When I was the IPPR’s energy research fellow, I always loved working with Dieter Helm – a total iconoclaust who’d infuriate the green establishment by poking holes in their shaky claims about how cheap it would be to sort out climate change. He could always get away with it for the simple reason that he knew energy policy better than they did. He was at it again last week in the Wall Street Journal:
The U.S. and Europe refuse to acknowledge that halting the relentless rise in the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will take a significant slice out of economic growth. It will probably mean living standards will have to be cut if our consumption is going to be environmentally sustainable. We are simply living beyond our — and the planet’s — means.
This is not a welcome message for politicians to give to their voters. But it happens to be what is required to tackle this global crisis. Not since the late 1930s, in the run-up to World War II, has such a massive restructuring of major economies been required. Nobody told the British or American people then that the challenge of creating a wartime economy was going to be cheap. They should stop pretending that the enormous challenge of decarbonizing the major economies can be done on the cheap, either.
Thank goodness for straight talkers. Absolutely. I’d be a rich man if I had a pound for every enthusiastic green who told me that the bad news is that the four horsemen of the apocalypse are just round the corner and will be here in a few minutes, but that the good news is all I need do is remember not to leave my phone charger plugged in. People ain’t stupid. When the gap between the problem narrative and the solution narrative is that wide, they assume one of two things: that it’s already too late to solve the problem, or that the scale of the problem is being exaggerated in the first place.
