The spectre at the climate change feast
Matthew Sinclair 12:19pm
Today the TaxPayers' Alliance is releasing a new report which sets out the huge and excessive burden that green taxes impose on families and business across the UK.
At the moment, 14 percent of domestic bill costs are the result of climate change policies. Increasing the price of energy hits the poor and elderly hardest - which, in turn, increases poverty and benefit dependency. At the same time, 21 percent of industrial electricity bills are the result of climate change policies. If we want to make our economy less dependent on financial services, driving up a major part of many manufacturing firms' costs isn't the way to do it.
Despite these costs, the current approach doesn't appear to be achieving the desired cuts in emissions. It is hard to establish this empirically, as we don't know what level emissions would be at without current policies. But looking at the data since 1970, I don't think many people would think that a major and escalating attempt to cut emissions had been made since the early 1990s. Many politicians, environmentalists and senior academics are disappointed with, or sceptical about, the progress which has been achieved.
But the costs are still set to rise massively in the next few years, even without a new deal at Copenhagen. Citigroup research (not available online, unfortunately) argues that it is possible there will be a 57 percent to 100 percent increase in energy prices by 2020. That is driven by the need to finance the £161 billion needed to meet renewable energy targets, which comes on top of the £77 billion needed to replace the generating capacity that keeps the lights on. Thanks to the Government's disgraceful failure to stand up for Britain's interests, we are expected to need to spend far more than other major European economies despite having achieved faster progress than most towards meeting our Kyoto targets.
Combining that with a major fiscal tightening will mean an absolutely intolerable burden on ordinary families. The poor and elderly will suffer particularly badly, but even those on average incomes aren't going to be able to afford anything like a doubling of already high energy costs. At the same time, and again in order to pay for that massive investment, energy companies will see their profits rise substantially. That is when climate change policy will run into an affordability crisis.
Politicians need to understand that, however much they might be willing to sacrifice to cut emissions, the public aren't going to support that. For too long, the need for policy to be affordable has been the spectre at the feast. For too long, the possibility of climate change policy bringing about fuel poverty has been ignored. There is no way that strategy is politically sustainable.
Major changes to the current direction of policy, along the lines we outline in our report, would upset some significant vested interests and others earnestly, but wrongly, committed to the present direction of policy. But it is going to become a political imperative to stop just adding new layers to the existing mélange of climate change policy, and start working at reducing the cost through serious reforms. There is a huge opportunity for either party to become the party of low energy prices.
Matthew Sinclair is research director at the Taxpayers’ Alliance
Previous
peter
December 17th, 2009 12:56pm Report this commentIn saw the photo and read the headline and realised that nothing further need be said.
david alexander
December 17th, 2009 12:57pm Report this comment"I’m of the view that climate change is happening and that the evidence suggests that man’s actions are playing a significant role in this. I’m even in favour of a carbon tax to deal with the problem"
James Forsyth
Spectator Blog yesterday
Rhoda Klapp
December 17th, 2009 1:02pm Report this commentThis is just a beginning of the analysis on the effects this farrago will have on our standard of living. I am surpirised to see no mention of the way the Redcar Corus plant is being shut down just so its carbon credits may be plundered. How many more jobs will we send overseas in support of this fatuity?
Billericay Dave
December 17th, 2009 1:18pm Report this commentsort of topic by brown is again claiming he will create 500,000 low carbon jobs where does he get his figures from the tooth fairy ? Or maybe someone on here can enlighten me and I will give him the benifit of the doubt.
Publius
December 17th, 2009 1:29pm Report this commentGood to see that there are some clear and rigorous thinkers out there doing the kind of work that needs to be done. Thank you.
If only the Speccie would get in on the act, instead of mouthing yesterday's platitudes.
Moraymint
December 17th, 2009 1:32pm Report this comment"Politicians need to understand that, however much they might be willing to sacrifice to cut emissions, the public aren't going to support that ..."
Politicians don't sacrifice anything; they offer up sacrifices that must be made by us taxpayers.
And how are we, the public, supposed to "not support" ever rising "green" taxes? Not pay them? Yeah, right.
The gulf between our political mafia and we citizen serfs grows wider by the day. Like the IMF reported recently, the likelihood of widespread civil unrest in the coming years also appears to be growing.
Is it just me, or does one get the increasing sense that political mafias around the world are losing their grip on things at the moment (whilst spinning propaganda for all their worth)?
Perhaps we're at the leading edge of a convergence of catastrophes? Global economic crisis (little/no substantial evidence of recovery or where recovery will come from); climate change chaos (regardless of whether or not you think climate change is man-made); the end of cheap, fossil-fuelled energy (just watch that oil price continue to rise inexorably); relentless population growth; natural resource shortages around the globe (lack of fresh water being the scariest challenge) ... and so on.
