Chris Stark, the outgoing Chief Executive of the U.K. Climate Change Committee (CCC), is demob-happy. In a number of interviews, the highly-paid civil servant has criticised the Prime Minister for seemingly faltering in his commitment to Net Zero. This unguarded criticism is unusual in itself, unwittingly highlighting, rather than seeking to resolve, the increasing tensions between green ideological ambition and political reality. But it is Stark’s curious framing of the problems apparently holding climate policy back that is most revealing of the growing democratic deficit. The only things now sustaining the green agenda are the political establishment’s intransigence and sense of entitlement. And that increases the risk of catastrophic policy failure.
The CCC is a troubled organisation. Its former Chairman, pka John Gummer, now Lord Deben, left his role last year, and since then political disagreements between Westminster and the devolved governments have prevented the appointment of a permanent successor. Now, the CCC’s Chief Executive’s chair is also empty, and whoever steps into it has a much bigger set of problems to face than his or her predecessor.
This is all the more an irony because the CCC itself was summoned into existence by the Climate Change Act 2008 (CCA), which was the act not just of the dying days of the last Labour Government but also the expression of the cross-party consensus on climate change. MPs didn’t believe that they or their successors were able or should be free to represent their constituencies on matters of climate policies, and so only an ‘independent’ panel of experts – a quango, or Non-Departmental Statutory Body – would be able to set the terms of climate and energy policy, which the Act put beyond democratic control. Accordingly, the CCC has since its inception set the U.K.’s Carbon Budget. Now, however, the quarrelsome devolved parliaments – which were also created to bring all parts of Britain into harmonious consensus – and a growing sense of the impossibility of Net Zero makes it hard to fill the current vacancies. The pay is good, but you’d have to be daft to accept such a poisoned chalice. The climate agenda is literally out of control.
According to Stark in an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, the problem began last year when “Sunak delayed a ban on new petrol and diesel cars, and weakened targets on phasing out gas boilers”. However, as I argued at the time, the problem with this claim is that Sunak’s interventions were the smallest possible dampener on the policy agenda – a mild tapping of the brakes and nothing like a U-turn. The U.K.’s phasing out of petrol and diesel cars was, and still is, a target which reduces the proportion of internal combustion engine cars sold each year in stages. The change merely extended the last phase of this abolition from 2030 to 2035. By 2030, 80% of new cars sold will have to be EVs. Similarly, the 2035 ban on sales of new domestic gas boilers is largely intact, save for exemptions for low-income households. And properties that aren’t connected to the gas grid will not be required to shift to electric heating until 2035, because, as many argued, the previous target of 2026 was ‘premature’.
In other words, Sunak was attempting to save Net Zero, not depart from it. EV sales, for example, are rising only because of absurdly generous tax breaks given to well-off middle-class people, and have no chance of reaching 100% by 2030 without causing immense problems, as well as sacrificing a great deal more of the British and European car industry to China – a problem now acknowledged across the continent. Extending the target by five years was the only option available to the Government. And despite Sunak’s slightest possible dilution of the policy target, firms such as Vauxhall are now citing Net Zero, and the lack of consumer interest in EVs, as reasons for threatening to leave the U.K.
But Stark (who has done as much as anyone to salt the earth for his successor) attempts to catastrophise about Sunak’s decision in much the same way that civil servants have dramatised recent senior politicians’ decisions. “The diplomatic impact of that has been immense,” says Stark. “The overall message that other parts of the world took from it is that the U.K. is less ambitious on climate than it once was.”
This seems unlikely, and the plight of the U.K.’s poor climate diplomats facing the fallout from Sunak’s five-year extension should raise 67 million shrugs, if it is worthy of any attention at all. Diplomacy was not Stark’s or the CCC’s brief, and the notion of the PM derailing the global climate agenda by slightly undermining the world’s perception of the U.K. as a climate champion is only going to upset green wonks and the BBC and Guardian’s ideological hacks, not the hoi polloi.
