Net zero policy in 2,000 pages

At the end of 2020 the government and the Climate Change Committee produced a blitz of documents. We had the Ten Point Plan, the National Infrastructure Strategy, the Energy White Paper and the Treasury’s interim report on its Net Zero Review. Thousands of pages. But what do they tell us? Are they good answers to the challenge of our unilateral net zero target? Is the strategy coherent and cost-effective, and is the money being provided to support it? The Energy White Paper, the precursor to a new Energy Bill, starts off with levelling-up and jobs. All the documents have at their core the claim that this huge transformation of the economy (and especially the main emissions in heating, transport and agriculture) is going to be achieved at little or no cost. Bills are not going to go up. Is it really true that we can no longer cause further increases in the carbon concentration in the atmosphere – unilaterally – without any pain? Can we go from living beyond our environmental and carbon means without a net cost, or not more than 1% of GDP at worst? Or do we need a rethink, a focus on carbon consumption and a new realism about what we need to do?