Energy bills may be going up and the economy may be flatlining, but not for long. Thankfully, the government’s Climate Change Committee has the answer. In a press release introducing the committee’s Seventh Carbon Budget, published this morning, interim chair Piers Forster declares: ‘The committee is delighted to be able to present a good news story about how the country can decarbonise while also creating savings across the country.’ By 2040, when the CCC sees the UK’s carbon emissions falling by 87 per cent on their 1990 level, the cost of heating and lighting our homes is going to fall by £716 a year and the cost of running a car by £699.
Surely never has such a Panglossian document been put before the public by an arm of government. The CCC has progressed from making what a committee of MPs called ‘heroic assumptions’ into the realm of outright fantasy. The report can’t even describe the current situation accurately, so why we should believe its projections for 15 years’ time?
The report tells us, for example, that ‘for many technologies (including solar, wind turbines, and batteries) consistent and rapid cost reductions have been seen over the past 20 years’ – which will come as news to the civil servants who ran the government’s auction for offshore wind in September 2023 and received not a single bid. The then Conservative government had to increase the long-term guaranteed ‘strike prices’ on offer by 66 per cent. The price of wind power plummeted while interest rates were on the floor – and suffered a sharp reversal when rates went up.
Surely never has such a Panglossian document been put before the public by an arm of government
The document also claims that electric cars are ‘already cheaper to run and maintain than petrol or diesel and will shortly be cheaper to buy.’ That will come as a surprise to anyone trying to run an electric car from public chargers. And while the cost of running an electric car from your home supply can be lower than a petrol car, that rather ignores the tax situation – around half what you pay at the pump is fuel duty. EVs won’t be so cheap to run once the government comes up with new motoring taxes – probably road pricing – to claw back the £28 billion a year it faces losing in fuel duty. As for the claim that EVs will be on purchase price parity with electric cars by 2026 to 2028, that skirts around that reality that recent discounts have been made out of desperation, as manufacturers try to avoid fines for not selling enough EVs under the Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate.
By 2040, the document claims, 63 per cent of HGVs are going to be electric. That is a dream figure given that there are hardly any electric lorries on the road at the moment, and the few light, 20 tonne lorries that are available can manage little more than 100 miles between charges (compared with 800 miles for diesel lorries). Moreover, Tevva, which was touted as the Tesla of trucks – which was going to manufacture them in Essex – went bust last year.
Similar fantasies are spun regarding carbon capture and storage, hydrogen and grid batteries, all of which are projected to play a significant role in balancing intermittent wind and solar power by 2040 – in spite of playing little or no role at present on account of their excessive cost. How these costs are going to come down so dramatically that they will save us £716 on our energy bills the CCC doesn’t explain.
But there is another striking assertion in the CCC’s Seventh Carbon Budget. It projects that meat consumption in Britain is going to fall by 25 per cent by 2040, with the numbers of cattle and sheep plunging by 27 per cent as land is given over to trees to try to soak up carbon. Not such a prosperous future for farmers, then – while the rest of us, it seems, will have to be strong-armed into changing our diets. There is little sign at present of the population wishing to play along with this. On this, at least, the CCC shows a rare bit of insight. While it first welcomes an 11 per cent fall in meat sales between 2020 and 2022 it does then admit that this might just have more to do with eliminating waste during the cost of living crisis than a desire to change what we eat – given that overall food sales fell by 10 per cent over the same period.
If meat consumption does fall by 2040 it will more likely be down to us having to survive on bread and water. The golden low-carbon economic future portrayed by the CCC is simply not credible – though sadly it will fool many MPs just like its previous reports.