How a Thinktank Got the Cost of Net Zero for the UK Wildly Wrong (theguardian.com) 124
An anonymous reader shares a report: Imagine demanding an "honest" debate over the cost of net zero in a report full of errors that even a schoolboy would be embarrassed about. Then imagine getting coverage of your report in the Sun, Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Spectator. Sound impossible? Well, let me tell you how Civitas, one of the thinktanks housed at 55 Tufton Street in London, did exactly that, and nearly got away with it. On Wednesday, Civitas published a pamphlet on net zero by Ewen Stewart, whose consultancy, Walbrook Economics, works on "the interaction of macroeconomics, politics and capital markets." Stewart is also a climate sceptic, having written in 2021 that human-caused warming is a "contested theory." Along with Civitas, 55 Tufton Street also houses the climate-sceptic lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation and its campaigning arm Net Zero Watch. These groups previously attempted to spark an "honest debate about the cost of net-zero" in 2020.
The Civitas report claims to offer a "realistic" $5.5tn estimate of the cost of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 and says "the government need to be honest with the British people." This estimate is much higher than the figure produced by the government's official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), which has said that reaching net zero would require net investments of $1.71tn by 2050. Note the difference between Civitas's "costs" and the CCC's "net investments." The CCC also found that reaching net zero would generate savings in the form of lower fossil fuel bills worth $1.34tn, resulting in a net cost of $0.37tn. In his report for Civitas, Stewart adopts the well-worn climate-sceptic tactic of simply ignoring these savings. He also ignores what the Office for Budget Responsibility has called the potentially "catastrophic economic and fiscal consequences" of unmitigated climate change. The report was timed to follow hot on the heels of Rishi Sunak's big climate speech, in which he called for an "honest" approach to net zero that ends "unacceptable costs."
The Civitas report claims to offer a "realistic" $5.5tn estimate of the cost of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 and says "the government need to be honest with the British people." This estimate is much higher than the figure produced by the government's official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), which has said that reaching net zero would require net investments of $1.71tn by 2050. Note the difference between Civitas's "costs" and the CCC's "net investments." The CCC also found that reaching net zero would generate savings in the form of lower fossil fuel bills worth $1.34tn, resulting in a net cost of $0.37tn. In his report for Civitas, Stewart adopts the well-worn climate-sceptic tactic of simply ignoring these savings. He also ignores what the Office for Budget Responsibility has called the potentially "catastrophic economic and fiscal consequences" of unmitigated climate change. The report was timed to follow hot on the heels of Rishi Sunak's big climate speech, in which he called for an "honest" approach to net zero that ends "unacceptable costs."
Showing my age here (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
You aren’t the only one.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, that was tried during the Dark Ages, everyone slightly smarter than the average brute was slayed for various reasons.
We all know how THAT worked out.
Re: (Score:2)
Lol was gonna say, if you viewed their stupid ads or didn't get caught bypassing them, it was free!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"think tank" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"think tank" (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember seeing a poster in Dulles airport from some think tank laboratory. They openly promised on the poster to provide the customer with the scientific results that they want.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Um, they are likely closer than the government got it.
Uh, it's hard to believe that the government got the number wrong by a factor of ten thousand because they don't know the difference between megawatts and megawatt-hours.
But if you can find four-orders-of-magnitude errors in the govenrment numbers, do point them out.
Re: (Score:2)
55 Tufton Street is somewhat notorious from there. Our last PM and her chancellor crashed the economy on their advice. Proper loons.
Re: (Score:2)
Just pick both values, average them out, and you will very likely hit very close to the true figure.
Re: (Score:1)
If one side says it's 60 and the other says it's 1.3 milllion (what the thinktank concluded to be the price per MWh) in truth it's 200, then averaging those two numbers are still further off than the 60, while both individually are fairly far off.
If you want to find a solution you should try to get to what's most likely true as close as possible together instead of having propaganda in one direction compete with propaganda in t
Re: (Score:2)
It was a joke, doh.
Forgot one has to carefully explain EVERYTHING in detail on Slashdot.
Re: (Score:2)
You realize, of course, that this methodology encourages them to lie bigger, so that they can move the needle in their favor.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, but they will cancel each other out :)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Yeah, but they will cancel each other out :)"
To an extent, but it still hands the advantage to the side willing to lie bigger. That, to me, does not recommend it.
If you wanna hit net zero and do it cheap (Score:3, Insightful)
As an added bonus you save trillions on transportation costs and can tell the middle east to go fuck themselves without grinding your entire economy to a halt.
