Global theft

Yet more mind-boggling figures on global warming
Are we really to believe that the benefits gained from the Climate Change Act will amount to £1,024 billion, wonders Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker

Last October the House of Commons passed, by 463 votes to three, the most expensive piece of legislation ever put through Parliament. The only MP to question the cost of the Climate Change Act, requiring Britain to cut its CO2 emissions by 80 per cent within 40 years, was Peter Lilley. It was also Mr Lilley who, just before the MPs voted to stop runaway global warming, drew the House’s attention to the fact that, outside, London was experiencing its first October snow for 74 years.
What made the MPs’ lack of interest in the cost of this Act even more curious was that the Government’s own “impact assessment” showed that, whereas its benefits were estimated at £110 billion, its costs were £205 billion. The MPs thus happily voted for something that would be twice as costly as any benefit.

But these figures were based on the Government’s original plan to cut CO2 emissions by only 60 per cent. A last-minute amendment had this to 80 per cent (a target which can only be achieved by closing down most of Britain’s economy), so our “climate change minister”, Ed Miliband, was obliged to produce new figures. These he has now belatedly slipped out via the Department of Energy and Climate Change website – no thought of reporting them to Parliament – and truly mind-boggling they are. The cost of the Act has nearly doubled, to £404 billion, or £18.3 billion for every year between now and 2050. However, the supposed benefits are given, astonishingly, as £1,024 billion, an increase of 1,000 per cent.
How on earth were such unbelievable figures calculated? Peter Lilley has written a trenchant letter to Mr Miliband, asking this and a series of other highly pertinent questions. But pending any reply, last week I posed this question to DECC myself. I was assured that the new figures had been worked out by “a method used by the independent Committee on Climate Change, and peer-reviewed by Simon Deitz, an expert in carbon pricing from the London School of Economics”. Dr Deitz’s website shows that last year he carried out “research for the UK Committee on Climate Change”.
So this independent expert was asked to peer review the method used by an “independent” committee (which he had already been working for) to produce figures that seem rather to have been plucked from the thin air of which only 0.04 per cent – one 2,500th – consists of the self-same carbon dioxide which we are now expected to believe we will benefit by £1 trillion from not emitting. Truly we are governed these days by stark, raving lunacy – and no one is meant to notice.