I went looking for the origin of the government’s inane Zero-Emission Vehicle Mandate, and found myself hurtling down one rabbit hole after another. It’s interesting that even recent history becomes hard to trace these days as policy documents and web pages are superseded, departments change names, and the number of reports ramifies exponentially. Finding the bit of sweetcorn you are searching for is increasingly difficult as the size of the cess pit grows. Why was I searching for this? Well, it had to do with car manufacturers, in particular Stellantis, whingeing about the ZEV mandate. I wanted to trace how enthusiastic they were back when it was originally proposed. My memory is that the manufacturers were gung-ho for it, being preternaturally dim.

However, this little exploration does not trace that bit of history, because it ended up getting so sidetracked. The original attitude of the manufacturers to the ZEV mandate will have to wait for another day (if any commenters would care to paste in a link that might shorten my search, I would be grateful). This short discussion digs into the origin of a statistic used, or rather misused, in one of the CCC’s outputs.

The CCC put out a briefing document in 2020 entitled

The UK’s transition to electric vehicles

Actually, it was

A report by Terri Wills for the Climate Change Committee.

Terri Wills is an independent climate change consultant who worked with the CCC throughout 2020 to identify opportunities for business to deliver the UK’s Net Zero objectives

I don’t know who Terri Wills is. But I find it interesting that the government outsources its climate policies to the CCC, who outsources them to a single “independent climate change consultant.”

(I exaggerate. But only slightly.) One of the briefing note’s recommendations, as you may have gathered from the preamble, was a zero-emissions vehicle mandate. It followed hot on the heels of the CCC’s 6^th Carbon Budget, the actual source of the policy recommendation, which was that:

A zero-emission vehicle mandate should be introduced, requiring car and van manufacturers to sell a rising proportion of zero-emission vehicles, reaching nearly 100% by 2030, with only a very small proportion of hybrids allowed alongside until 2035. This should strengthen incentives to sell EVs in the UK market.

Smart guys, the CCC. They think that if you ban one product, it will increase the sales of an inferior product that does the same job. Example: banning milk will increase the sales of vegan alternatives. I don’t know about you, but I would prefer to drink soya milk than have black tea/coffee. Not almond milk, which tastes like ashes. Another example: banning cheese will increase the sales of vegan alternatives.

(OK, there are limits to this. Have you tried vegan cheese?)

Minor digression begins: putting the CCC in charge of climate policy is like putting a committee of Year 7s in charge of high school lunch menu policy. As an example of the CCC’s delusional recommendations, I offer their approach to feeding the UK:

Land and greenhouse gas removals. There is [i.e. there will be under their scheme] a transformation in agriculture and the use of farmland while maintaining the same levels of food per head produced today. By 2035, 460,000 hectares of new mixed woodland are planted to remove CO2 and deliver wider environmental benefits. 260,000 hectares of farmland shifts to producing energy crops. Woodland rises from 13% of UK land today to 15% by 2035 and 18% by 2050. Peatlands are widely restored and managed sustainably.

That’s new woodland of almost the size of Norfolk, energy crops covering an area half the size of Norfolk, and they want 20% of lowland agricultural land (i.e. the lowland peats, the best farming areas) to be rewetted:

The farmed lowland peats cover 243,000 ha but that is far less than 20% of the lowland agricultural land. Let’s assume they want all of that re-wetted. This won’t necessarily mean you can’t grow crops on it, but you can safely bet that it won’t work very well if you do, and that you will have very angry farmers if you try to force them to do so. They also want another 18% to be sustainably managed, which presumably means not intensively farmed. They want 85 GW of solar PV, which going by the usual rule of thumb means 170,000 ha or 1,700 km².

And let me just repeat…

“…while maintaining the same levels of food per head produced today…”

Turkey twizzlers for mains and crème eggs for dessert.

Minor digression ends.

Let me screech back onto the track I wanted to follow before I saw something else interesting in the weeds. One of the co-benefits of the ZEV mandate that was identified in the briefing note by the CCC via the independent climate change consultant was:

• Improved air quality. The link between EVs and air quality is clear. Air pollution is the top environmental risk to human health in the UK, and in the UK alone in 2016 was responsible for 40,000 premature deaths.

Remember, this document was produced at the end of 2020, so there was really no excuse for wheeling out this zombie statistic. My thanks go to Stew, who linked to this comprehensive explanation by Prof. Spiegelhalter in a contemporaneous comment at Notalot.

