Targets, Targets

The Groan reports:

Ministers are planning a U-turn on Britain's pledges to combat climate change that "effectively abolishes" its targets to rapidly expand the use of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power.

Excellent. There's two things here to note. The first is that any and all such targets will be treated this way. We've got the likes of Greenpeace and FoE insisting that there should be "legally enforceable" cuts in CO2...but who is going to do the enforcing? It looks very pretty when we can say, gosh, yes, we've got a law that says we'll cut emissions by 90% or whatever. But when push comes to shove we all know they'll be ignored, for exactly who is going to get arrested, fined, jailed, for breaching them? No one, of course, which is why they're an irrelevance.

The second is a rather deeper point. Such targets are insisted upon by those who still have the rather socialist (or if you prefer, planners') view of the economy. That it's a machine, with levers and buttons which the wise can pull or push in order to get to the desired solution. On a gross level of course this is true. Kleptomaniac incompetents, as Mugabe has shown, can indeed reduce an economy to rubble. On a more fine grained view, those levers simply don't exist. There is no magic button to be pressed to reduce emissions: we can make people pay for them via Pigou taxation but there's no way in a free society in which we can insist upon a certain level of emissions.

So the abandonment of even trying to do so is to be welcomed, for we would like to remain a free society, wouldn't we?