Sadly we have become accustomed to the routine parade of untruths in government. But what should concern us almost as much is the peddling of ridiculous theories, misleading statistics and nonsensical arithmetic by bodies that pretend to offer some kind of independent analysis. Nowhere is this more evident than in the numerous self-styled
think-tanks and “expert” groups that set out to dispute the scientific consensus over climate science, or the relative costs of climate change versus mitigation policies.
One such has been the All Party Parliamentary Group on Fair Fuel, a lobby group composed of numerous climate sceptic MPs. (It should be noted that APPGs do not have an “official” parliamentary status and are very different from the Parliamentary Select Committees who do excellent work and produce well-researched reposts. They are in fact often just lobby groups for MPs pursuing particular agendas). I dealt with some of the “analysis” provided by this APPG in earlier posts.
THE CASE FOR ELECTRIC VEHICLES IS STRONG ENOUGH TO SURVIVE ATTACK FROM THE ICE LOBBYISTS,
and
COSTING AN ELECTRIC VEHICLE FUTURE. IGNORE THE ALARMISTS.
The latter showed the lobby report had got its numbers wrong by a factor of 50, largely because of a failure to understand either elementary physical principles of energy or the units of measurement it chose to employ.
This level of incompetence was however surpassed by another “think-tank”, Civitas, which was sufficiently shamed to withdraw its report on account of “factual errors” after a withering assessment by Simon Evans in the Guardian. Some of the “errors” in this case were of the order of millions.
How a think tank got the cost of net zero wildly wrong
Losing six or so zeros might merely be seen as carelessness. But as the Evans article demonstrates, it indicates a much deeper failure of understanding. It is failure to grasp the difference between power (kW) or capacity, on the one hand, and energy (kWh), on the other. This translates, unsurprisingly, into order of magnitude errors on cost. For those not familiar with the units used for electricity, this is akin to confusing the cost of a button with the cost of the factory that produced it.
There seem to have been other errors in the report, such as an equally inexcusable failure to understand the difference between the total cost of investments made under a particular policy, on the one hand, and the net costs or benefits of that policy as a whole.
We await with interest the revised report. Civitas, on its website, claims to “… strive to benefit public debate through independent research, reasoned argument, lucid explanation and open discussion. We stand apart from party politics ….”
Odd, then, that this report should appear immediately following Sunac’s alteration of course on UK net zero. Readers will no doubt form their own view of its “independence”, as well as the competence of its authors.