The 40,000 deaths came from a report in 2016 from the Royal College of Physicians, which took its data from a 2009 report by the Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollution. COMEAP’s results for the UK in turn derive from from a 2002 paper by Pope et al who calculated a risk ratio of 1.06 per 10 μg PM2.5 per cubic metre. The deaths were not deaths at all since (until lately) air pollution has never been on a death certificate. Their main role was to shorten the lives of already moribund people:

Spiegelhalter goes on to say that the WHO target is 10 μg PM2.5 per cubic metre, so that in effect there is no additional risk if you live somewhere with that average level.

One thing that is generally agreed upon is that the air is rather cleaner now than it was before. The COMEAP risk ratio was obtained for 2008 levels of PM2.5.

At the time, London was given a risk ratio of 1.03 by Spiegelhalter, based on a value of 15 μg PM2.5 per cubic metre.

The latest map from Defra [select the pollution type and the year from the drop-down menus] looks like this:

A very small part of the UK breaches the WHO guidelines, unless they have revised them down in the interim.

Spiegelhalter says of the 1.06 risk ratio:

For a start, we can make comparisons with other aspects of lifestyle and environment by going back to the relative risk estimate of 1.06 per 10 mPM. This is very roughly, pro-rata, like an extra hour watching TV, being another 3Kg overweight, or having an extra drink.

Nevertheless, cleaning up our air is seen as a major co-benefit of the ZEV mandate by our indefatigable committee and their independent climate change consultant. I delved quite deeply in the CCC’s 6^th carbon budget and in their briefing note on EV adoption. But I don’t remember them highlighting the societal costs of their ZEV mandate quite so prominently. It would probably quite useful to know how much productivity is going to be affected by long-distance drivers sitting on forecourts recharging their batteries. (The DfT thinks that “decarbonising” transport will have jobs and growth co-benefits as well as health benefits.)

Bonus figure, showing the UK’s emissions of PM2.5 over the last 50 years:

(Of course, I’m talking to myself, since we all died in 1970, the air was that bad.)

Bonus bonus figure, showing the decline in lead emissions from transport. I can only find data going back to 1990 without a deeper search, so here we are. Remember the good old days? Walking along the main road breathing in all that lead chloride?

If anyone has memories of the air before the figure begins, please regale us.

See also No Smoke Without Tyres: on the particulate matter arising from EV tyres.

Featured image: a bohemian cycling the wrong way as an example of a hoped-for future, from the DfT’s 2021 “Decarbonising Transport.”

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

BY EUGYPPIUS

All of our countries are crazy in various ways, but when it comes to energy policy Germany is an undisputed champion of crazy.

In 2011, a tsunami caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster. If you check a map, you’ll notice that Fukushima is in a country called Japan, which it turns out is a different country from Germany. The Fukushima disaster had zero to do with the Federal Republic, but then-Chancellor Angela Merkel felt the need to solve the problem of Fukushima by phasing out nuclear power in Germany, even though tsunamis and earthquakes are not a problem in Germany, because Germany is a country in Central Europe and not an island nation in Asia.

That is crazy enough, but it gets much crazier. Months before announcing the nuclear phase-out, Merkel’s Government had passed energy transition legislation to secure Germany’s path towards a zero-emissions future. We resolved to ditch our most significant source of emissions-free power, in other words, just months after resolving an energy transition to emissions-free power. At this point you would be justified in wondering if Germany suffers from some kind of shamanistic cultural phobia of electricity in general, that is how crazy this is. These insane choices had the near-term consequence of increasing our dependence on Russian natural gas. Otherwise, they ensured that power generation in Germany would be vastly more expensive than necessary and also vastly more carbon intensive than necessary.

Now, crazy demands explanations, and observers have proposed various theories for the German climate nuclear crazy. Two of them deserve mention here:

1. The 1968 generation in Germany suffered from unusual radicalism, sharpened by moral anxiety over National Socialism, and resolved to outcompete all others in the project of self-abnegating virtue. Our culture developed a deranged anti-nuclear movement that in a fit of typical German thoroughness also came to embrace opposition to nuclear power. The Chernobyl disaster radicalised the pink-haired anti-nuclearists still further, and these cretins grew up to become news anchors, school teachers and book authors, effectively indoctrinating the next generation according to their parareligious delusions.
2. German politicians after the Cold War – especially Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel – harboured a subtle and not entirely unreasonable desire to strengthen ties with resource-rich Russia. They decided that the anti-nuclearists and the Green Party could be instrumentalised towards this end. The energy transition and the nuclear phase-out increased our dependence on Russian gas, and this was a feature more than it was a bug.