The only downside, besides cars are cool and you'll need to figure out how the kool kids can get laid now, is Walmart's gonna have to have a back room again since they'll be using more trains than trucks. They can turn their parking lots into one. No more heat islands.
Re: (Score:3)
Tire particulate, if a big problem, will get regulation passed down to it (like other things, HCFC Refrigerants, h
Re: (Score:3)
Tire particulate, if a big problem, will get regulation passed down to it (like other things, HCFC Refrigerants, harmful pesticides, etc) and will be corrected.
That may take some new materials science. There are some promising results from adding crosslinking materials to existing tire materials, so there might be some progress on that front. It may make tires more expensive though. Which means that people will blame the regulations that enforce the new materials for prices going up.
So rewrite physics so you can keep driving (Score:3)
Who's gonna pay for all that? It ain't gonna be cheap. Cars are already too expensive for most users. My last set of tires was $800 bucks. Good quality, but nothing amazing. Just run of the mill 14" rims and no fancy stuff. I think I overpaid by $100-$150 because I was in a hurry, but that's still $600-$700 bucks for 4 tires.
It's not just about prices going up, they're at the point where regular workers can't afford them. All so you can keep living li
Re: (Score:2)
Cars are already too expensive for most users.
Man, you sound like a broken record. Repeating garbage over and over in multiple posts does not make it right. Cars are still very affordable for most people, at least in the U.S. As I've said before, I can buy a reliable, used Toyota, Nissan, or Honda, for $3K-$4K and insurance on it will be low, too. Yes, there is maintenance, but I still don't see people opting for public transportation or anything else, at least not where I live.
There's being conservative and then there's being myopic. It's time we grew out of cars. It's not like they've been around for all of human history. It's been about 75 years if you don't count them as rich men's toys. Let them go. If you want to drive that badly go find a race track.
I'd wager that in the old days, everyone would have liked to have a hor
Start a dealership then (Score:2)
You can still get around, but you're not going to be doing it in a car much longer, one way or another. Your kids can't afford them, or if you somehow stumpbled into a bunch of cash and are sharing it with them their friends can't afford them.
Cars are going to fade away. It's just a question of whether we're going to do it by denying 80-90% of Americans transportation while keeping a handful of gas guzzlers running like Cuba does or if we're going to build out cit
Re: (Score:2)
cool. Can I have a flying car while you're at it?
I hardly think that additives that make synthetic rubber less friable fall into the same technological territory as flying cars. This is quite likely very doable, so I'm not sure why this strong reaction implying that it's somehow difficult or impossible to make tires cleaner.
Who's gonna pay for all that? It ain't gonna be cheap. Cars are already too expensive for most users. My last set of tires was $800 bucks. Good quality, but nothing amazing. Just run of the mill 14" rims and no fancy stuff. I think I overpaid by $100-$150 because I was in a hurry, but that's still $600-$700 bucks for 4 tires.
I also pointed out that it would probably be more expensive. Up front at least. I don't expect it to be vastly more expensive, maybe 10% to 20% or so higher materials cost. In any case, I try to think of tires as consumables that I pay
Again, physics (Score:2)
And cars are still becoming unaffordable without trying to come up with space age solutions to fundamental problems of physics. And that's before we talk about the added healthcare costs from all that tire smog.
You're trying to solve a problem that can't be solved. We don't have enough metal on earth to give everyone that wants a car a car. They're
Re: (Score:2)
synthetic rubber is still rubber and still prone to friction just like real rubber. It's still going to disintegrate into particles which turn into smog.
Tires are already mostly made out of synthetic rubber. They're composites made of a number of different materials. Crosslinking additives to reduce fragmentation would help with pretty much any rubber material used in tire tread to reduce how many particles it puts into the air.
And cars are still becoming unaffordable without trying to come up with space age solutions to fundamental problems of physics
What fundamental laws of physics prevent tire rubber from being reformulated to produce less particulate waste?
And that's before we talk about the added healthcare costs from all that tire smog.
I'm confused here. Or I think that you're confused about what I'm suggesting. The whole point of what I am proposing is to
Yeah, and I pointed out your mistakes there too (Score:4, Insightful)
Europe has plenty of walkable cities, they somehow avoid becoming wastelands. So yeah, we can get rid of cars. Or at least 99% of them. You just don't wanna because you grew up with the things and like a lot of old farts don't like change, even if it's for the better.
You might also be concerned about being left behind, especially if you work in an industry that involves cars. This is a valid concern. America often abandons people. But Instead of supporting a transportation system that's killing us why not just not abandon people when things change?
