|
Net Zero Watch has ridiculed the Seventh Carbon Budget, which was published today, saying that ‘it doesn’t rise much above the level of fantasy’. The campaigning organisation says that the spending estimates are unaffordable, and are lowballed, because they are based on figures that bear no resemblance to anything seen in the real world. The Climate Change Committee, which prepares the budget, says that capital expenditure on Net Zero projects will have to rise from around £18 billion today to over £40 billion by 2029, a level of expenditure that will then have to be sustained for a decade. But Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford says this is unaffordable: The Chancellor of the Exchequer is already running out of spending headroom. For the Climate Change Committee to commit the country by law to a financial excess on this scale shows that the whole Net Zero project is not grounded in reality.
And Mr Montford has discovered that even these figures are gross underestimates, because the Climate Change Committee is assuming dramatic reductions in the cost of renewable energy, despite the fact that the ongoing trend is upwards.
|
