It is clear from the public debate that the citizenry has no idea of the scale of the task to achieve a net zero emissions economy in 30 years, writes Professor Michael Kelly in a recent report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Opinion polls indicate that few are willing, let alone able, to pay more than very modest sums, he states, and nothing like the £100,000 plus per household identified by his report.
But the costs do not end there. The former Prince Philip Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge went on to note that if Europe and North America are to pay for the rest of the world’s Net Zero activities, the cost for each U.K. household could rise to £450,000, and £13 trillion for the whole U.K. Unsurprisingly, Professor Kelly feels this is a “fantasy in practical terms”.
These costs are rarely mentioned. The Paris Climate Agreement seeks to mobilise $100 billion a year from developed countries to fund green projects across the globe. Few countries in the developing world specify their demands for hard cash in public, but when they do, the amounts sought are eye watering. The small Caribbean island of Grenada, with a population of 112,000 people, recently informed the United Nations that it would like $1 billion up to 2030.
Grenada is just one of many countries seeking to profit from the largesse on offer at countless international climate meetings. But in Kelly’s view, the project is being attempted without any kind of roadmap. “The project is therefore more likely than not to veer in the direction of the historical Tower of Babel,” he suggests.
Professor Kelly’s figures will shock those who rely on the advice of the Government’s own Climate Change Committee (CCC). In its 2020 Sixth Carbon Budget it reduced the cost of Net Zero from 1-2% of UK GDP to under 1%. By 2030, the annual cost will be £32 billion a year, compared with £10 billion in 2020. The CCC said the “low costs for the transformation” were due to new clean technologies being more efficient. An annual cost of £32 billion a year equates to just over £1,000 per household, orders of magnitude below Kelly’s estimates. The CCC says people can play their part by eating less meat, curbing flying, driving less and installing low carbon heating.
So back in the real world, let us look at this last suggestion. The CCC claims that it will cost £10,000 to insulate a home and install a heat pump system. Kelly is more realistic. Detailing his own practical experience as Chief Scientific Advisor to the then Department for Communities and Local Government in 2009, he recalled a £17 million retrofit of 100 social houses. Knowing the actual costs involved, Kelly scales up to a figure of £4 trillion to insulate and install heat pumps in 26 million U.K. homes. Allowing for economies of scale, but also including another 5.5 million non-domestic properties, he arrives at a total refit bill of £3 trillion. Installing a heat pump and insulating a house is likely to cost £65,000, nowhere near the ludicrously low figure promoted to the general public by the CCC.
The CCC is right, however, about Net Zero knocking flying on the head. At present the amount of battery storage needed to contain the energy for a jumbo jet crossing the Atlantic weighs six times the maximum cargo that a jet can carry. Even assuming 50 more years of battery improvement at the rate of recent years, a jet would only be able to fly without any cargo.
Under Net Zero, Kelly estimates that the electricity grid would need to be 2.7 times bigger in 2050 than today. This involves adding capacity at eight times the rate it has been added over the last 30 years, including all renewables. In addition there will be a need to rewire homes, streets and local substations to carry the extra current. Kelly estimates a cost of £700 billion for this work. Add in the cost of upgrading power lines and it is estimated that the cost for the National Grid of reaching Net Zero by 2050 is £900 billion or nearly £1 trillion.
The cost of the new electricity generating capacity is said to be £500 billion, making a total of over £4 trillion, if the costs of agriculture and rail, sea and air transport are ignored. The headline figure is reduced to £3 trillion by allowing for further economies of scale, and this is equivalent to over £100,000 for every household in the U.K.
But money is only part of the picture. To complete the Net Zero project will also require huge increases in skilled workers. Kelly estimates a doubling of electrical engineers and a workforce of around 500,000 people to retrofit houses. In addition, vast quantities of materials will be needed for wind turbines, solar panels and electric car batteries. Kelly notes that the extraction of oil and gas only has a small impact on the earth’s surface, compared with the opencast mining of the minerals used in wind turbines and solar farms. Meanwhile, if the U.K. converted to electric cars overnight, it would require 207,000 tonnes of cobalt – almost double the annual global production. Kelly notes that “unregulated and child labour is implicated in much mining of cobalt”.
In summary, Professor Kelly writes:
With extra costs comfortably in excess of £3 trillion, a dedicated and skilled workforce, 70% that of the NHS, and key strategic materials demanded at many times the supply rates that prevail today, and all for no measurable attributable change in the global climate, the mitigation of climate change via a net-zero-emissions U.K. economy in 2050 is an extremely difficult ask. Without a command economy, the target will certainly not be met.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Par for the course from a load of professional arse-sitters, spouters and generalised planet savers, educated in subjects specialising in the latest fashionable drivel.
Incapable of doing a real job, a serious day’s work or understanding the principles of physics.
Keep up the good work, Mr Pile. In the long run, physics will prevail over fallacy and folly. Just a matter of when.
Reading your comment Art, it just occurred to me that Rayner is emblematic of the malaise afflicting our ‘governing’ party. Your three points in order: 1. She isn’t educated at all. 2.She’s never tried a ‘real job’ having been steeped in Trade Union lore prior to local government, then politics. 3.I doubt she could spell physics. ‘Room for improvement.’ as her end of term report might read would be a colossal understatement.