And unless you're going to change physics all the regulation in the world can't do anything about smog from tire particulate. You put something that heavy in contact with the ground at those speeds and you're going to get particles.
Walkable cities built for people instead of car company's profits are the future. They're the only future because personal automobiles are rapidly becoming too expensive for the bottom 90% to afford.
Re: (Score:1)
My grandfather is 93. He has been living with this "horrible" tire particles his entire life. Seems to working just fine since life expectancy is what, 78 for men? I'm not seeing a problem here.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is called anecdotal evidence.
and, in this case, survivorship bias [scribbr.com]
Re: (Score:2)
My grandfather is 93. He has been living with this "horrible" tire particles his entire life. Seems to working just fine since life expectancy is what, 78 for men? I'm not seeing a problem here.
My mother smoked for much of her life. She did not get lung cancer. Are you going to claim that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer on the basis of my anecdote?
Re: Yeah, and I pointed out your mistakes there to (Score:2)
Smoking doesnâ(TM)t cause lung cancer. It increases your individual odds slightly, per the CDC from 10% to 11 or 12%, it is significant if youâ(TM)re talking about a population, it is insignificant if youâ(TM)re talking about personal odds (driving a car is still more dangerous and nobody is worried about that).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Statistics, based on your other comments on this site, you do not understand them.
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently you are incapable of recognizing sarcasm.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No, it increases the risk of you getting a cancer. Even if you don't smoke, you still have a 10% chance of getting lung cancer. Smoking increases that chance slightly.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No, you are misinterpreting the language and moving the causal factor from the person to an inanimate object. If smoking CAUSES cancer, then everyone that smokes gets cancer, which is false. The CAUSE of cancer is still largely unknown to science so to think you have the answer because someone told you this was a fact is easily disproven. The reason people believe smoking CAUSES cancer, is because they have been utterly misinformed by media and propaganda about smoking. The fact is that smoking increases yo
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Smoking doesnâ(TM)t cause lung cancer. It increases your individual odds slightly, per the CDC from 10% to 11 or 12%, it is significant if youâ(TM)re talking about a population, it is insignificant if youâ(TM)re talking about personal odds (driving a car is still more dangerous and nobody is worried about that).
Lifetime risk of dying in a car accident, if you travel in cars, is lower than that if dying from lung cancer if you smoke.
Re: (Score:2)
My grandfather is 93. He has been living with this "horrible" tire particles his entire life. Seems to working just fine since life expectancy is what, 78 for men? I'm not seeing a problem here.
In other news, black lung disease doesn't exist because only about 20% of coal miners with 25 years experience will die of it
Good for your grand father (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The UK has actually had light electric vehicles for last mile delivery for decades. They are called "milk floats" and are still used to deliver milk to people's doorsteps in the middle of the night. They switched to electric long ago (lead acid batteries initially) because they didn't want to disturb people's sleep while delivering at 4AM.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd say a railroad has more crossings per mile than a freeway.
Re: (Score:3)
We've talked about this in another thread. That last mile delivery still requires roads everywhere, requires cars everywhere.
And we've talked about this in another thread. Walkable cities do not imply cities without roads, and no you don't need cars everywhere. Cities with proper design work perfectly fine (including for commercial delivers) with only a tiny fraction of the car use. Easily >95% of car trips can be substituted with good city planning. And yes you'll still need to go to the hardware store at some point to buy a ladder, do you do that twice daily? No.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Japan is a great example of that. I keep thinking about renting a car, but end up not doing it because you can walk or use public transport to get pretty much everywhere. I take the occasional taxi, but it's still cheaper overall than renting a car, and no worries about dinging it etc.
It's only when you get to really rural areas that a car starts to be significantly quicker.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In walkable cities, they'll do deliveries and trash pickup early in the morning before stores open and then close down the street to motor vehicles.
Re: (Score:2)
Cars are a necessity for modern times so we will continue creating cities around the use of those vehicles.
The vehicles are not necessary for transportation needs, in fact, transportation needs are why we designed the cities around cars.
The manufacturing and purchasing of vehicles is a strong 'boost' to the economy. Cars are expensive, so ownership is a thing that is easily tracked. In fact, we have 'Titles' for them.
Rather than write the rest of this up, I will summarize like this: Forcing people into cars
Government spending 101 (Score:4, Informative)
Everything in government costs exactly as much money as they're able to get away with. No exceptions. If they can milk $1T out of an effort? Perfect, they will. $10T? Even better. If someone claims it'll cost $0.1T? Not once the funding is approved. The value of overages, slipped estimates, and supplemental budgetary requests is too high to ignore.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No (Score:2)
Imagine...a report full of errors that even a schoolboy would be embarrassed about. Then imagine getting coverage of your report in the Sun, Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Spectator. Sound impossible?