These are mutually supporting theories, but I don’t think either of them can fully account for the bizarre phenomenon before us. Germany energy crazy is a very deep problem and it will keep historians busy for many generations.

In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Germany under Merkel’s successor, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, decided along with the rest of the liberal West that Russia was bad, bad, bad and that evil Putin had to be punished with self-immolating sanctions, sanctions, sanctions. This new spasm of high-minded moralising further attenuated our energy situation, ushering in an entirely self-made energy crisis. The Greens, now in government, were determined to proceed with the last stages of the nuclear phase-out, even with our natural gas supplies in doubt. Only when they saw themselves staring into the abyss of political doom did they grudgingly agree to give our last nuclear plants a three-and-a-half month lease on life. We Germans and our energy policy had out-crazied everyone else, we had made ourselves the laughing stock of the entire world, that is how crazy we were.

The Greens fought ruthless bureaucratic battles to shut off the last remaining nuclear power plants, and in the years since they have fought ruthless legal battles to keep the records of all this under seal lest their idiocies ever see the light of day. In open court, they argued that these documents must remain secret, because the German Sonderweg in all things nuclear “has to be defended in the future, both domestically and to our international and European partners” and “if the documents were to be disclosed, the negotiating partners of the Federal Government could counter our arguments”. Yes, you read that right: lawyers for the German Ministry of Economic Affairs stood before a judge last year and begged him not to release internal records relating to the German nuclear phase-out because their contents were so discrediting that they would make the policy impossible to justify at home and defend abroad.

Our Government, then, is not only crazy. Its members also know that they’re crazy, they love being crazy, they wish to persist in their crazy and they hope only that nobody else finds out about their crazy. It is like a middle-aged man with a crippling addiction to foot porn worried that his wife might stumble across his browsing history, except transmogrified into the form of a major European industrial power.

Happily, journalists for the excellent news magazine Cicero won their court battle and succeeded in forcing the release of the deeply embarrassing nuclear memos. Today Daniel Gräber has published his long-awaited analysis of these records, and what it reveals is really and truly abysmal. These documents show high civil servants literally falsifying expert reports. They show these same officials withholding information from their boss, Economics Minister Robert Habeck, lest he inconveniently arrive at the right conclusions. And they show an oblivious and wilfully deceived Habeck, still dreaming of becoming Chancellor one day and terrified of alienating the rabid antinuclearists of his own party.

Before we get to the highlights, I must introduce you to our cast of characters. They are a colourful bunch indeed. At the pinnacle of this tragicomedy is of course Habeck himself, our valiant Minister of Economic Affairs. He hails from the technocratic, so-called ‘realist’ wing of the Green Party, which means that he is Hard-Headed Very Serious Visionary and not just another crazy Leftist hippie.

Habeck’s even stupider colleague, Annalena Baerbock, ended up being the Green Chancellor candidate in the 2021 elections because feminism. Frustrated ambitions can ruin the best of men, to say nothing of petty pseudointellectual children’s book authors.

Next, you must meet Habeck’s powerful State Secretary, Patrick Graichen. This odious man, who was forced to resign May 2023 in the face of a nepotism scandal, was Habeck’s energy tsar during the 2022 crisis. He came to the Ministry following years as a lobbyist at Agora Energiewende, a think-tank responsible for devising and promoting much of the present German renewables lunacy.

Third in line is Stefan Tidow, who looks like what would happen if you blended a shark with an accountant. He also has a background at Agora, where he worked for a time under his friend Graichen. When the Scholz Government came to power, Tidow became State Secretary in the Ministry for the Environment, responsible for nuclear supervision.

Finally, there is Tidow’s subordinate, an insane lawyer named Gerrit Niehaus. Like his boss Tidow, Niehaus appears to truly loathe nuclear power for unfathomable reasons, and that is very unfortunate, because the Green Environmental Minister placed him in charge of “Department S”, the division responsible for nuclear regulation. I cannot find a good picture of Niehaus, so for the purposes of this post I invite you to imagine an unpleasant male visage of your choosing.