Life has a certain fin de siecle feel about it these days, don't you think?
Ian C
December 17th, 2009 1:40pm Report this commentThe Russians have today dislcosed their belief that the CRU database of world temperatures has been cherry picked by using just 121 out of over 1500 Russian weather staion data. They have used the warmer records(surprise, surprise) and excluded 40% of Russia in the process.
That's an area about the size of the USA that has not been 'counted' for assessing the climate data!
EyeSee
December 17th, 2009 1:46pm Report this commentIt seems quite often that we hear that our politicians have 'disgracefully failed to support Britain's interests', which quite often we put down to Labour's inherent incompetence. But surely anyone would feel the need to stand up to strangers? I think that it is the herd mentality that permeates politics. The EU becomes a 'good thing' and for evermore whatever crackpot scheme it comes up with our government see nothing wrong. Climate change is clearly bunkum (well, man-made anyway) but the herd are pointed in that direction and it takes mammoth and sustained effort to divert them. They have an idealitic vision of an issue and never vary from that, no matter what reality shows them. Funny too how energy prices go up due to green taxes, but strangely at the same time the energy companies profits go up. Something else that doesn't concern our politicians. Even when they have a relative working for one, eh Gordon. The corrupt pact between New Labour and the banks that allowed the banking crisis is echoed in the desperate measures politicians take in order to deliver the carbon trading schemes their big business chums are demanding. But address climate change? No. I'm sure they are well aware there is nothing to be done there. But for me, building up technology companies to cut down on pollution would be a great idea. Emissions may not be causing global warming, but that doesn't make them a good thing!
Liz Brown
December 17th, 2009 1:46pm Report this commentI cannot afford this Government
Publius
December 17th, 2009 1:56pm Report this commentMoraymint writes:
"Life has a certain fin de siecle feel about it these days, don't you think?"
-- Yes. It puts me in mind of the years before the Great War.
-- And it seems to me that mainstream politicians think the answer is ever-larger dollops of more-of-the-same, whereas what we need is less of the same. The lunatic Brown seems to be a reductio ad absurdum of this.
oldtimer
December 17th, 2009 2:05pm Report this commentCopenhagen is not so much a climate change feast, as your headline states, but a climate change scam. It is based on dodgy data, dodgy statistical methods and dodgy computer programming if those investigating the released emails and associated documentation are to be believed.
So far from the science being settled, as the AGWarmers proclaim, it is suspect. It needs thorough, independent review from the data sources through to the methodology used to support the hypotheses that are deployed. These hypotheses need to be tested against the available evidence.
Yet it is this suspect climate science that is being used to justify the taxation and tax incentives you describe.
jon
December 17th, 2009 2:14pm Report this commentCap and Trade in Practice
How to get paid for laying off 1700 workers at Corus/TATA, Redcar and build a new factory in India. Net reduction in Co2 0.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704398304574598173402205330.html#mod=djemEditorialPage
Jan
December 17th, 2009 2:52pm Report this commentThis has more than a fin-de-siècle feel to it. The troubles are heaping up and our leaders can find answers only in taxes, regulation and bureaucracy. Little does anyone realise that it is not climate change, peak oil or financial stress that will put an end to us. The real danger is taxes, regulation and bureaucracy!
Joseph Tainter, a US anthropologist studied the collapse of civilisation and collected his conclusions in a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. He argues that all societies react to challenges by adding complexity (taxes, regulation and bureaucracy) to their structure. These, at first, have advantages in that, at modest cost, they create order and security. Unfortunately, with each wave of complexity, the cost rises as the benefits diminish until they reach a point of negative returns. The burden of greater complexity outweighs any benefit. Survival, at that point, requires a reduction in complexity but very few civilisations chose that option and history is littered with their remains.
Tainter makes the point that collapse, for the ordinary citizen, is not necessarily a bad thing as it releases him or her from the costs and burdens imposed from above.
Yam Yam
December 17th, 2009 3:18pm Report this commentAll this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true in itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
"It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so are brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.”
- Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf , vol.1, ch. 10, 1925
Publius
December 17th, 2009 3:37pm Report this commentJon
This Corus story, like Neather, is being pretty much suppressed by the mainstream media -- presumably because these unintended but not surprising consequences are not "helpful".
Thank you for the link.
Moraymint
December 17th, 2009 3:50pm Report this commentJan: "... collapse, for the ordinary citizen, is not necessarily a bad thing ..."
That's where my mindset is these days.
I've lost virtually all hope of our political mafia steering us through the next few years, still less the next decade or two. Whilst the prospect of serious societal collapse is alarming, the prospect of more of what we've had to put up with for this past 12 years drives me to distraction. Our political mafia has failed us all, miserably. Perhaps they always do in the end?