Sounds like a daily issue.
It's bullsh*t no matter what side is talking (Score:1, Insightful)
Both sides have a vested interest in blowing smoke up the collective ass of the people. One side wants to get reelected. One side wants to stay in business. Neither side can accurately predict what the cost will be. The only thing you can be sure of is the people will ultimately get screwed in the form of higher taxes and higher costs.
Re: (Score:1)
Both sides have a vested interest in blowing smoke up the collective ass of the people. One side wants to get reelected. One side wants to stay in business. Neither side can accurately predict what the cost will be. The only thing you can be sure of is the people will ultimately get screwed in the form of higher taxes and higher costs.
Wow - both you and the AC who posted two minutes after you expressed the same rational, realistic sentiment; and both of you were modded down. What you said doesn't seem off-topic, trollish, or baiting. Maybe someone with mod points is just having a bad day.
Cheaper way to cut the same CO2 (Score:4, Insightful)
The UK generates 1% of the world's CO2.
https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
According to this, 553 steel plants using the BF-BOF process generate 9% of the world's CO2:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/gu... [carbonbrief.org]
According to this, it costs $1.4Bish to convert BF-BOF to a low carbon electric arc furnace:
Switching to an electric arc furnace is no trivial exercise; it costs between US$1.1 to 1.7 billion according to the world's second-largest steelmaker ... This system promises to bring that down to around 680,000 tonnes combined, a massive 94% reduction.
https://newatlas.com/environme... [newatlas.com]
So to cut the world's CO2 output by 1%, you could convert (553 / 9 x 1.06) 65 steel mills from BD-BOF to electric arc, at a total cost of $1.4B x 65
=$91B or £74.6B
In theory (and it obviously won't happen), the UK could pay out the £75B for the conversions instead of making its own £1T+ net zero plans.
Re: (Score:2)
If the electricity needed to power the electric heaters and gas separators is procured from renewable sources,
Thank goodness there is an unlimited supply of cheap, green electricity.</sarcasm>
Re: (Score:2)
Converting steel production to electric definitely seems like a good investment in curtailing global warming. There is the question of what the net CO2 is if the electricity for the electric furnaces comes from fossil fuels. It's quite probable that it's still a net reduction in CO2, but it might take a lot more plants converted to match the 1% CO2 reduction. Obviously ideally the electricity would come from renewables and we don't want a chicken and egg problem where we say that there's no demand for the r
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There are two good reasons to reach net zero in the UK.
1. It's vital for our economic future. After declaring sanctions on ourselves with brexit, we need to play to our strengths. We have great wind power resources, and actually quite a bit of talent we can put to developing it. Wind is the new oil, it's where the new jobs will come from as things like car manufacturing and steel wind down. It's a fantasy to think we can turn those industries around now, but renewables are a massive opportunity and there is
Re: (Score:1)
Why has this been modded down to -1? It's interesting and informative. The summary seems "tongue-in-cheek" rather than being critical of anyone.
It seems that somebody with mod points is butt-hurt. I see a lot of that here lately.
moderation system was always broken (Score:1)
The 'who watches the watchers' problem was never solved. M2 never worked right, it was unappealing to make those decisions. If you are going to gamify something, you should make it appealing at all levels.
Re: (Score:1)
Because climate change politics isn't about actually fixing a problem but wealth transfer and control.
Re: (Score:2)
Most politics is about wealth transfer and control, and it really sped up starting with Reagan, it's why the wealthy have increased their wealth way faster then the average person and why the wealthy have so much control now.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh look (Score:5, Insightful)
in the Sun, Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Spectator.
So two Murdoch owned publications, two that WikiPedia won't allow to be used for references due to inaccuracies and a magazine that once had Boris Johnson as its editor. Can't think why they'd be keen to push a deniers rant...
Re: (Score:2)
All you have to do is tell us how much and by when (Score:1, Troll)
So you want the entire country to spend trillions on your Green Dream. Fine. Just tell us 1) How much CO2 will decrease if we spend the money, and 2) By when we should see the reduction. No hand waving. No cries of alarm. Just give us the deal.
If you can't do that, stop asking.
Re: (Score:2)
Covid emergency spending inadvertently reduced CO2 emissions by 5% in 2020.
There's your ballpark of what needs to be done.
Re: (Score:2)
So wait, you want everyone to stay home for a 5% reduction?
