From THE DAILY SKEPTIC

Chris Stark, the outgoing Chief Executive of the U.K. Climate Change Committee (CCC), is demob-happy. In a number of interviews, the highly-paid civil servant has criticised the Prime Minister for seemingly faltering in his commitment to Net Zero. This unguarded criticism is unusual in itself, unwittingly highlighting, rather than seeking to resolve, the increasing tensions between green ideological ambition and political reality. But it is Stark’s curious framing of the problems apparently holding climate policy back that is most revealing of the growing democratic deficit. The only things now sustaining the green agenda are the political establishment’s intransigence and sense of entitlement. And that increases the risk of catastrophic policy failure. 

The CCC is a troubled organisation. Its former Chairman, pka John Gummer, now Lord Deben, left his role last year, and since then political disagreements between Westminster and the devolved governments have prevented the appointment of a permanent successor. Now, the CCC’s Chief Executive’s chair is also empty, and whoever steps into it has a much bigger set of problems to face than his or her predecessor. 

This is all the more an irony because the CCC itself was summoned into existence by the Climate Change Act 2008 (CCA), which was the act not just of the dying days of the last Labour Government but also the expression of the cross-party consensus on climate change. MPs didn’t believe that they or their successors were able or should be free to represent their constituencies on matters of climate policies, and so only an ‘independent’ panel of experts – a quango, or Non-Departmental Statutory Body – would be able to set the terms of climate and energy policy, which the Act put beyond democratic control. Accordingly, the CCC has since its inception set the U.K.’s Carbon Budget. Now, however, the quarrelsome devolved parliaments – which were also created to bring all parts of Britain into harmonious consensus – and a growing sense of the impossibility of Net Zero makes it hard to fill the current vacancies. The pay is good, but you’d have to be daft to accept such a poisoned chalice. The climate agenda is literally out of control. 

According to Stark in an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, the problem began last year when “Sunak delayed a ban on new petrol and diesel cars, and weakened targets on phasing out gas boilers”. However, as I argued at the time, the problem with this claim is that Sunak’s interventions were the smallest possible dampener on the policy agenda – a mild tapping of the brakes and nothing like a U-turn. The U.K.’s phasing out of petrol and diesel cars was, and still is, a target which reduces the proportion of internal combustion engine cars sold each year in stages. The change merely extended the last phase of this abolition from 2030 to 2035. By 2030, 80% of new cars sold will have to be EVs. Similarly, the 2035 ban on sales of new domestic gas boilers is largely intact, save for exemptions for low-income households. And properties that aren’t connected to the gas grid will not be required to shift to electric heating until 2035, because, as many argued, the previous target of 2026 was ‘premature’. 

In other words, Sunak was attempting to save Net Zero, not depart from it. EV sales, for example, are rising only because of absurdly generous tax breaks given to well-off middle-class people, and have no chance of reaching 100% by 2030 without causing immense problems, as well as sacrificing a great deal more of the British and European car industry to China – a problem now acknowledged across the continent. Extending the target by five years was the only option available to the Government. And despite Sunak’s slightest possible dilution of the policy target, firms such as Vauxhall are now citing Net Zero, and the lack of consumer interest in EVs, as reasons for threatening to leave the U.K. 

But Stark (who has done as much as anyone to salt the earth for his successor) attempts to catastrophise about Sunak’s decision in much the same way that civil servants have dramatised recent senior politicians’ decisions. “The diplomatic impact of that has been immense,” says Stark. “The overall message that other parts of the world took from it is that the U.K. is less ambitious on climate than it once was.”

This seems unlikely, and the plight of the U.K.’s poor climate diplomats facing the fallout from Sunak’s five-year extension should raise 67 million shrugs, if it is worthy of any attention at all. Diplomacy was not Stark’s or the CCC’s brief, and the notion of the PM derailing the global climate agenda by slightly undermining the world’s perception of the U.K. as a climate champion is only going to upset green wonks and the BBC and Guardian’s ideological hacks, not the hoi polloi. 

In a subsequent interview with the Guardian, Stark’s attempt to rescue climate policy from inevitable watering down grew more obviously desperate. “Net Zero has definitely become a slogan that I feel occasionally is now unhelpful, because it’s so associated with the campaigns against it,” he told Fiona Harvey. “It’s the culture warriors who have really taken against it.” 