There is no way that any of our major political parties have the ideas, the fibre, the morality or the tenacity to lead us through what lies just ahead of us now. We've used cheap, fossil-fuelled energy to create a monstrous, debt-fuelled "developed world" that has now all but gone bust. Simple as that. We've run out of fuel, so we've run out road.
At this rate, we may have no choice but to watch the edifice that is our unsustainably complex, bureaucratic, indebted, suffocating, fragile society collapse - primarily because we've, er, run out of money. Made worse by politicians of all colours believing more and more that the state always knows best; the state is the panacea. It isn't, of course; quite the opposite, in fact.
So, the Moraymints are diversifying into bee-keeping during 2010 - to add to the emergency provisions, seed beds, water butts, hens and other smallholding paraphernalia that represent the Moraymints' modest attempts to prepare for what lies ahead.
Collapse it is then?
Snowman
December 17th, 2009 4:24pm Report this commentNothing would please me more than the Copenhagen gathering agreeing to treble or quadruple the transfer of money from the CO2 belching West to the struggling countries, China included. Nothing but speedy impoverishment of the West will kill the AGW off.
Tiberius
December 17th, 2009 5:24pm Report this commentIan C: I saw that report today on the DT website along with a report that Brown was trying to produce some tortuously worded statement that Man rather than God was responsible for past natural disasters.
"Brown saves the world from God" shock!
anne allan
December 17th, 2009 6:00pm Report this commentThe world is really topsy-turvy when data provided by the Russians is more reliable than that of the Western 'democracies".
THX1138
December 17th, 2009 6:10pm Report this commentA carbon tax is the most efficient means of reflecting the cost of carbon in all economic decisions – from investments made by companies to fuel their requirements, to the product choices made by consumers,.....As a businessman it is hard to speak favourably about any new tax. But a carbon tax strikes me as a more direct, a more transparent and a more effective approach."
Rex W. Tillerson CEO of ExxonMobil
John Richardson
December 17th, 2009 6:49pm Report this comment'Moraymint'.Re 17th Dec. 3:50pm.
What if you are wrong ?
Ironically I want to cheer you up.
Not wrong about the real possibility of collapse.
When Schools teach children in secret
(the 'Old' O Levels) and men are jailed for defending their families too much;
we have long ago started to collapse.
No, wrong about the cause.
If, like me, you regard the 'macro' contemporary socio-economic developments as obviously delibarate, then you become more angry than despondent.
I regard the list of real and serious problems you cite as symptoms, not causes
[".....the edifice that is our..."].
Where did they think 125% mortgages would lead ?
It's obvious.
Why import millions from the 'third world'?
Not despite,instead, because of the effect.
Do they really think housing Somali immigrants in luxury during a recession is the right thing to do?
Do they really?
You could throw you own examples on the pile if you wanted.
They have declared war on civilisation. We are at war.
John Richardson
December 17th, 2009 6:50pm Report this commentOh ,
and good luck with the Bees !
Moraymint
December 17th, 2009 9:12pm Report this commentJohn Richardson
December 17th, 2009 6:50pm
Thanks re-bees! Can't wait to get going with them. Anything to take my mind off this travesty of a government :-)
Amadeus Plonquer
December 18th, 2009 12:07am Report this commentThe problem with our gevernment today is that they are incapable of thinking holistically. They are trying to deal with each problem on its own instead of perhaps using the effects of one problem to solve another as entrepreneurs do.
Global Warming? No problem. Nuke Tehran!
The resulting Global Winter will cool the planet down by 2C. Not one but two problems solved.
Where do I send my invoice?
Ian C
December 18th, 2009 11:17am Report this commentWhatever comes out of Copenhagen it is going to be trashed in the USA. Sen. Inhofe last night on Newsnight said he was going there to tell them that Obama cannot deliver on what he promises. He cannot, Climategate has done for that and the EPA will be forced to review what it is currently threatening. The lawyers in the US are going to have a massive 'pay-decade' fighting anything Obama wants.
Read today's WSJ on the state of 'peer review' in Climate Science. The game is over. The fight begins. That means we will do nothing whatever the hot air. Rightly.
As this report highights we are well over taxed on green taxes anyway. And since when was tax a solution to anything?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704398304574598230426037244.html?mod=djemITP
2trueblue
December 18th, 2009 11:51am Report this commentNo joined up thinking has certainly been the trade mark of Labour. Ideas and initiatives have been abundant over the past 13yrs and few of them should have seen the light of day. This whole thing is about raising more funds and all governments are right in there. It is depressing. There has been no personal committment made by any of these people, they have all travelled in style to these janborees and it is not impressive that none of them can see that they must lead by example. They are so remooved from the true reality of living as the majority of us do, and they also do not care.
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