UK ex-finance minister warns PM of net-zero carbon costs

Former UK Conservative finance minister Nigel Lawson has warned the prime minister, Boris Johnson, that the official £1.4 trillion ($1.9 trillion) cost of achieving net zero carbon by 2050 is likely to be at most a half and possibly a third of the real figure. He advised him to find more balanced advisors and economists than those now offering advice.

The government is preparing to host the UN COP26 summit in November this year, but the actual costs taxpayers must shoulder have been skated over as they are expected to be extremely heavy, on top of other bills following the state's mitigation of COVID-19 effects.

In a July 30 letter published by the privately-funded organisation Global Warming Policy Foundation, of which he is director, Lawson congratulated Johnson on his reported decision to delay the ban on new gas boilers for homes by five years.

But this is only the start of such back-tracks, he said, unless Johnson used more reliable estimates than those produced by the independent body Climate Change Committee (CCC).

Johnson's own government's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) also produced unreliable estimates, he said. "Analysis of offshore wind farm accounts shows that costs, far from falling, remain virtually unchanged over the last ten years. It is now clear that electricity prices, which have doubled since the advent of the Renewables Obligation, will double again unless you change course soon.

"British households are still threatened with a burden of net zero costs that is simply unaffordable: an additional cost of £10-12,000 for buying an electric vehicle and an estimated £7,000/household for upgrading the electricity distribution grid. And that is just to scratch the surface of what will be necessary," he said. "Each time you accept the advice of the CCC or BEIS without scrutiny, you will be forced to reverse course as soon as the real costs hit home and public anger results." 

Last month, Oxford University energy economist Dieter Helm told a parliamentary committee investigating the UK's  regulatory framework for achieving net zero carbon that politicians – and not only those in the UK – were not being straight with the electorate about the cost.