As soon as Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th 2022, Habeck and his Ministry knew that their plans to abolish nuclear power were in doubt. Habeck initially suggested he was open to delaying the phase-out, and his subordinates commissioned an assessment from internal experts on whether extending the lifetime of our last nuclear plants would enhance energy security. These politically neutral civil servants produced a four-page memo explaining in detail all the reasons that shutting down power plants in the face of a looming energy crisis might be a bad idea, and why it might be wise to keep them running through the winter. All the arguments that would emerge in the autumn as the energy crisis deepened were thus, as Gräber explains, “on the table right from the start… well-prepared by civil-servant experts whose job it is tend to the welfare of the entire country rather than of any specific party”.

Fascinatingly, Habeck claims that he never saw the assessment. His energy tsar Graichen, intent on phasing out nuclear power by the end of the year even if it meant freezing to death in the dark, seems to have sent it directly to the waste bin – condemning his boss to say stupid and wrong things on television for months to come.

Meanwhile, Graichen’s counterpart in the Ministry of the Environment, our accountant-shark Tidow, was working just as hard to subvert inconvenient reports on his end. On March 1st 2022, his Ministry commissioned an assessment on “scenarios compatible with nuclear safety”, should the last nuclear plants be allowed to run beyond December 31st. The authors of the report – including two outside consultants – affirmed that safety concerns did not stand in the way of extending plant lifetime “for several years” beyond the scheduled phase-out date.

Tidow’s subordinate in “Department S”, Gerrit Niehaus, found this document to be highly inconvenient, and he immediately began rewriting it. Amusingly, he replaced every occurrence of the word for “nuclear power” (Kernkraft) with the slightly more ominous-sounding “atomic power” (Atomkraft). “Then,” Gräber writes, “he set about turning the core message of the memo into its opposite.” It took him two days to do this. On March 3rd the new, falsified memo was ready, now scrubbed of the original authors’ names and sourced only to “Department S”. It argued that extending the life of Germany’s final nuclear plants by even a few months represented too great a risk to contemplate. And once again, Habeck was kept in the dark. Niehaus’s boss, Tidow, withheld the original assessment and forwarded only Niehaus’s doctored version to Graichen at the Economics Ministry. With it came a note: “Don’t formally deliver, only for you.”

There ensued an astounding comedy of the absurd. Apparently doubting that Habeck would have the appetite to read even the doctored memo, Graichen drew up an entirely new document, entitled ‘An examination of the continued operation of nuclear power plants in view of the war in Ukraine’. Of course, this was yet another bureaucratic invention that recommended against extending the life of the last German nuclear plants, and this on an even more egregiously pseudointellectual basis. Graichen promptly forwarded this fraudulent derivation of a falsified memo of a genuine assessment to Habeck – who of course really, really loved it.

It was a Friday evening, but Habeck’s intellectual orgasm was so intense that he spent the evening and much of the next day rewriting Graichen’s farce into a long question-and-answer dialogue. Having finished this labour of love, our proud schoolboy happily forwarded it to Graichen and Tidow, explaining that he had reworked Graichen’s “marvellous paper” into an FAQ, “because I believe this has to be NARRATED. If you want to read about this, so will everyone else”. Habeck suggested that they send this fourth narrative derivation of Graichen’s fraudulent reconception of Niehaus’s falsified memo of a genuine assessment to the nuclear plant operators the next day, at noon.

Our bureaucratic wizards now had a very delicate problem. As Niehaus explained, Graichen’s memo (derivation number three) was a complete disaster – “grossly wrong in legal terms” and mistaken in other respects as well. Habeck had unknowingly taken all of this ignorance into his “NARRATIVE” and was now demanding they use this monument of ideological idiocy to tell the actual experts – the nuclear plant operators – how things had to be. There followed, as Gräber writes, “a lively email exchange in which Habeck’s people wondered what they should do about the story written by their boss, which was based on false facts”. They finally posted a “radically shortened” and “heavily rewritten” version to the Ministry website on March 8th.

In the end, the Green bureaucrats lost the battle but they won the war. All the fake, invented reasons why the nuclear plants could not be left running into the spring melted away as the energy crisis deepened and the Government found themselves toeing the brink of political annihilation. The plants did go offline, however, if a little later than Graichen, Tidow and Niehaus had hoped. The Greens declared victory and Habeck dreams of his future Chancellorship to this day. What remained in the archives of Habeck’s ministry were the awkward leavings of their radicalism, ignorance and will to deceive, which in this case at least they failed to keep from us.

This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.