In a subsequent interview with the Guardian, Stark’s attempt to rescue climate policy from inevitable watering down grew more obviously desperate. “Net Zero has definitely become a slogan that I feel occasionally is now unhelpful, because it’s so associated with the campaigns against it,” he told Fiona Harvey. “It’s the culture warriors who have really taken against it.”
It seems to be a tactic of people who believe in the genetic transfer of historical guilt and the interchangeability of biological sex – among other bizarre, unscientific things – to claim that anyone who disagrees with them, however reasonably, is waging a ‘culture war’. In this view, if you refuse to take a knee, or believe that gender-confused children ought not to be dispatched on irreversible medical pathways, then you are the dangerous activist. And the greens have embraced this tactic, believing that sceptics of climate science, and more pertinently climate policies, have simply joined the ranks of the ‘culture warriors’.
What the defenders of the radical progressive policies mean by ‘culture war’ is that they no longer have everything their own way. There used to be a cross-party consensus and widespread public support for our membership of the EU, various woke social policies and on the need to reduce carbon emissions. But the consensus has broken down and people who no longer have the ‘correct’ opinions on these issues are, understandably, seeking representation for their views. They’re not ‘culture warriors’.
Take the green agenda. The consequence of the abolition of petrol and diesel cars is not merely limiting consumer choice, but the restriction of mobility through price and technological limitation. The phasing out of the domestic gas boiler has an effect far beyond mere lifestyle – it requires a household to find many thousands of pounds, perhaps tens of thousands, to pay for a heat pump. And by seeking to prioritise the reduction of carbon emissions over maximising GDP, the successive U.K. Governments, the Treasury and the Bank of England, in cahoots with other central banks, have given enormous powers to financial institutions to regulate the economy and business activity via ESG, leading to a massive misallocation of resources, pushing prices up, with the main (perhaps sole) beneficiaries being green billionaires.
Stark, of course, will never have heard such criticisms. As far as he’s concerned, the prices of things are mere arbitrary numbers that can simply be controlled by yet another policy intervention to disguise yesteryear’s policy failures. Life is sweet when you’re a senior civil servant on a £400,000 package and your career is protected from markets and political whims. So what if energy prices double and double again, when you earn more than 10 times the national average? But such protection from reality means isolation from reality, too. His waving away critics as mere ‘culture warriors’ reveals that he – and the fawning journalists that surround him – lack even the vocabulary to understand criticism. Establishment hacks simply have no other term with which to explain the phenomenon of people disagreeing with them. It’s called democracy, Chris.
So if not a ‘culture war’, what is the right term for the divisions within society that are growing up around the climate agenda? I believe the correct term is ‘civil war’. Net Zero requires intensely political transformations of society – as radical as the changes sought by the early 20th century’s ideological movements. Net Zero requires the transformation of the relationship between the individual and the state. It requires the complete reorganisation of the economy. And it requires new powers to be created and put beyond democratic control.
It may not be a ‘hot’ civil war – or not yet. But our intransigent and chaotic political class seem not to have registered the possibility of their failure and have taken for granted our willingness to accept our immiseration ‘to save the planet’ without question or challenge. Much like many a military blunder, armies of wonks like Stark have no real idea about how to achieve Net Zero, nor what the costs and consequences of failure are, but will not be swayed from the agenda. Critics can just be written off as ‘deniers’ and ‘culture warriors’.
Under Chris Stark’s tenure, the CCC has lied, made stuff up, hidden its calculations from scrutiny and based its feasibility studies of the U.K.’s pathway to Net Zero on technologies that do not exist or have not been proven to be economically viable. And this was made possible by Parliament’s dereliction of its duty to scrutinise legislation and represent the public’s interests, and its desire to delegate difficult decisions to an unaccountable technocracy. Moreover, as Andrew Neil pointed out this week, this radical dismantling of democracy came with very little comment from the news media.
