Committee on Climate Change’s Net Zero advice to government is "a political suicide note"

The Sixth Carbon Budget outlines how the government can achieve Net Zero and at what cost. Claims by the CCC that the cost of Net Zero will be surprisingly low are based on  assumptions that are not credible. Other economic analysis reveals that the decarbonisation of  electricity, housing and public transport alone is estimated to cost more than £3 trillion in the next three decades.The central cost assumptions used in the Sixth Carbon Budget are divorced from reality: some of them out by several hundred percent, meaning that the claim that we can decarbonise painlessly doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Offshore wind is twice as expensive as the CCC assumes and two to four times more expensive to operate. The resulting electricity will be many, many times more expensive than is claimed, making the use of heat pumps and Electric Vehicles  unaffordable. Worse still, the CCC itself admits that all it has done is accept the generation cost estimates of the  Department of Business. Far from being an independent advisor, the CCC is nothing more than a passive and uncritical sock puppet repeating government nonsense. Dr Prieser warned that the 6th Carbon Budget is sales-talk designed to fool the public into signing on the dotted line and sacrificing their futures and those of their families. The CCC analysis is an attempt to conceal true costs and trick the public into committing to a policy that will ruin lives across society, with truly terrible effects on low income households.Every time someone has to buy a high-price heat pump rather than a cheap gas-fired boiler, every time they are forced to replace their cheap car with an expensive electric one and every time they get their ever more expensive electricity bill, they will remember who lied to them about the cost of Net Zero.This plan is a political suicide note. Any party supporting this economic and social disaster will be punished ruthlessly at the polls in coming elections.