/SolarEROEI.pdf

It follows that Britain’s wind farms are achieving a reduction of 0.008x0.20x0.25x0.6 = 0.0002, or two hundredths of one percent of global emissions. That is what £25 billion a year, paid by you in direct and indirect subsidies according to the Renewable Energy Foundation, is buying you. At that rate getting the world to net zero will cost £100 trillion a year – or the entire world’s economic output.

https://ref.org.uk/ref-blog/390-uk-renewable-electricity-subsidy-totals-2002-to-the-present-day

The climate economist Bjorn Lomborg has calculated that if all of Europe went net-zero today and stayed net-zero for the rest of the century that would reduce the rise in temperature by 2100 by 0.14°C – based on standard assumptions about climate sensitivity. So Britain (with 12% of Europe’s emissions) spending £25 billion a year to cut emissions by 20% of 25% of 60%, or 3%, would reduce the temperature in 2100 by – wait for it! – 0.0005°C, less than a thousandth of a degree.

Can this really be good value for money? Esther McVey MP asked Ed Miliband in the Commons last week by how much his policies would reduce global temperatures. He refused to answer but what he did say was revealing: “the costs of inaction are much greater than the costs of action.” He is no longer claiming that we are saving money by cutting emissions, just that his policy will cost less than climate change in the long run.

Is this true? Let’s take Mr Miliband at his word and assume that his widely famed global leadership skills ensure that the whole world achieves global net zero in short order. What horrors will he have prevented?

https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.70010

The state of the climate report, which he presented to Parliament last week, says only that “recent decades have been warmer, wetter and sunnier than the 20th Century” with earlier springs and more “lawn-cutting days”. Mostly good news unless you hate lawn-mowing. There has been more warming in winter than summer, so less frost, less snow and fewer “heating days”: good news given that death rates spike in cold weather much more than in hot weather.

It says we now have 10% more rain, most of it in winter but the report can only “suggest a slight increase” in heavy rainfall while finding a “downward trend” in both average wind speed and maximum gust speed. On balance, good news. The only bad news is that sea level is rising, still very slowly – about a foot per century – but perhaps with a slight acceleration.

Where’s the horror, Ed? Project these changes to the end of the century, and take into account that crops and oak trees all grow faster these days because of carbon dioxide, and it is hard to call it a crisis.

The average of 69 estimates from 39 studies by climate economists, summarised by Richard Tol of Sussex University, says that when we hit 1.5 degrees of warming, global GDP will be 0.74% lower as a result; 1.9% lower if we hit three degrees of warming. That’s not 1.9% lower than today: it’s 1.9% lower than a much richer level reached in future.

https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421523005074

The business-as-usual model used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects the average person in the world to be earning 4.5 times as much in 2100 as today – and if we do not prevent climate change that will be cut to 4.3 times as much. The model in which we forget about climate change and just let the fossil-fuel economy rip has the average person an astonishing 9.8 times richer in 2100 even with the effects of rapid climate change, instead of 10.4 times without it.

https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162520304157#fig0001

So Mr Miliband is asking you to reduce your standard of living today to save a bunch of very, very wealthy future people from being slightly less – but still very, very – wealthy. Your prosperity is sacrificed to their posterity. This is therefore yet another way in which he is transferring money from the poor to the rich. Was he sheriff of Nottingham in a previous life?

Matt Ridley, a former member of the British House of Lords, is a science writer, businessman, and NY Times bestselling author, who blogs HERE.