It seems to be a tactic of people who believe in the genetic transfer of historical guilt and the interchangeability of biological sex – among other bizarre, unscientific things – to claim that anyone who disagrees with them, however reasonably, is waging a ‘culture war’. In this view, if you refuse to take a knee, or believe that gender-confused children ought not to be dispatched on irreversible medical pathways, then you are the dangerous activist. And the greens have embraced this tactic, believing that sceptics of climate science, and more pertinently climate policies, have simply joined the ranks of the ‘culture warriors’.

What the defenders of the radical progressive policies mean by ‘culture war’ is that they no longer have everything their own way. There used to be a cross-party consensus and widespread public support for our membership of the EU, various woke social policies and on the need to reduce carbon emissions. But the consensus has broken down and people who no longer have the ‘correct’ opinions on these issues are, understandably, seeking representation for their views. They’re not ‘culture warriors’.

Take the green agenda. The consequence of the abolition of petrol and diesel cars is not merely limiting consumer choice, but the restriction of mobility through price and technological limitation. The phasing out of the domestic gas boiler has an effect far beyond mere lifestyle – it requires a household to find many thousands of pounds, perhaps tens of thousands, to pay for a heat pump. And by seeking to prioritise the reduction of carbon emissions over maximising GDP, the successive U.K. Governments, the Treasury and the Bank of England, in cahoots with other central banks, have given enormous powers to financial institutions to regulate the economy and business activity via ESG, leading to a massive misallocation of resources, pushing prices up, with the main (perhaps sole) beneficiaries being green billionaires. 

Stark, of course, will never have heard such criticisms. As far as he’s concerned, the prices of things are mere arbitrary numbers that can simply be controlled by yet another policy intervention to disguise yesteryear’s policy failures. Life is sweet when you’re a senior civil servant on a £400,000 package and your career is protected from markets and political whims. So what if energy prices double and double again, when you earn more than 10 times the national average? But such protection from reality means isolation from reality, too. His waving away critics as mere ‘culture warriors’ reveals that he – and the fawning journalists that surround him – lack even the vocabulary to understand criticism. Establishment hacks simply have no other term with which to explain the phenomenon of people disagreeing with them. It’s called democracy, Chris. 

So if not a ‘culture war’, what is the right term for the divisions within society that are growing up around the climate agenda? I believe the correct term is ‘civil war’. Net Zero requires intensely political transformations of society – as radical as the changes sought by the early 20th century’s ideological movements. Net Zero requires the transformation of the relationship between the individual and the state. It requires the complete reorganisation of the economy. And it requires new powers to be created and put beyond democratic control. 

It may not be a ‘hot’ civil war – or not yet. But our intransigent and chaotic political class seem not to have registered the possibility of their failure and have taken for granted our willingness to accept our immiseration ‘to save the planet’ without question or challenge. Much like many a military blunder, armies of wonks like Stark have no real idea about how to achieve Net Zero, nor what the costs and consequences of failure are, but will not be swayed from the agenda. Critics can just be written off as ‘deniers’ and ‘culture warriors’. 

Under Chris Stark’s tenure, the CCC has lied, made stuff up, hidden its calculations from scrutiny and based its feasibility studies of the U.K.’s pathway to Net Zero on technologies that do not exist or have not been proven to be economically viable. And this was made possible by Parliament’s dereliction of its duty to scrutinise legislation and represent the public’s interests, and its desire to delegate difficult decisions to an unaccountable technocracy. Moreover, as Andrew Neil pointed out this week, this radical dismantling of democracy came with very little comment from the news media. 

If the civil war is not yet apparent, it is because its battle fronts are not barricades, but remote agencies and lofty courts and financial markets. Their assaults on our freedom, wealth and ways of life are unannounced and greeted joyfully by journalists, while green activists protest that they’re not going nearly far enough. Our public institutions are captured and turned against us by legislation and legal precedent. Not by guns and bombs, of course, but the difference is merely one of rate: the difference between the speeds of combustion and metabolism. Either way, we get burned or eaten. Stark has quit his job at the CCC just as the reality of the Net Zero agenda has been made plain. This is a war of some kind, and it is bound to get hotter until politicians put the climate agenda to a full and proper democratic contest.

Subscribe to Ben Pile’s The Net Zero Scandal Substack here.