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.
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So many bad things happening in society can be traced back to Blair and Brown.
So many things happening in society can be traced back to the Tories doubling down on them.
Corporate Fascism. (non) ‘Green’ entities backed by gov’t grants and billionaires, taking said gov’t to ‘court’ itself fully on side with the Nut Zero nonsense. What are ‘Carbon Emission’ targets? To build a Bird chopper will emit ‘tonnes’ of friendly Co2 in resourcing, manufacturing, emplacing and operating. But these ‘costs’ are left out of the equations.
Word salads, marketing, emotive campaigns of non-science. None of this was voted on, nor debated in our ‘thriving democracy’ which must be protected against ‘right wing extremists’. So the fascists say.
This is a most depressing read. How on earth has it come to this? The only succour I can take from it is that I’ll need to ‘bat out’ to be 102 by 2050 to experience the solids hitting the air-conditioning and thus will miss the s-show.
Don’t count on that. The UN still wants 2040 and should they get that, they’ll aim for 2030.
When you force yourself in law to do something with no idea how it can be done and no concern for the cost there is only one conclusion to be reached. —-You are not doing it for the reasons you say you are. People need to wake up to the fact that “Climate Change” has NOTHING to do with the climate and it never has. This whole political agenda is Eco Socialism and is entirely about control of the worlds wealth and resources and the United Nations idea that the wealthy west must stop using fossil fuels because we have used up more than our fair share of this finite resource in becoming wealthy. —–The very troubling thing though is that our own political class are fully onboard with this scam and have passed laws that force its citizens to comply. They care not one jot about the impoverishment this is causing and will continue to cause so long as they all get their little gold stars on their lapels from the UN and WEF. —–Our group think politicians are all in on this eco socialist fraud and asked no questions about cost or whether these emissions reductions could ever be achieved. They simply waved it through parliament. —-SCAM
Well part of the job of a Parliament is to make laws so if left to their devices that’s what they will do, even if no new laws are required. After hundreds of years of Parliament it’s hard to believe we need more than a tiny number of new laws, which would generally be dealing with new phenomena. Perhaps they should only be allowed to pass a new law if they get rid of at least two.
Passing a law like the one discussed is obviously a bad idea if it is in an area where you clearly will need room for manoeuvre. But perhaps that was the intention. They can repeal it if they want- all they need is a simple majority. It’s doubtful though that they want to, and even if they did I doubt they dould
command the support of anything like enough MPs.
Sooner or later they will need to either repeal it or seriously ruin our country- we will find out in the coming years just how wicked they are.
”Sooner or later they will need to either repeal it or seriously ruin our country”
There’s the rub, you are absolutely correct but is there anyone or anything in UK politics that could rescind or significantly change the Climate Change Act.
The very term ”Climate Change Act” is an oxymoron, An Act means something that humans can do that will have an effect, the climate will change as it wishes. The term Climate Change Act demonstrates that we learnt nothing from King Canute, he could not control the tides and would have drowned if he had not got out of the way, we cannot control the climate but I am afraid we will drown in our own net zero hubris rather than get out of the way by repealing the Climate Change Act.
Reform will dump it immediately. The Uni-party is fully paid by the WEF.
Parliament does not make Laws, it makes legislation.
Laws are like gravity, always been there and discovered not invented.
But that matters not one iota. What matters is people believe they can dance on the moon in 2030, and when that year passes without a new cosmological jig they’ll simply believe the dance will happen next year. The enemy that is our government rely on our enemy within – our neighbours, our friends, our families. As we saw with Covid it doesn’t have to be dancing on the moon, it can be wearing a new bit of cloth and taking a magic potion. The real problem, one that will never be solved for us, is frightened and weak-minded people who are easily manipulated. As long as the powers that be have these people to do their bidding we’re screwed. So we’re screwed.
That’s why H L Mencken’s essays on Imaginary Hobgoblins, and Eisenhower’s1950s fireside speech about the government-military complex will soon become banned reading in schools, and excised or shadow-banned from social media.
This is why I’m bored rigid with all things ‘climate’ related and you’ll seldom see me commenting on this topic. The entire agenda has been pushed for as long as I can remember. It was CFCs, acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer when I was a teen. We’ll all on here be pushing up daisies and the dratted narrative will still be being shoved down the public’s collective throats. It’s never going away. This 2min clip is from 1992;
”The climate scam has been going for decades. This is from 1992, radio broadcaster Paul Harvey gave a speech warning about the dire consequences of it. It’s will about forcing you into behaviours and taking money from you.”
https://twitter.com/Twitawoo8/status/1787855433635397989
Well that video will inevitably attract the catastrophists who will doubtless organise a rapid response pile-on to “debunk” Mr Harvey’s assertions. I suspect that over the coming decade there is going to be a lot of “I told you so but you wouldn’t listen” regarding the covert interplay between BigGovernment and BigGreen, BigPharma, BigHealth and BigArmaments to ensure a steady supply of Imaginary Hobgoblins. I wonder what the next generation’s confected panic will be base on? Like 10Navigator, I shall need to bat on till I’m 100 to find out! However, I suspect that in the UK over the next ten years I shall be entertained by watching a Starmer government reaping the foul harvest from what the Blair government sowed.
