Turning airy-fairy wishes into legal requirements, with little or no analysis of the likely consequences, is a very strange way to run a country – to say the least. The government’s former ‘fracking tsar’ is not impressed, and neither is the House of Lords. It appears that most members of Parliament neither know nor care what the implications might be for the national economy, but just expect people to pay a heck of a lot for very little without question.

As Theresa May takes to the G20 stage in Japan to urge her fellow leaders to follow the UK’s moral leadership on climate change, she should hope that their parting gift is, politely, to ignore her (from The Times via the GWPF).

As impressive as the target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 sounds, other countries will recognise the capacity it has to destroy UK plc for generations to come.

The lack of scrutiny of what would be the most expensive and socially disruptive public policy since the Second World War is truly remarkable.

The announcement and cross-party self-congratulations last week were short on any ideas about how we get there and who picks up the tab. The chancellor has estimated that the cost would be more than £1 trillion. That’s £1,000 every second for the next 30 years.

That may please our international competitors but it’s unlikely to be a domestic vote winner. Given that the UK contributes just 1 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, it’s also unlikely to have any effect on climate change.

The problem with putting targets into law is that no amount of legislating can make magic happen. In fact, we have seen too often how setting a target distracts us from what we are trying to achieve and results only in the time-honoured massaging of statistics.

Continued here.

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop

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June 28, 2019 at 06:33AM