If the civil war is not yet apparent, it is because its battle fronts are not barricades, but remote agencies and lofty courts and financial markets. Their assaults on our freedom, wealth and ways of life are unannounced and greeted joyfully by journalists, while green activists protest that they’re not going nearly far enough. Our public institutions are captured and turned against us by legislation and legal precedent. Not by guns and bombs, of course, but the difference is merely one of rate: the difference between the speeds of combustion and metabolism. Either way, we get burned or eaten. Stark has quit his job at the CCC just as the reality of the Net Zero agenda has been made plain. This is a war of some kind, and it is bound to get hotter until politicians put the climate agenda to a full and proper democratic contest.
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On the face of it, putting big decisions in the hands of “unbiased” “experts” rather than politicians might seem appealing – politicians are not and cannot be “experts” in everything and they are short-termist and self-serving. But the problem is that all big decisions are political because they inevitably involve tradeoffs that only elected, accountable politicians are in a position to take into account. Whatever panel of “experts” you have in some silo or other will just blindly pursue an agenda that suits them and bugger everyone else.
Not only that, but “experts” themselves are both political and ideological animals. It’s predictable what kind of policies you’ll get if climatologists are put in charge of energy, Neo-darwinians are put in charge of biology education, Marxist educationalists are put in charge of religious studies, or sex-change practitioners put in charge of gender dysphoria policies.
It’s the adage that “advisors advise, ministers decide”
However as was demonstrated in COVID there’s no recourse against the advisors that give “questionable” (or completely false) advice or information to ministers
Any minister saying “it’s not my fault, the experts told me to do this” is not doing his duty
Sorry but I don’t entirely agree. As you said above ministers can’t be experts in everything.
It makes sense when needed that they take advice from experts in the relevant fields.
However my obvious example would be the second COVID lockdown announced on the Saturday night and by Sunday morning it’d been demonstrated by endless other experts that the information shown to the government/public was completely wrong to a scale beyond a reasonable allowance.
That’s the point Witty, Vallance and JVT should’ve been dismissed (and likely faced formal investigation) and their advice and ministers sought new advisors
I’m not saying ministers should not use experts, or that they don’t need them, but they need to own the decisions because the decisions are political.
I think we’re going past each other…
I completely agree ministers need to make “the decisions”.
However they need to make the decisions (when it’s not something they know about) based on appropriate advice..
Whilst they then “own the decisions,” the advisors also need to “own the advice” those decisions were based on
I agree – the advice should ideally be accurate and given in good faith (but it possibly won’t be). In the case of “covid”, I think the government looked quite happy to follow what the “experts” were saying. We may never find out exactly whose hand was up whose backside in all of those relationships, both nationally and globally.
Do you blame the government for following the advice? None of them had medical experience and we were in a scenario none of us lived through.
If they’d ignored it and COVID been as bad as the “experts” warned I fully expect the government would be facing criminal investigations for misconduct in a public office.
This is why it’s essential the advisors are held accountable to give future governments cover to ignore them.
Edited as posted by mistake before finished
“Do you blame the government for following the advice?”
Absolutely. Lockdowns are always wrong. It was obvious this wasn’t a deadly pandemic that was a societal level threat. If such a pandemic ever occurred, people would lock themselves down voluntarily.
You’ve just contradicted yourself with the lockdown comment…
However that’s not what the advisors were saying (that it wasn’t a serious risk) because it was a “new” variant the old rules didn’t apply…
That’s why when lockdown 2 was shown to be wrong the advisors should’ve been dismissed and new ones brought in to provide fresh advice and cover to ministers to go against the previously issued advice.
How have I contradicted myself?
Saying lockdown is always wrong and then saying later that if it was a serious people would lockdown voluntarily.
I thought it was obvious that I meant imposing lockdowns is wrong, but I guess it wasn’t.
To be clear – imposing lockdowns is always wrong, and if the emergency was real people would voluntarily behave in a way that preserved life.
Sorry I went out and the day has ran away from me.
I still think you’re contradicting yourself.
We have laws in place to protect people from the actions of others who don’t behave in a way to preserve life.
