If there is one thing that we have learned (or, more accurately, relearned) from the pandemic, it is that an emergency is an ideal opportunity for the state to grab more power and then, rather too often, mess things up.
There are a couple of reasons why climate policy-makers and their proxies increasingly prefer to talk about the climate “crisis” or a climate “emergency,” rather than good old climate change, a sneaky but calm phrase that, however strangely, I’m beginning to miss. One is to stoke up the fervor of climate fundamentalists, who, like all millenarians, like to be reassured that doom is indeed just around the corner. The other is to prepare the way for (yet more) measures that would otherwise be unacceptable in a free society.
And so, via the Daily Telegraph:
The Government should consider cutting motorway speed limits to 64mph to reduce transport emissions and dependence on oil imports, MPs have said.
The measure is among many that the Commons environmental audit select committee, in its report out on Thursday about reducing the UK’s reliance on fossil fuels, has said that Westminster should consider.
The report got under way shortly after the war in Ukraine and addressed both the UK’s energy independence and the net zero transition.
It said that solar panels should be installed on new developments and the Government should set an end date for oil and gas licensing . . .
The committee added that the Government should consult on measures, such as those listed in the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) 10-point plan to cut oil use, which was drafted in response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
The IEA’s plan also included the introduction of car-free Sundays in cities, working from home three days a week and alternating car access to roads depending on licence plate numbers.
The recommendation that the government could learn something from the IEA (which has long since descended into millenarian madness when it comes to climate) should be enough to consign this report to the flames. But given the nature of Britain’s government and, for that matter, its major opposition parties, it would not be safe to assume that this will be the report’s fate. I hope that I am wrong about that: Mandating hybrid-working would be yet another blow to the economies of large cities, and driving restrictions of the type favored by the IEA are yet another reminder that the war against cars is also, to no small extent, a war against mobility. Can’t have the plebs moving around too much, y’know.
“MPs on the committee also called for a national “war effort” on energy efficiency . . .”
Of course they did. “War efforts” have a way of trumping individual liberty.
To be fair, not all the committee’s recommendations are without merit (doing more to encourage housing insulation, great; a rapid increase in nuclear-power buildout, absolutely), but the overall tenor of the report appears to be of a document written by a group of people who learned too much (and not in a good way) from the pandemic, and too little from the economic and geopolitical disaster that Europe’s climate policy-makers have done so much to enable.
Philip Dunne, the Conservative MP who chairs the committee that produced this report, argues that Britain’s energy supplies must be made sufficiently resilient to avoid the country’s ever again being “so vulnerable to the whims of brutal and autocratic regimes.” That is, of course, a worthwhile objective (so long as resilience includes a realistic assessment of what renewables can and cannot deliver) but, as things stand, it is incompatible with the pursuit of net zero, at least on its current timetable, regardless of the value (spoiler: less than zero) of the latter objective in the first place.
A mark of grown-up policy-making is facing the necessity of trade-offs. A mark of fundamentalism is the refusal to accept that necessity. Some not-unwelcome suggestions aside, this committee has little time for trade-offs but wants Britain to go even faster along a path that is making it poorer, less free, and, for the foreseeable future, more, rather than less, vulnerable to “brutal and autocratic regimes.”
That does not seem wise.