"The idea that the transition to a green economy can come at a low price is a dangerous fairy tale"
Telegraph: 26th November 2024: Columnist and Deputy Comment Editor, Annabel Denham, discusses the inevitable costs of Labour's energy policy
"We knew Labour was no closer to solving the energy trilemma than scientists are to explaining dark matter. That, for now, we cannot have net-zero emissions, security of supply and affordability... Perhaps most importantly, we knew that the pursuit of net-zero policies, regardless of cost, would impact our lives in ways the gentleman in Whitehall could not possibly foresee...
So we should thank Bill Esterson, Labour chair of the Commons Energy Security and Net Zero Committee, for letting the cat out of the bag.
“We will all have to change our lives” if we are to decarbonise the grid by 2030, he has just admitted.
Keir Starmer is offering no such candour; at Cop29, the climate jamboree many world leaders had the good sense to snub, the Prime Minister not only set us another target (an 81 per cent reduction in emissions by 2035), but peddled the line that he “won’t be telling people how to behave”. This will surely only be true in the most literal sense...
And we are only in the foothills of the transition... The next half will be far more painful...
Yet the Tories are hardly in a position to challenge it – assuming they want to. The timetable they set for the transition to clean energy was excessively ambitious. They did nothing about the 2008 Climate Change Act, failed to dismantle the supposedly independent Climate Change Committee, and enshrined the Net Zero by 2050 target in law. As a result, the country that birthed the industrial revolution, and created the oil refineries and steelworks that transformed people’s lives, now has the world’s highest electricity prices – and only the ghost of an industrial sector..."