The Climate Change Committee is living in cloud cuckoo land

Energy bills may be going up and the economy may be flatlining, but not for long. Thankfully, the government’s Climate Change Committee has the answer. In a press release introducing the committee’s Seventh Carbon Budget, published this morning, interim chair Piers Forster declares: ‘The committee is delighted to be able to present a good news story about how the country can decarbonise while also creating savings across the country.’ By 2040, when the CCC sees the UK’s carbon emissions falling by 87 per cent on their 1990 level, the cost of heating and lighting our homes is going to fall by £716 a year and the cost of running a car by £699.

Surely never has such a Panglossian document been put before the public by an arm of government. The CCC has progressed from making what a committee of MPs called ‘heroic assumptions’ into the realm of outright fantasy. The report can’t even describe the current situation accurately, so why we should believe its projections for 15 years’ time?

The report tells us, for example, that ‘for many technologies (including solar, wind turbines, and batteries) consistent and rapid cost reductions have been seen over the past 20 years’ – which will come as news to the civil servants who ran the government’s auction for offshore wind in September 2023 and received not a single bid.