The bill for cutting UK emissions of greenhouse gases already stands at well over £100 billion, but what difference has it actually made?
The Government has published the latest annual assessment of the UK’s carbon footprint and the findings suggest that the money spent to date has had little effect. Officials have measured what are known as Consumption Based Emissions, which include emissions embedded in imported goods and services, minus of course those embedded in UK exports.
The figures we normally see are based around territorial emissions, those physically produced within the UK’s border. These say that we have cut GHGs by 55% since 1990. It is these territorial emissions that are targeted in Carbon Budgets. And it is these that must be eliminated by 2050 by law to achieve Net Zero.
But the new figures show that our real emissions have really only fallen by 15% between 1996 and 2023. All that has happened is that we have offshored our emissions, especially to China. According to DEFRA:
Consumption-based GHG emissions associated with imports from China have increased substantially over time, and especially since China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001. These emissions now represent both the largest in terms of absolute tonnages from a single source region in 2023 and the largest percentage increase since 1996. In 2023, emissions embedded in goods and services imported from China were 93 MtCO2e, more than four times as high as in 1996. This means that in 2023, China accounted for
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“Given all of this, why on earth are we proposing to spend hundreds of billions on an impossible dream?”
Which in effect is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
Unless the aim is to transfer wealth from the public purse to the private sector… in which case it’s a great wheeze…
Of course they’re barely cutting emissions, because we barely have any emissions in the first place… 1% of 3% of, apparently just 0.042%, of the atmosphere.
Or, 0.0000126%, if you prefer.
Any claim we’re reducing it with net zero, is most likely a rounding error.
The “cut” in emissions is due to reduced economic activity in the UK, but it is not a cut in fact it is a transfer of emissions to places like China and India.
Yes, there was a story I saw a few days ago, about exporting hundreds of thousands of tyres to India for rendering their constituent parts… and the zero carbon credentials of the infamous Drax, of course, achieved solely by ascribing its carbon footprint entirely to where the wood chip comes from.
What I infer from the graph is that our disposable income is in a downward trajectory – we are getting poorer.
I’m not party political, how can you wholeheartedly believe in and defend a set of policies that were devised by someone else?
I vote with regard to a hierarchy of concerns. I have difficulty recognising what is right or left wing, but less difficulty recognising policies which are kind rather than callous and those that are practical rather than fanciful.
My own comfort relies largely on wealth that I did not help create – the historic exploitation of coal, gas and oil which kick started the industrial revolution.
A by-product of capitalism is surplus wealth which allows investment in future technologies.
If you put a governor on this wealth creation, as is the case with the retail cost of electricity then the result will be no surplus wealth and reduced investment in future technologies.
Nothing is static our prosperity as a country either increases or decreases relative to others. Once you drop behind you are on a downward trajectory and the only way to reverse this trend is by abandoning self imposed constraints, ie the pursuit of the nebulous net zero.
I… Read more »
So that Ed Milliband can bestride the world stage like the colossus that he thinks he is. As opposed to the communism poisoned, ideologically possessed, intellectual midget that reality demonstrates.
And again: during lockdown human emissions fell by 5.4% for the year (NASA), equivalent to the whole of the EU going 100% net zero, and yet the data from the Mauna Loa Observatory showed no sign of it. In fact 2020 showed a particularly high spike of carbon emission from the planet.
Ergo: we make no difference
Similarly post-2008 financial crisis and drop in industrial and therefore C02 output, no noticeable decrease.
The answer to the question in the last sentence is I believe that the end goal is the process, not some outcome. The object of power is power.
“Given all of this, why on earth are we proposing to spend hundreds of billions on an impossible dream?”
Because:
(a) the UN devised the SCAM in order to transfer wealth from the “undeserving West” to deserving Asia and Africa.
(b) Eco Globalists are making a fortune out of it
(c) The Governing Class benefits hugely from it ….. via personal investments and future careers
Question: who do Climate, Covid, and Ukraine all have in common?
Answer: They all involve a massive transfer of funds at the tax payers expense to individuals and corporations. They are all maintained by propagandist government narrative, and any dissenters are treated as heretics.
It was never designed to cut our emissions, it was just to make us poorer.
And easier to control
People aren’t going to give up ‘stuff’ voluntarily. Perhaps this is why successive governments seem to be so keen on pushing the economy to near destruction – only a serious crash in living standards or draconian consumption rationing could bring this down.
Given 99.99% of all medicines and pharmaceuticals are made from fossil fuels, I think it will be a serious crash in living.
And much of our food production and processing dependent on them, as well construction materials – well everything really.
In answer to your question, I can only assume it is the saviour complex (aka Messiah complex) in politicians.
Psychopathic – in my view.
Mad Ed’s father:
“Ralph Miliband was born in Belgium to working-class Polish Jewish immigrants. He fled to Britain in 1940 with his father, to avoid persecution when Nazi Germany invaded Belgium. Learning to speak English and enrolling at the London School of Economics, he became involved in left-wing politics and made a personal commitment to the cause of socialism at the grave of Karl Marx.”
Could Mad Ed have absorbed, from the cradle onwards, the Marxist claptrap that his father spouted and be a strident communist hell-bent on the destruction of his family’s adopted country? The very same country that provided his family sanctuary in the face of persecution? If he is indeed that spiteful and ungrateful – then he’s evil as well as mad.