On your basis that if it was serious enough people would lockdown voluntarily you have to accept that it right for the government to enforce it?
Where I think we agree is this was NOT a situation that required that.
Where I think we then differ is where you’re happy just to blame the politicians for the decisions made, I want the advisors/civil service personnel held fully accountable for the advice they issued on which the decisions were made
Oh I would love to see everyone involved held accountable. All somewhat academic as it won’t happen.
The “voluntary self isolation” example is somewhat academic. I don’t believe that it’s very practical to mitigate a “pandemic” in such a way. Anyway my starting position is that the government should not have any special powers in an “emergency” – they will get abused.
But the ‘experts’ contradicted themselves. First they told the truth that it was mostly a problem for the elderly, and herd immunity is the way to go, then on a dime they started the fear porn whilst at the same time, downgrading Covid to medium HCID. (that was to avoid giving people HQC). As with masks, one minute they are next to useless, next we must all wear them. Fauci did the same in US.
It wasn’t a problem for the elderly, either, just for people who were already so seriously frail that they might succumb to a pneumonia. From March 2020 until some time in 2022, what used to be called death because of natural causes was renamed to COVID death and it was wrongly claimed that these would be avoidable if the right kind of pandemic xiqu was played by everyone.
Of course, no two ‘pandemic experts’ (we really had a pandemic of these) agreed what precisely the right kind of pandemic xiqu was and – to complicate matters further – all kinds of people with a chip on their shoulder jumped onto the bandwagon as soon as they had figured out that their xiqu was really a pandemic xiqu, too. The outcome was that avid teetotalers like Mark Drakeford and Devi Sridhar suddenly had a license to terrorise the hospitality industry and abolish almost all kinds of social and cultural events where people would “drink alcohol”.
Illustrative example: Street fireworks on new years eve are a German tradition some people are very much opposed to. In 2020, they were outright banned “because of COVID”. One year of mad repeat vaxxing and persecution of the unvaccinated later, they were again banned. This time, the justification was that they’d cause accidents A&E would need to deal with and as A&E was already “under extreme pressure because of COVID¹”, street fireworks obviously couldn’t be allowed to take place.
¹ Seem neither mad repeat vaxxing nor persecution of the unvaccinated had helped much wrt “COVID” supposedly still causing people to stream into A&E and die shortly thereafter in uncountable numbers².
² To be interpreteted literally: They couldn’t be counted because they weren’t doing this.
Agreed.
That’s why I want them held to account for the advice they gave…
I’m going to make a generalisation here which hopefully won’t offend anyone and I apologise in advance to anyone who is.
I think it’s reasonable to assume that many of us on here would be referred to as loners or at least below average sized friendship groups. Naturally suspicious of authority and a low tolerance for people who cause drama or just want to “go with the flow” for an easy life.
That doesn’t describe politicians. (Another day I’ll debate the standard of them and our role in that).
Until then you have people who are concerned about being popular. Many seem to have a questionable ability to think on their feet and also an inability to critique information presented to them.
This leaves them vulnerable to being led by advisors who might have other potential interests of their own.
Describes me
I’m sociable and have a very large number of acquaintances – but only a very small number of people I consider friends. I’m quite happy with my own company and have no patience with drama queens.
There was NO pandemic.
And there was nothing in the Public Health Act 1984 that endorsed Lockdowns. It was an abuse of the Act as Peter Hitchens said many times in 2020 for those who cared to listen.
Yup. Sumption said that too. They should have used the Civil Contingencies Act but that required more parliamentary scrutiny
The Government downgraded Covid to a Low Consequence Infectious Disease on 19 March …. five days before the first lockdown …. because they had data which showed it would have a low mortality rate and they knew it was only the very elderly/frail and those with serious co-morbidities who were at risk.
The experts had told them it wasn’t serious ….. so why did they massively over-react?
I think they were ordered to …. and I think it was the American military who did the ordering.
Ministers should take advice from experts …. but from a range of experts, not one cohort who are all singing from the same hymn sheet – and being funded by the same source.
