Our enemy is not global warming. In Britain, people are dying of the cold

Fanciful predictions of all the deaths that will result from climate change, decades into the future, are regularly thrown into public debate. Less attention has been given to a real statistic from the here and now, released by the Office of National Statistics this week, which shows the effects of one of the policies designed to tackle climate change: high energy prices. It emerged this week that there were 31,000 ‘excess’ deaths in England and Wales last winter, almost a third more than the previous year. Almost all were, in effect, British pensioners who died of the cold. It’s odd: Britain is a rich country with a massive welfare state — and we know how to heat and insulate houses. We also send millions away in overseas aid. Yet somehow we have failed to find a way to stop our own people dying of the cold. Each winter, we tolerate a death toll which runs into the tens of thousands. Worse, we seem to have become inured to it. The 2003 heatwave was blamed for 2,000 deaths, and treated as a national emergency. Sir David King, then chief scientific officer, declared that this meant climate change was ‘more serious even than the threat of terrorism’. Since then, some 280,000 Brits have died from the cold and barely 10,000 from the heat. We have been focusing on the wrong enemy. Yet still the government seems little bothered by the link between green levies, which are already jacking up our heating bills, and rising winter deaths. Whenever the Climate Change Secretary is presented with the charge that climate levies are hurting the poor he always makes the same claim: that one of the main roles of the levies is to subsidise home insulation schemes for low-earners, and that by doing so their energy bills will actually fall.