Climate is the biggest transfer of money from the poor to the rich since Sheriff of Nottingham

The poor today are even paying to help the very rich people of 2100 get slightly richer

In a droll but scathing assessment, Matt Ridley calculates that even in a best case scenario, with the most generous estimate of how useful a wind turbine might be, the people in the UK are spending £25 billion a year to reduce global emissions of CO2 by 0.0002, or two hundredths of one percent.

At that rate, getting the world to net zero will cost £100 trillion a year – or the entire world’s economic output.

The numbers burn like the Hindenburg, yet serious people keep a straight face, like we are living in an episode of Monty Python. The Parliamentarians pretend to save the world, the scientists research a pretend world, and the media pretend to be journalists. 

Excerpts from Matt Ridley on X:

The climate boondoggle is one of the most regressive wealth transfers in history: never in the field of human commerce, or at least not since the sheriff of Nottingham, has so much tax been paid by people so poor to people so rich. Perhaps Ed Miliband is hoping that by giving lots of money to rich people, he can then impose a wealth tax on them in a sort of economic perpetual-motion machine.

There appears to be no end to his generosity to the rich. He has recently announced an increase in subsidies for electric cars, electric heating, and electricity bills, and this week he quietly let slip that he will raise the amount he pays for new wind farms and index-link the payment for an extra five years.

What’s that? You don’t have a wind farm? Bad luck. Landowners who do can trouser £150,000 per wind turbine per year in rent for twenty to thirty years. One is arguing in court that £10m a year for his wind farm is not enough. …

Ridley quotes the latest official State of the Climate Report and asks: “Where’s the horror, Ed?”

The State of the Climate Report, which he presented to Parliament last week, says only that “recent decades have been warmer, wetter and sunnier than the 20th Century,” with earlier springs and more “lawn-cutting days”. Mostly good news — unless you hate lawn-mowing. There has been more warming in winter than summer, so less frost, less snow, and fewer “heating days”: good news, given that death rates spike in cold weather much more than in hot weather.

It says we now have 10% more rain, most of it in winter, but the report can only “suggest a slight increase” in heavy rainfall while finding a “downward trend” in both average wind speed and maximum gust speed. On balance, good news. The only bad news is that sea level is rising, still very slowly – about a foot per century – but perhaps with a slight acceleration.

The inescapable pointlessness of the wind power boondoggle is there for all to see:

…Let’s do the sums: Britain produces 0.8% of the world’s emissions. Electricity supplies roughly 20% of our energy and wind supplied about 25% of our electricity last year.

Let’s be generous and assume that windmills cut emissions by maybe 60% over their lifetimes compared with gas turbines…

It follows that Britain’s wind farms are achieving a reduction of 0.008 x 0.20 x 0.25 x 0.6 = 0.0002, or two hundredths of one percent of global emissions. That is what £25 billion a year, paid by you in direct and indirect subsidies according to the Renewable Energy Foundation, is buying you. At that rate, getting the world to net zero will cost £100 trillion a year – or the entire world’s economic output.

He cites Richard Tol’s study showing that even if the world warms by (an unbelieveable) 3 degrees, global GDP will only be about 2% smaller than it would have otherwise been. And total GDP is expected to grow massively, either way.

Alternatively, if we go by the IPCC‘s business-as-usual model, and if  “…we forget about climate change and just let the fossil-fuel economy rip,” the average person will be an “astonishing 9.8 times richer in 2100 even with the effects of rapid climate change, instead of 10.4 times without it”.

Matt Ridley:

So Mr Miliband is asking you to reduce your standard of living today to save a bunch of very, very wealthy future people from being slightly less – but still very, very – wealthy. Your prosperity is sacrificed to their posterity. This is therefore yet another way in which he is transferring money from the poor to the rich. Was he Sheriff of Nottingham in a previous life?

Read it in full on X — there is a lot more — or in a somewhat edited version in the Daily Mail, which Matt warns contains errors introduced by editors while he was away.

This article originally appeared at JoNova