They are supposed to challenge …. not meekly acquiesce.
And therein lies the rub. A single point of reference for advice is not a sound basis for decision making, it is an indirect dictatorship. Whereas good decisions should have involved some form of a syllogism, a logical deduction formed from the analysis of the major and minor premises, to form a logical conclusion.
Everything we hear is an opinion, and not a fact, everything we see is a perspective, not the truth. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.
When governments “follow the science” they can then blame “science” for their failed policies. But it was government in the first place that created the situation where all manner of scientists, experts and modellers were clamouring for the massive increase in funding that was available as government sought the excuses for policies they had already wanted to implement. If government want to pay huge sums of money for experts to look for purple horses, then those experts are going to accept that money and report back that their studies are “not inconsistent with there being purple horses” etc etc. —–Who pays the piper calls the tune. And when it comes to climate change, it is government who call it. The government does not “follow the science”. The science follows the government.
There is no such thing as an unbiased expert – they have rank, status, privilege, authority and position to maintain.
Indeed, which is why the buck has to stop with politicians. If experts are found to be utterly incompetent or not acting in good faith or not following orders, they should be sacked, otherwise their advice should be taken with a healthy dose of scepticism and if possible alternative views sought.
They also have employers who pay their wages and help them pay their mortgage and feed their family. It is hard to get a man to be unbiased when his salary depends on being biased.
To be able to so, there need to be experts to begin with. As nobody who doesn’t behave as if he was convinced that the sole driver of climate change on earth is CO₂ emissions caused by burning stuff in the white parts of the world (ie, neither in China nor in India) will be able to get an academic degree in anything from the mainstream universities located there, climate experts simply don’t exist, only expert Net Zero activists. Even if this was otherwise, a committee tasked with implementing Net Zero in the UK obviously wouldn’t ever include them.
Judging from what I’ve learnt about this so far, the former New Labour governments have transferred control for all of their long-term policies to quangos created for this purpose and thus, ensured that neither experts nor politicians can easily interfere with them. And that’s the problem here.
Oh yes most of these experts are not acting in good faith
Ben nails it as ever!
I like this article and I like the bit about Sunak knocking back the phasing out of petrol diesel cars and gas boilers not because he was having doubts about Net Zero but because he was actually trying to “save it” from the real World coming up closer in his rear view mirror. Reality has a very nasty habit of biting us in the behind and Net Zero policies that took no account of cost or viability back in 2019 where the policy was simply waved through with no debate and no vote are going to bite harder than all the banned Bully dogs put together. Because it is a policy out of the ideological Alice in Wonderland that ignores and treats the populace with utter contempt, preferring to pander to the UN and WEF global government aspirations that seeks to control the worlds wealth and resources, while pretending what they are doing is all about the climate and the temperature. ——–The “civil war” that Ben Pile speaks off will come when (a) living standards drop to unacceptable levels, as is inevitable when affordable reliable energy gets replaced with unaffordable unreliable energy, and (b) When people wake up in much greater numbers to the fact there is no evidence for a climate crisis, and it is a purely manufactured one.
Ben just a big thank you for all that you do.
“…the increasing tensions between green ideological ambition and
politicalreality.”They declared war on ordinary people actually.
Stealing our money through green taxes, our freedom to drive, fly and heat our homes. Massive taxation and penalties on businesses who pay a fortune for energy, all passed on to consumers. Banning the fantastic gas resources under our feet whilst importing gas from halfway round the world. Smart meters, heat pumps, e-vehicles imposed.
Carbon Zero is one giant scam to steal our money and freedom.
And all this imposed with no public consultation, debate, mandate.
War has started, so fight them every step of the way.
I have been saying pretty much what you just wrote since Net Zero was waved through in 2019. Also let’s not forget that Net Zero was just an extension of the Climate Change Act of 2008. So they have been stealing our money and Freedom since back then. Net Zero just enables them to steal it harder and faster.
Hear, hear.