Ms Nobrayner is a bit of an outlier among the spouting classes. Having said that, anecdotally the two working people currently re-roofing our house have worked it all out for themselves. Work doesn’t get much more real, or educational, than being up on a roof at 8.15 in a cold, frosty February sunrise.
Been there, got the tee-shirt. Re-roofed our 8m x 5m barn in Yorkshire 40 years ago. Nothing like jumping in at the deep end. Never again!
I am not convinced it has much to do with understanding of physics. I know little about physics. There are useful idiots who find comfort in the religion of signalling their virtue, and there are others who just want to lord it over everybody and have cottoned on to “climate change” (or “pandemics”) as a good way to do that.
You know more about physics than you give yourself credit for. Less about O- and A-levels, more about grasping reality. Most career politicians don’t get that – witness Miliband (who has a physics A-level…).
Agreed on motivations – in my experience, one half of people revel in telling the other half what to do. The other half just wants both halves to work it out for themselves. Controllers vs responders, chalk and cheese mindsets.
Each to their own, live and let live. You see what you see, I see what I see, best we can do is each say what we’ve seen and discuss from there.
Some people seem to want to be told what to do.
As far as physics goes, I think it’s a case of doublethink or “there’s none so deaf as those that refuse to listen”.
Oh, I expect you’re right for too many of the people too much of the time. Bring up Feynman and Popper and watch eyes glaze over. Cue Dietrich Boenhoeffer on stupidity…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc
“…Against stupidity we are defenceless. The stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.”
I don’t think using the word “stupidity” in that way is overly useful. I think most people understand “stupid” in the sense of being intellectually challenged, inarticulate, incapable of higher order reasoning. If “stupid” people “go on the attack” then they are malicious. I know malicious stupid people and highly moral ones.
Let’s not get too hung up on a single word. I’m assuming Boenhoeffer used it in good faith in the circumstance of the time he was up against.
I’m sure he was wiser and certainly more courageous than I am.
We’re now fully in the grip of a socialist, central planning regime.
It’s been advancing for 100 years but now all the major and essential elements of our economy are for all intents and purposes centrally planned.
The remaining pockets of free market are in small enterprises. Sandwich shops, bits of the tech industry, basically the scraps.
Indeed. If memory of O-level history serves right, all those canals, railways and Victorian sewers had little to do with the governments of the time, and everything to do with men with spades and civil engineers of genius.
Credit where credit’s due, government did rule the waves, abolish slavery and foster civil engineering on foreign soil (but gets little historic thanks for it from present day arse-sitting and spouting classes).
Basically all the bits that are being forced out of business by the blob/govt.
You could mage an argument that the last 50 years or so of history have all been ‘about oil’. As one philosopher proposed ‘things’ change into their opposites over time… so perhaps the current history being formed is about ‘fake oil’. Oil you don’t extract and use to fuel (pun) the economy and standard of living.
Can we borrow Elon Musk
What happens in America never stays in America.
A large number of exceptionally fat backsides in the climate change/green energy taxpayer rip off business will be emaciated shadows of their former selves by 2015….
Bring it on.
Government Hates Wealth Creation
This one does – but of course they do, because they are socialists.
Socialism leads to denial of reality, poverty, economic collapse, totalitarianism, famine and death. History abounds with examples.
Socialism. Always. Fails.
“Labour’s manifesto promise to “create new high-quality jobs, working with business and trade unions, as we manage the transition””
Do governments create jobs? Don’t “jobs” arise because people want their needs fulfilled? Didn’t people do work thousands of years before we had “governments”?
Government create non-jobs that the private sector won’t because they see no value in them. The secret of the success of Donald and Elon is that they are successful businessmen and understand value for money. Governments can destroy jobs and 100 days on from the worst budget in history from probably our worst Chancellor this one is doing just that. With inflation about to rise again after the brief blip in December, the Bank of England has been forced to gamble in reducing the interest rate to prop up the failing economy. I see far too much optimism in rate reductions for this year. And don’t expect to see your mortgage rate come down as they are driven by 10 year bond rates.
100%
Yesterday is a good illustration of the variability of renewable power. At the start of the day wind was producing 14GW, by the following midnight it had dropped to just 4GW. Try coping for that sort of variation without reliable, dispatchable energy
January is obviously a critcal month in UK. The percentage graph from Gridwatch shows nuclear as grey, gas as dull orange and wind as pale blue.
PS You can see how pathetic solar is by the little flashes of yellow where the sun broke through.
It’s worth mentioning that the chart is %age of power generated. The nuclear power generated does not peak each night – it continues at the same level of power but represents a larger percentage because less is generated/required overnight.
On the other hand, solar…
Right now CCGT (gas turbines) contributing 54.46% towards our 42.91 GW demand today in spite of a glorious clear sunny February day in East Yorkshire (solar 6.43%).
Only slightly on topic, I fell about laughing this morning watching the article about vegan pets on GBNews. The woman from PETA (not British by the way), said that vegan foods for dogs is readily available, nutritious and reduces your dog’s carbon footprint. She then held up a tin consisting mainly of jack fruit. This comes from tropical countries, so massive food miles and carbon footprint and costs about £3.00 per 400g tin. Pedigree chum costs £1.00 per tin. What planet do these idiots come from?
You’re so right. And did you see the item on dog meat ‘made in the lab’ (for the lab??) guaranteed to reduce your dog’s carbon footprint!