The disaster we are headed for this winter represents a failure of policy under successive governments going back decades. The fact that much of Europe is in the same boat – and that poor Germany is hardly in the boat, but sticking its fingers to the guns – is no consolation. Like their counterparts in other Western countries, our leaders are now trying to make up for the mistakes of the past. More nuclear power plants are under discussion. The ban on shale gas extraction is being reviewed. There is sudden attention to potential new sources of clean fuel, from hydrogen to fusion. All good things. Too late. You can’t build a nuclear power plant in less than five years. Even fracking takes about ten months to come online – and that’s assuming you’ve cleared all the programming hurdles first. Hydrogen has enormous potential and what Britain is doing with fusion, particularly at the Atomic Energy Authority’s Culham facility, is staggering. We may be less than two decades away from solving all our energy problems. But none of this will get us through next winter, when average household fuel bills are set to rise to over £4000. How did we allow ourselves to become so vulnerable? Disruption in global energy markets was hardly unthinkable. Most of the world’s hydrocarbons are buried under countries with bad governments. For every Alberta, there are a dozen Iranians. for every Norway, a dozen Nigeria. There is even a theory, first floated by Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, the Venezuelan energy minister who founded OPEC, that the very fact of having oil turns a country into a dysfunctional dictatorship. We have seen wars, blockades and revolutions in all petrodollar economies. We knew supply disruption was always a possibility. And it wasn’t almost like Vladimir Putin was hiding the nature of his regime, for heaven’s sake. No, we’re in this mess because, for most of the twenty-first century, we ignored economic reality in pursuit of theatrics of decarbonization. Actually, no, that’s underestimating our stupidity. Decarbonisation will eventually happen as alternative energy sources become cheaper than fossil fuels. It is right for governments to seek to accelerate this process. But this goes far beyond emitting less CO2. Our spiritual and cultural leaders – television producers, novelists, bishops, many – see fuel consumption itself as a problem. What they want is not green growth, but less growth. As Amory Lovins, perhaps the most prominent writer involved in divestment from fossil fuels, put it in 1970: “If you ask me, it would be a little catastrophic for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.” The idea that cheaper energy is a positive good – that it reduces poverty and gives people more leisure time – has almost completely disappeared. We have convinced ourselves that if it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t work. The reason we are so easily drawn into the ban and rationing debate is not just that lockdown has left us more ready to be woken up. It is that we have come to regard the use of power as a sinful indulgence. But raising the price of energy is not something we can do alone. When electricity becomes more expensive, so does everything else. Fuel is not just one of many products. It is the agent of exchange, the engine of efficiency, the agent of economic development. When was the last time you heard a politician admit as much? When have you heard a public figure extolling cheap energy as a poverty alleviator? When did you ever hear any historian describe how coal and later oil freed the mass of humanity from destructive drudgery and led to the abolition of slavery? For ten thousand years, the primary source of energy was human muscle power, and emperors on every continent found ways to harness and exploit their fellow humans. But why bother with slaves when you can use a barrel of the sticky black stuff to do the work of a hundred men – and without having to be fed or housed? The reason no one says these things (except Matt Ridley) is, to put it bluntly, that it’s unfashionable. The high-level view is that we’re brutalizing Gaia, that politicians are in direct contact with Big Oil, and that we should all learn to get by with less – a view that’s especially easy to adopt if you’ve spent lockdown you get paid to stay in your garden and have no desire to go back to commuting. Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and the various anti-capitalist caretakers are openly and unashamedly anti-development. For them, low-cost energy has lured humanity away from the closed, local economies they want. As Paul Ehrlich, the father of modern green, put it in 1975: “Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. With cheap, abundant energy, there would clearly be an attempt to pave, develop, industrialize and exploit every last bit of the planet.” The Tories don’t put it that way, of course, not even for themselves. But they are still being carried away by the cultural currents of the time. So they find ways to rationalize higher taxes, higher spending and anti-market measures that they would normally have little truck with. Typically, they do so by playing up the economic opportunities that green technology is supposed to bring. Boris Johnson extols them with such gusto that he honestly seems to have convinced himself. But it’s pure hogwash. If such opportunities really existed, investors would find them without the need for the state to ban some fuel sources and subsidize others. Green growth is a fallacy for the same reason that, as Frédéric Bastiat showed in 1850, you cannot make a city richer by breaking its shop windows. This can create immediate growth – nominal GDP often rises sharply after a natural disaster – but every penny the shopkeeper spends on new storefronts (both from the glass that now has extra income, and from the people he buys from and .etc on) is a penny that would have been more usefully spent without the breaks. Likewise, every penny spent on green “investment” is a penny taken out of the productive economy through taxation. None of this is to say that governments should not pursue climate change mitigation. It should. I just wish they’d admit it’s expensive to do. Green jobs are a cost, not a benefit. If you banned the use of diggers and instead had rows of workers with sticks, you could argue that you had “created” jobs. but you would have made everyone worse. Conservatives must approach climate change neither masochistically nor messianically, but calmly, transactionally, hard-nosed. If there is good reason to believe that technological advances will lead to a sharp reduction in costs, then let the timeline roll accordingly. If something more urgent comes up, then, likewise, make a cool assessment of where your priorities lie. When the coronavirus hit, many fiscal targets were abandoned on the grounds that there was a more immediate crisis. The current energy deficit should prompt a similar reassessment. Consider this. The transition from relatively dirty coal to relatively clean gas required very little government involvement. The Thatcher government simply withdrew subsidies and allowed the market to do its job. Carbon emissions were reduced and the air became cleaner. Since then, however, we have had a much more interventionist approach, with price caps and green levies and subsidies for consumers and subsidies for producers and bans on new technologies (especially fracking). Result? Prices have gone up and supply has gone down – to the point where, like some South American dictatorship, we’re going to order our population to get by on less. Please, ministers, stop trying to help. Stop spending and taxing and printing. Stop fines and subsidies and restriction. Stop the ban and rationing. Stop setting goals. We’ve had enough of being helped. We need time to heal.