Excellent article by Ben Pile, especially his exposure of our politicians betraying democracy by handing over control to “remote agencies” who dictate government policy, and “lofty courts” who challenge and often overturn every decision of our elected representatives in Parliament.
Even when Parliament responds to public outrage over, for example, thousands of horrific dog attacks, the “lofty courts”, often represented by a single judge, allow a single person to launch legal “appeals” to overturn it, as they have just granted one woman obsessed with her bully dog, Sophie Coulthard.
“The Mirror previously launched its Time For Action On Danger Dogs campaign calling for an overhaul to the Dangerous Dogs Act as Brits continued to be seriously injured in vicious dog attacks.”
As with the Green Agenda, discussed here by Ben Pile, the mass invasion of the British Isles by the Third World, vicious dog attacks, and countless other issues, all real decisions have been taken out of the hands of the legislative and executive branches of government, and handed to the judicial branch as “The Final Authority in Everything”.
This is the Globalist Dream of a Global Kritocracy = “Rule By Judges”.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/smoke-mirrors-and-co2-emissions-part-2/
By way of backup here is a data packed article courtesy of Howard Dewhirst at TCW
“The Green Agenda Will Lead to Civil War”. That’s the only way it will be stopped.
The State has a monopoly on violence. Civil War is the result when those who hold narrowly concentrated political power engage that monopoly to impose their will on a population against the interests of that population, and the normal institutional political process is no longer available to change those holding that power or their policies.
The entire State apparatus, party-political, bureaucratic, and interlinked with a like-minded global nexus of interests, cannot be altered by normal democratic process.
It does raise the question: what exactly does the British political establishment think it can achieve by Net Zero? China, India, Russia, other BRICS and the USA when Trump is back in, will follow the Net Zero path to oblivion.
I do like Trump but as Roseanne Barr said, we should not put all our faith in single people whether it’s Trump, Kennedy or anyone else. We must all try to do our bit.
Excellent article Ben. The enormity we are up against is scary. It will probably become worse before reality arrives. Hopefully not too late.
What sort of backhander is Stark to talk such nonsense?
The civil war has already started in London where the blade runners are steadily disabling the ULEZ cameras. The media isn’t reporting it, of course, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
We can stop the Net Zero tyranny: there are far more of us than them and if we just say NO and mean it, the lunacy will stop.
Don’t buy an EV. Don’t get a heat pump. Don’t get a smart meter. Don’t change your diet. Don’t vote for any party which intends imposing Net Zero, whether they’re in the fast or slightly slower lane.
The use of quangos and NGO’s for advice, and policy making is fraught with problems. Allowing unelected people to mandate policies because the Government has committed the country to conform under legislation, is an abdication of duty and responsibility, leading to chaos and corruption.The MHRA is an example of an organisation that receives 87% of its funding from Big Pharma, a conflict of interest that has seen an apparent dereliction of duty to the public. We have over 650 quangos potentially feeding from unelected
masters as well as Government.
The £2 Trillion cost of Net Zero insanity is wide open to vested interests from corporations, civil servants, Governments and anyone else who can get on the gravy train. Accountability appears to have gone out of the window, just as medical ethics disappeared completely years ago.
A secret Canadian RCMP report is warning the federal government that Canada may descend into civil unrest once citizens realize the hopelessness of their economic situation (the report is entitled Whole-of-Government Five-Year Trends for Canada).
I’ve always wondered what the first shot of a civil war might look like. Or indeed if it might ever happen eat all. After all, Theresa May, and others, made no secret of trying to overturn the Brexit vote and were free to do so, unencumbered by opposition legal or illegal. In my book she did everything to deserve to go down in history as the next Bellingham. The funders of hard left climate protestors – like those behind the CCC – are well known and continue to do immense damage with no pushback at all from those who suffer most from their activism. Moreso in the US, where Soros and son wreak wide-scale havoc over major cities with impunity as they fund absurd, lawless district attorneys, migrant and student activism and terrorist organisations like BLM and yet will never pay for what are crimes against humanity. And yet unlike here, there are more guns than people.