The radical Islamist climate lobby don’t you mean as the eco guys and their green party have joined forces with those that would harm
I would like to take slightly tangential approach to this topic.
Have a look at the images on this page dedicated to the history of shipbuilding and shipping in general on the River Clyde.
I recommend as a first pass at least to ignore the written detail (though a lot of it is fascinating in its own right) and just scroll quickly through the vast number of pictures of nautical industrial magnificence.
Sailing Down the Clyde: Doon the Watter | Glasgow History
As well as the grandeur and beauty of many of the individual vessels portrayed the numbers involved in this overall story are staggering;
For example many of these individual shipyards produced hundreds of large ships over the course of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, and to put this into perspective the Scottish Government has failed to complete just two relatively minute ferries since the process began in 2014, ie ten years ago.
Now take a look at this image of the nearest contemporary equivalent of large-scale industrial activity around Glasgow, the Whitelee Wind Farm (the largest in the UK):
Whitlee.jpg (430×250) (power-technology.com)
Enough said.
For the purposes of this post I am leaving aside all the complex arguments and background situation of Clyde (and general UK) shipbuilding re ever increasing world competition, the conditions the workforce had to endure etc and concentrating solely on this striking visual metaphor for the difference between relatively unfettered human productive activity, and that directed by a malign, dictatorial, dehumanising political ideology – environmentalism / Net Zero.
Errm, i assume that was the intention all along. The Government is now being ordered by the courts to pursue unpopular policies thanks to legislation that was nodded through by cretins who did not understand the implications of what they where voting for.
Here is a list of the sages who voted against the Climate Change Act: Christopher Chope
Philip Davies
Peter Lilley
Andrew Tyrie
Ann Widdecombe
https://www.publicwhip.org.uk/division.php?date=2008-10-28&number=298
I asked a mate ‘s ten year old do they teach about climate in his school, said yes the factories pump out pollution and is warming the planet. I told him that it is all a load of rubbish and those cooling towers are mostly steam. The teachers would not be impressed but I don’t care.
Cooling towers are entirely water vapour!
No current Parliament is bound by a previous Parliament.
The Government could easily amend or better still repeal the Act. That they don’t means, they don’t really care – like they didn’t care what happened to the economy, people, children during the CoVid calamity and death-jab promotion.
It could easily. But this would mean the nominally ruling party would lose a bunch of ‘donations’ from the same people funding these lawsuits. And all the MPs who were bought to implement this taxpayer defrauding scheme would lose money, too. And there would be no more invitations to the regular global “Sex and drinks and CO₂-reductions!”-happenings. All of this will make it extremely unlikely that any particular government would want to act on this. After all, it’s only five years and then, somebody else’s problem.
I doubt they would get a majority – plenty of Tories would simply vote against the government, probably for reasons RW mentions below.
The thing is that the present government has understood the fantasy and has been edging away from it with as much caution as it dares. Unless it is returned to power in the next election, the succeeding government of Labour zealots will double down on the targets and bankrupt us all. I am not sure why this doesn’t appear to be an election argument.
How utterly, utterly depressing. I am thankful for my faith in God in whom I can trust as I obviously can’t trust in anything else!
“… because the plans to deliver it [NET Zero policies] have never been tested”
Together, A’ level Physics and Chemistry gives you the knowledge that Windmills are incapable of providing sufficient Power, when needed, for this country pursuing NET Zero policies. And that is only scratching the surface.
In addition, we ARE the experiment! And yet, no-one in a position of responsibility is willing to look at the results. The recent presentation by Judith Curry explains it all, (especially at 15:00):
2024 Annual GWPF Lecture – Judith Curry – Climate Uncertainty and Risk
https://youtube.com/watch?v=iqsZV8i3O1E&si=QQIM5MSx7G0Ac0y9
This is similar to another hauled through hostile territory:
My 49 Days as Prime Minister – Liz Truss
https://youtu.be/jqN-B4DVUww?si=wyvHmXUnwWwfutgI
It shows how difficult it will be to modify the NET Zero policies, even slightly, without a monumental change within Westminster (and Whitehall?)