silverguide.site –

The net zero consensus is crumbling – that is the background to the open letter addressed to me last week from 60 well-intentioned but misguided clerics (Church leaders criticise Christian owner of GB News over channel’s climate attacks, 26 March). I share their concerns for stewardship of the planet and their belief in the importance of human flourishing. I also agree that the planet is in a gradual warming phase and that carbon emissions have contributed to this.

Where we differ is on their policy response. Calling for an end to fossil fuels is an impractical and ideological policy position that leads to the emasculation of our main sources of energy at the expense of millions of jobs. It is subject to what is called a collective action problem. Net zero might work for the UK if the whole world had signed up to same timeline. However, India and China have very different and distant schedules. And now that the US has left the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UK is left pursuing a path of unilateral economic disarmament.

UK industrial electricity costs are now two and a half to three times those of China, and four times those of the US. This is destroying the competitiveness of our energy-intensive industries, from steel through oil refining and chemicals to automobiles. It is also ruining our competitiveness in the industries of the future, most notably AI. Thousands of people are losing their jobs in our industrial heartlands as factories are closed and investment withdrawn. This is the very opposite of human flourishing.

Perhaps most worrying is the impact on elderly and poor people, who not only suffer from depressed incomes but also cripplingly high energy costs. It is estimated that there were 2,500 excess deaths last year among elderly people who could not afford to heat their homes.

All policies have trade-offs. Our clerical friends are proposing that the working people of this country suffer very real personal costs in the hope that this will reduce global warming. It won’t.
Paul Marshall
Chair, Marshall Wace; personal investor in GB News

• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.