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The Un-Debated Cost of the UK Climate Change Bill: £10,000 per Household
The UK’s Climate Change Bill, which commits future governments to cut CO2 emissions by 80% from 1990 levels by 2050, is about to receive Royal Assent but at what cost? Peter Lilley MP asks why ministers failed to mention that the legislation could cost each family in the UK up to £10,000.
Can you spare £10,000 for a good cause? The government thinks you can – despite the recession.
Parliament passed the Climate Change Bill, which is set to receive Royal Assent in the coming days, which will force you to cough up.
This legislation binds future British governments to introduce unilaterally, even if other countries do not follow suit, massive spending programmes which could cost up to £200bn; that’s £10,000 from every family in the country.
I’m not talking about rescuing the banks. That involved loans which we should eventually get back. This is real money in taxes and lost incomes – money you will never see again.
The bank rescue was to save the economy. This is to save the planet.
Hold on! I hear you exclaim. No-one asked us if we could afford £10,000. We haven’t heard anything about a £200 billion package. That’s enormous.
That’s right; it is enormous and you didn’t hear anything about it. That is the scandal.
Neither Parliament nor most of the media bothered to discuss the cost of one of the most immense projects ever adopted in this country. Indeed, Parliament wafted it through without even discussing its cost and with only five votes against.
In my experience, our biggest mistakes are made when Parliament and the media are virtually unanimous and MPs switch off their critical faculties in a spasm of moral self-congratulation. That is what happened with this Bill…………………………………………………………
…………..The oddest thing about the government’s cost/benefit analysis is that it contradicts the Stern Review.
Sir Nicholas Stern concluded that the cost of preventing climate change would be small relative to the benefits.
Yet the Impact Assessment reveals that the costs could dwarf the potential benefits.
The Stern Review was much criticised for resorting to unprecedented means to inflate the benefits artificially.
In particular, he used an astonishingly low discount rate thereby giving a huge weight to benefits that will not accrue until centuries ahead. In fact, half the benefits he expects will not occur until after the year 2800!
Ministers have admitted to me that their Impact Assessment rejected Stern’s dubious figures and used conventional discount rates.
Yet they still quote Stern’s conclusions to justify their Bill and never mention their own more recent calculations.
What a disgrace that our legislators failed to scrutinise and amend this Bill as rigorously as the US Congress examined the Paulson package before agreeing it.
If the Impact Assessment is right and Stern wrong there is a strong case for spending more of taxpayers’ billions on adapting to climate change and less on trying to prevent it, but we will not have that option.
Read the entire article on the BBC News website, Peter Lilley MP, Viewpoint: ‘Coughing up to curb climate change’
BBC News website: Climate law ‘could cost billions’