Where Were You Before, Mr Warner?

By Paul Homewood

h/t Doug Brodie

Welcome to the party, Mr Warner!

Some of us have been warning you about this years ago, when you were praising Net Zero:

There is so much wrong with climate change policy as it stands that it is hard to know where to start.

Yet bans and deadlines are as good a place as any, for the way things are going we’ll end up with the worst of both worlds – significantly higher costs but with much of the intended industrial upside of the transition going not to the local economy but to overseas producers.

I’m not going to get into the rights and wrongs of the presiding cross-party commitment to net zero by 2050. Suffice it to say that the cost argument often advanced to support it has always somewhat missed the point.

The relatively modest investment costs of meeting the target – generally judged by economic modelling to be around 0.5pc of GDP a year in today’s money – are nothing, it is said, against the potentially catastrophic costs of doing nothing at all. Money well spent, in other words.

Unfortunately, the comparison only holds good in a perfect world where everyone strives for the same thing, which is very definitely not where we are.

At just 1pc of global emissions, it matters not a jot what privations Britain imposes on itself unless others do the same. If they don’t, then we’d still be faced with the costs of doing nothing.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/02/27/dash-electric-cars-industrial-destruction-britain-europe/

Could this be the same Jeremy Warner who announced the end of petrol cars in 2017?