Enough of the pretence. The current path threatens our economy, society and democracy, and we urgently need a change of direction.

Political obituaries will not be kind to Theresa May. But there is one unwritten law of modern British politics the former prime minister understood: you can be wrong on climate change, provided you are wrong in the right way.

Whisper that net zero by 2050 will have deleterious social and economic costs, and accusations of “denialism” will swiftly follow. Yet warn that the “house is on fire” and the end time is at hand, and you’ll probably be given a book deal. The Telegraph has the story.

Not only did May commit the UK to the 2050 target, but in the years since she has doggedly called for the Government to move faster. Last year, just months before we became the first economy to halve emissions since 1990, she claimed we were “falling behind”.  

Such attitudes are commonplace – and it will only get worse. Pity the prime minister in charge in 2033, when the sixth “Carbon Budget” kicks in, or in 2035, when electricity will apparently be fully decarbonised. A gulf now lies between the wishful thinking of the political class and economic reality, yet still the discourse is dominated by doomsday language and a worrying desire to silence dissent.

Consider the words of Climate Change Committee (CCC) boss Chris Stark, when asked for clarity over claims of a “mistake” (which it has denied) made by the body. “How’s this,” he told his team, “kill it with some technical language.” Like the clergy greedily collecting tithes from peasants unable to understand Latin, the green Blob seem to assume an unsuspecting public can be confused or shamed – usually both – into compliance.

The CCC, set up to advise government on climate policies, is useful to elected leaders eager to grandstand without taking responsibility or accountability for the choices they make for us. It allowed politicians to bypass the opportunity to scrutinise the 2050 target because they relied on the CCC’s apparently unchallengeable assessment that net zero was “necessary, feasible, cost-effective” and “achievable with known technologies”.

Yet in December, the OECD warned that the shift will leave our economy £60 billion – or 1.65 per cent – smaller. The idea that the green economy will lead to a jobs boom ignores the redundancies in those sectors that can never ride the net-zero wave, while the suggestion that the UK will be more prosperous and secure is difficult to square with our growing reliance on other countries for gas, oil, steel and the manufactures they rely on. It is time politicians ended the delusion that the current, top-down, centrally-planned approach to decarbonisation is the right one, and can be delivered at low cost.

Read the full story here.