Re: (Score:2)
You don't understand. We need an additional 5% reduction every year, on top of the previous years, to limit climate change to +1.5C. That is the part people usually don't get their head around.
Re: (Score:2)
I do not want a ballpark. I am looking for a precise amount. This is money we are talking about. When you spend it, you are supposed to know exactly what you are getting in return. You don't go to the grocery store and purchase a "ballpark" amount of milk, you purchase X amount of milk for price Y.
Re: (Score:2)
So can you tell me how much X amount of milk will cost next year, in 5 years? Future spending estimates are hard and sometimes it is better to do a comparison, in this case, how much to reduce CO2 vs how much to fix what breaks if we do nothing. Where I am, over a billion dollars on fire fighting this year, about a thousand dollars per tax payer, we suddenly need bigger reservoirs as it doesn't rain/snow as much as historically, a few billion more, couple of years ago, billions on flood damage the other yea
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
> You don't go to the grocery store and purchase a "ballpark" amount of milk, you purchase X amount of milk for price Y.
Ok, now go up to a cow, and milk it. Will you get a consistent amount of milk (down to the litre) depending on the number of udder squeezes, from every single cow in the herd?
Sometimes a ballpark is all you can get.
The covid example gives you an image of the scale of change needed for only a 5% reduction. The money spent wasn't directed to CO2 reduction, but did so as a side effect. I'
Re: (Score:2)
1) How much CO2 will decrease if we spend the money, and 2) By when we should see the reduction.
You do realize that, technically, those answers are easily derived from the summary, right? It's all about "...the cost of reaching net zero emissions by 2050...", I'm not sure how that doesn't provide what you need to answer your questions.
Re: (Score:2)
This isn't a semantic exercise. How much CO2 reduction is "net zero emissions", precisely? Complete the following sentence: it will cost $X to reduce CO2 by Y amount by 2050.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, according to the government figures it will cost $1.71tn to reduce CO2 by 100% by 2050. So that's 1.7tn for X and 100% for Y amount. If you actually want that in tons of CO2 or some other measure, then you just need to look at how much CO2 the UK is releasing right now. Also, to be completely clear, we're talking about a rate of release into the atmosphere, so it's really Y amount per unit of time that we're considering. We're also looking at averages, where the goal is _net_ zero. So adding some CO2
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sorry, are you trying to reply to me or someone else? I didn't even mention solar power.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm curious, what evidence do you have that solar power will produce more CO2 than it saves? Your argument seems to be based on that idea and it seems like some relic from out of the 70's.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And how would that happen in the UK where solar panels due to lack of actual sun in the UK actually make more CO2 in production than they save in use?
Untrue. It's about seven years for CO2 break even. http://www.sustainability.org.... [sustainability.org.il]
Re: (Score:3)
I love how my comment is moderated Troll. Slashdot is completely pwned by the woke mind virus. Just ask a simple question that challenges the narrative and down you go.
Really pathetic.
Does indeed sound impossible (Score:4, Informative)
Then imagine getting coverage of your report in the Sun, Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Spectator. Sound impossible?
For people who have never read the Sun, Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Spectator I'm sure it sounds impossible. For everyone else you know that they would publish absolutely any shock shit without any data or verification as to whether it is remotely based in reality.
Death by 1000 committees (Score:1)
"the Climate Change Committee (CCC), which has said that reaching net zero would require net investments of $1.71tn by 2050."
So a government committee came up with a figure of $1.7tril and as we all know government is incredibly efficient and on target with projecting expenditures and spending money. There's absolutely no way that the true cost would be triple the estimate, so closer to $5tril like Civitas claims!
Be aware of the obvious dogwhistle (Score:2)
One should note, that this is an investment (Score:2)
this isn't a cost. Any meaningful "net zero" strategy will lower the the costs in the future. It's like buying a new machine to be able to produce something more efficiently in the future.
Good examples are solar and wind power, which have some cost of investment, but once they are built they harness energy virtually for free. Another good example is public transport, yes it costs money to lay down new tracks, but once that's done, everyone gets _much_ cheaper traffic, both on the individual side (cars are e
Ho hum. (Score:2)
Keep your sniping to yourselves. Everybody gets to cherry-pick their favorite cherries.
Re: (Score:2)
Unfortunately, it's all too common that both sides of politics will forget many important variables to further their argument, which leads to both sides always being inaccurate.
That's intentional.
Re: (Score:2)
-1, Insightful.
This place these days... Fuck me.
And as a Brit, wtf is the tech angle to this story, msmash? If you just want to work at the NYT, go apply?
Re: (Score:2)