Echoing the recent shameful episode in the European Court of Human Rights, last week, the High Court ruled that the U.K. Government’s carbon reduction targets were insufficient to comply with the ‘Net Zero Strategy’, as set out by the Government in 2021, and which it is legally obliged to observe as per the Climate Change Act 2008. In his judgement, Mr Justice Sheldon upheld four out of five complaints brought by a team of lawfare activists in what they claim is a “humiliating” defeat for the Government. While it remains to be seen how this ruling will play out either in policy or in its formulation, it nonetheless marks yet another milestone in Britain’s departure from democracy and towards post-industrial immiseration. It is the public, not the Government, who have been humiliated by climate lawfare.
The Judicial Review was brought – or simply bought – by the bitter EU-referendum Remain hold-outs the Good Law Project, as well as Friends of the Earth (FoE) and green lawfare activists ClientEarth. These organisations can afford expensive litigation because they have incomes of £5 million, £13 million, and £31 million respectively – the latter two styled as ‘charities’, despite this obvious political intervention. And this is a problem for anyone claiming that such cases are David-vs-Goliath battles. The British and International branches of FoE, for instance, are well-funded by eco-billionaires and governments. And the same bodies – such as the European Climate Foundation and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (both under the control of Sir Christopher Hohn), Michael Bloomberg and Jeremy Grantham – fund ClientEarth, too.
Over the five years to the end of 2022, the U.K. Government made grants of £5 million to ClientEarth. And those grants put to bed the notion that any disagreement exists between the Government and these billionaire lobbying outfits. Why would a government fund an organisation that sought its humiliation in the courts if it wasn’t seeking to be humiliated? In reality, it helps the Government’s to be seemingly required by the courts to impose legislation on the public, rather than to be perceived as completely indifferent to the public’s concerns in its adherence to its increasingly alarmist policy agenda.
This is a problem that was anticipated before the Climate Change Act was even passed. In debate, Peter Lilley, then an MP, told Parliament, and reiterated in an opinion piece for the BBC, that “the sole effect of enshrining the targets in statute will be to open government policies to judicial review” and that “empowering judges to prescribe additional measures costing billions of pounds, without being accountable to the electorate, is a recipe for huge additional costs”. Sixteen years later, Lilley has been proven right.
MPs chose in 2008 to put policymaking beyond democratic control. And again in 2019, they doubled down by increasing the emissions reduction target from 80% to Net Zero by 2050. These targets are now legally binding on any future government, no matter how catastrophic the economic consequences. All parties of government since the 2000s have chosen this path, and all opposition parties, too, have supported those governments in upholding the Act, rather than recognising the policy failures it has led to and the burden they have imposed on businesses and households. MPs seem entirely untroubled by the fact that they have surrendered their decision-making power to half a dozen green billionaires.
As sure as the maxim the law is an ass, courts are invariably immune to sense or reason when the law itself requires the suspension of both sense and reason. The law requiring U.K. governments to reduce CO2 emissions takes no account of the economic, technical, or political feasibility of the targets, yet the law binds the government.
As has been pointed out previously on the Daily Sceptic, it is manifestly and necessarily the case that no government or research organisation knows how to achieve Net Zero, because the plans to deliver it have never been tested and are no better than science fiction, if not sheer fantasy. A law could be passed tomorrow requiring governments to enact policies that enable half of the population to dance on the Moon by the year 2030. But that date will come and go without a single lunar tango. No number of Judicial Reviews brought by politically-driven charities will change the realities faced by policymakers.
Ironically, it is the practical infeasibility of the Government’s Net Zero policies that form the basis of the complaint. At the centre of the complainants’ case are tables published in the Government’s Carbon Budget Delivery Plan (from page 23, with further tables published here), which summarise the proposed solutions available to the government. These tables include estimates of the risk of those policies’ failures, and the complainants argue that Grant Shapps, the Secretary of State at the time of their complaint who was responsible for achieving the targets set out by another minister in 2021, failed to acknowledge the risk of failure. What does this mean? It means that by 2037, the Government’s policies may have only yielded 95% of the emissions-reduction required by the Sixth Carbon Budget established by the Climate Change Committee. Oh, the humanity!
Mr Justice Sheldon “explains”:
It is not possible to ascertain from the materials presented to the Secretary of State which of the proposals and policies would not be delivered at all, or in full. It was not possible, therefore, for the Secretary of State to have evaluated for himself the contribution to the overall quantification that each of the proposals and policies was likely to make, bearing in mind that this evaluation had to be made by the Secretary of State personally: he could not simply rely on the opinions of his officials.
In other words, Grant Shapps did not have a crystal ball, and future policymaking will now require a greater degree of certainty than can reasonably be achieved. But all Net Zero policies face risks of failure, and so the complaint and the judgement are both trivially true and truly trivial.
For example, summing up his evidence to the judicial review, recently-departed Chair of the Climate Change Committee, John Gummer, restyled as Lord Deben, told Friends of the Earth that: “The Government is relying on everything going to plan with no delays or unforeseen circumstances, and on technologies which have either not been tested or indeed on which testing has not even started.” But exactly the same criticism can be levelled at the Climate Change Committee’s own advice to Parliament and the Secretary of State on reaching Net Zero in 2019, which warned that “sixty per cent of the emissions reduction in our scenarios involve some societal or behavioural changes”. The following year, the CCC’s Sixth Carbon Budget report, under Gummer’s instruction, projected a policy pathway that would yield a “thirty five per cent reduction in all meat and dairy by 2050”. What if the public do not wish to have their behaviour altered by these pompous climate commissars and begin to kick against them?
And the CCC makes similarly absurd economic and technological assumptions. “U.K. low-carbon investment each year will have to increase from around £10 billion in 2020 to around £50 billion by 2030,” it declares. Offshore wind will be producing power costing £43 per megawatt hour (MWh) by 2035, it predicts, whereas the Government recently increased the Administrative Strike Price of offshore wind to £101 (£73 in 2012 prices) following the failure to receive any bids in the Contract for Difference Auction in 2023. Hydrogen will store power and heat homes for a mere £37/MWh – £6 less than the electricity required to produce it. Any remaining emissions will be mopped up by Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage for a mere £240 per tonne of CO2 – which implies DACCS systems running on electricity that costs less than a penny per kWh. Needless to say, these prices are fantasies, and as I pointed out last week here, the technologies either don’t exist or are unproven.
The reasoning of the complainants and the judge, and the expert witnesses, appears to be entirely specious. And the grievance thus appears to be that the Secretary of State, even while trying to advance the Net Zero agenda, spoke out of turn. The Government’s mildest possible U-turns in the face of political, economic and technological reality has upset the green blob and the CCC, the departing top brass of which seem to be demob-happy and speaking out merely out of bitterness.
If only us ordinary folk had the opportunity to bring a judicial review, such points could be raised against the nonsense the court heard. But as I pointed out in the case of the recent ECHR ruling, raising money is a big barrier when it comes to hiring barristers to represent the public. Groups with a combined income of nearly £50 million a year can raise the cash for one judicial review after another without breaking a sweat, thanks to green billionaires such as Sir Christopher Hohn, who has $64.8 million committed to litigation. Indeed, such a barrier to democratic decision making seems to be the point of the Climate Change Act – it’s a feature, not a bug. No group representing the public at large has any hope of raising such funds.
MPs don’t seem to have understood what they have done. And until they develop the sense required to understand and undo this Blairist abomination, there is little point in their sitting in the House of Commons: they have surrendered policymaking to the climate lobby.
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.