Thread by @clim8resistance

Me on the @JuliaHB1 show on @talkRADIO this morning, talking about the @hmtreasury report on #NetZero.

Here's the point I was making about the report admitting to *considerable* uncertainty. The word 'uncertain[/ty]' appears 82 times.

They really don't know what the costs and consequences are.

Here's some other stuff I didn't get the chance to say...

Despite admitting to uncertainty, @hmtreasury hide behind the claim that the costs of 'inaction' outweigh the costs of 'action'.

That is manifestly a nonsense...

1. We can see now, the beginnings of two decades of policy failure really coming home to roost, and though we can't be certain of the final cost, we *can* be certain that the government has lost control of prices WHICH THEY SAID WOULD BE CONTROLLED BY GREEN POLICY.

2. Though there may well be evidence that the globe has warmed slightly (and I find this point unimportant and not worth debating), there is LESS THAN ZERO evidence that this is causing rising impacts on society, such as costs, lives or DALYs lost to extreme weather, etc.

That is to say that despite the claims that we are in the Anthropocene, fewer people suffer from climate/weather effects today than even in the 1990s, and vastly less than a century ago.

3. So @hmtreasury's claim that global costs of climate change are rising is necessarily false, and its claim that the costs of #NetZero policy will be less than those costs is necessarily false.

HMT's claim is simply ideological orthodoxy, not fact-based.

There’s no avoiding the conclusion that people aren’t going to be able to afford #NetZero. Replacing a boiler is going to bankrupt some people & make them homeless. Losing their car is going to make some people unemployed. This is not trivial stuff.

High prices are going to make people cold, hungry and poor. It will kill people, as unaffordable energy did throughout the mid-late last century.

Climate change policy, domestic or global may well be worse for people, everywhere, than *any* degree of climate change.

All these problems with #NetZero, and more green policy besides, were known about, and put to the government, its departments, and to MPs and political parties in the decade before last. They ignored people doing sensible policy analysis and called them 'climate change deniers'.

There could be no more fitting demonstration of this total ambivalence to policy failure than Boris Johnson yesterday and the day before hanging out with bankers and billionaires, begging them for 'investment' in the green agenda.

https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1450414167404556293

He said that ‘the market is going green’ and that ‘green is good, green is right, green works’. He waffled on about the 'Green industrial revolution'. Well, PMs and ministers have been banging on about that for over a decade. Where is it?

Boris Johnson is making the *exact* same claims that Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and Peter Mandelson made in 2009. But there is only the offshoring of our industrial sectors, capacity decline, and rising prices.

That's NOT an 'industrial revolution'.

Boris jokes about sacrificing goats to gods to get the wind turbines turning, and how there isn't going to be a 'boiler police' turning up at your door and waving a carrot at you. But there is no evidence that he is taking the problems seriously.

Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain road-blockers can ruin your day. Policymakers can ruin your life.

Boris and his government know full well that the public don’t share their plans for the radical transformation of society.

They ignore and smear critics of the green agenda.

They continue to believe that they can write blank cheques, and get away with it.

Boris thinks that Bill Gates - who most sensible people, such as his wife, are distancing themselves from - will save the day.

Like Tony Blair, today's senior politicians have much more interest in Utopian billionaires than meeting the public's needs.

newsweek.com/2015/04/17/dem…

Despite knowing that the public don't share the agenda, the PM turns to billionaires for 'investment'.

He doesn't think it better to ask the British people what they think, even though it will cost them tens, maybe hundreds of £thousands each "to save the planet".

Greens keep claiming that the public supports this agenda. But we have seen at least three government schemes like the current plan to offer £5,000 against the cost of an air source heat pump. All have failed.

"The Great British Refurb" under Gordon Brown. The "Green Deal" under the coalition and the "Green Home Grants" from this government. The public were not interested in them & they collapsed. Revealed, not stated preferences are what counts.

It really has been twenty years of policy failure after policy failure after policy failure.

*All* of it is owed to governments, MPs and political parties believing that they know better than the public, who do not need to be asked for consent to radical changes to society.

And *all* of it has been driven by the green blob, financed by weirdo Utopian billionaires, lobbying UK/EU and US politicians to ignore the public, and to press on with the green agenda, as though the public do not matter.

This has created chaos. And it will get worse.

What's the solution?

If the government and Parliament insist on the #NetZero agenda, then they must put it to a meaningful public vote.

There has been a cross-party consensus on climate policy, which has deprived the public of a debate.

That consensus has been concretely established across the political establishment. And it is not going to budge of its own accord.

It is driving a massive democratic deficit.

And it is an extremely radical ideological agenda.

That ideological agenda *must* be tested democratically, or it will create interminable divisions within society.

The government cannot wing it on such a radical agenda without undermining democracy, and cause massive social upheaval.

They need to ask us, "do you want this?".