We’re finding out the price of net zero

Now that the cost of net zero has become a pressing political matter, I have been re-reading the prescient words of Matt Ridley in the House of Lords when, in 2019, he was one of very few who opposed the government’s ‘net zero by 2050’ pledge. ‘I was genuinely shocked,’ he said, ‘by the casual way in which the other place [the Commons] nodded through this statutory instrument, committing future generations to vast expenditure to achieve a goal that we have no idea how to reach technologically without ruining the British economy and the British landscape. We are assured without any evidence that this measure will have, “no significant… impact on business” – but where is the cost-benefit analysis on which this claim is based? Where is the impact assessment?…We are told that the Treasury will run exercises in costing the proposals after we have agreed them, but that is irrational. Who in our private lives says “Yes, we’ll sign a contract to buy a house, and only after the ink on the purchase is dry will we try to find out its price”?’ Now we are finding out the price. We cannot afford it, yet we have been knocking bits of our previous house down. We might become homeless.

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Ella Dorn

Woke was invented by angry schoolgirls

Last week, the official Buckingham Palace Instagram account @theroyalfamily promoted a film by RE:TV, an organisation which the King, as Prince of Wales, founded at Davos in 2020. It is headed ‘50 years of speeches’ and consists of famous personages – Glenn Close, Olivia Colman, Idris Elba, Woody Harrelson – reciting passages from the half-century of princely words about the perils of climate change. These are accompanied by film of giant waves, parched earth, teeming cities etc. It was released, says the Instagram post, ‘on the day that the King witnessed a “Climate Clock” begin counting down the six years which remain to act to limit global warming to 1.5