By Ted Vibert
I WOULD like readers of this article to join me in an exercise in business logic by imagining that they are on the board of directors of a large manufacturing company that makes and sells 300 million tins of baked beans each year, on which they make a profit of £1 on every tin sold.
But sales this year are slower than usual and the managing director had previously convinced the board to spend £300 million on every form of advertising that he could think of to boost sales and maintain market share.
At this meeting which you are attending, the board of directors has been given the results of how much this expenditure of £300 million has increased sales. They have gone up by a minuscule 0.0008%, or 2,400 extra tins of baked beans and a subsequent increase of £2,400 to add to the company’s total revenue of £300 million.
Would you allow the managing director to remain in office after such a disastrous and crippling result, which could well plunge the company into bankruptcy as a result of such a foolish and irresponsible approach?
Yet that is what Deputy Ward and fellow travellers have condemned the Island to by persuading the States to embark on a policy of Jersey being compelled to be ‘carbon neutral’ by 2030, albeit that this was later revised to 2050.
To achieve this lofty and absurd aim will mean that no new cars, vans, trucks, buses or tractors that run on fossil fuels (petrol or diesel) will be available to be purchased after 2030. No heating system powered by oil or gas in a house or flat will be allowed and the buildings must be fully insulated.
A person who wants to replace his vehicle must choose one powered by electricity or any other system that may have been invented by then that does not rely on fossil fuel. If you are a house owner, you will also have to fully insulate your home.
And if you have oil-fired or gas central heating, that will have to be replaced – either by electricity or by heat pumps. The average price of an electric car is put at north of £30,000 (and it will be some years before a second-hand one will become available) by which time the battery may well be clapped out and a new one will cost thousands more.
Another complication is that Jersey has over 100,000 registered vehicles and these have to be disposed of. Somehow, somewhere.
In addition to all this, it could cost up to £8,000 to insulate a normal three-bedroom home and to change over from oil or gas to electric heating could cost £5,000 and more, and a heat-pump system even more at today’s prices.
And why is this all going to happen? It’s all in the name of ‘climate change’.
Thanks to Reform Jersey, the States decided that it was necessary for the people of the Island to rid themselves of many of the inventions that have created our modern society and which have changed the way we live compared to a 100 years ago and made our lives so much easier than yesteryear.
Unfortunately, all of these brilliant inventions have also been available to the rest of the world and scientists have now agreed that this has led to millions of tons of hidden gases being belched into the atmosphere by this modernisation.
The scientific evidence clearly shows that this dramatic change in human activity around the world is altering the climate. It is causing the ice cover to melt, which will push up sea levels and flood low-lying parts of the world. It is creating massive wildfires to ignite the world’s forests and is causing torrential rain, leading rivers to break their banks creating widespread flooding and subsequent misery around the globe.
The world now knows that unless the planet’s great emitters of these gases can convince their inhabitants to alter their habits, things will get much worse. The top ten emitters are China, America, EU countries, India, Indonesia, Russia, Brazil, Japan, Germany and South Korea. The UK is down to 17th on the list.
Jersey’s contribution is so minuscule that it doesn’t rate anywhere on any list (our tiny total is included in the UK’s figures).
We now know that the latest estimate for the cost of achieving the States’ target of reducing to zero the amount of greenhouse gases we emit by 2030 is likely to be £300 million.
Car and property owners will get some of this money but they are also going to face some hefty personal bills to change their lifestyles.
The people of Jersey are also going to face some serious financial situations as the States will have to find the £300 million to reduce the world’s greenhouse gases by 0.0008%.
Is that a price worth paying, for such a minuscule reduction? This won’t even touch the sides of the problem at a time when we are still recovering from the pandemic, we need to find a massive amount of money to build our new hospital, our sewerage system needs £64 million spent on it, we are facing a cost-of-living crisis that is going to get worse as interest rates rise and we have an imminent serious crisis in our home-care system? What the States are doing is the equivalent of the analogy I gave earlier about the company and their efforts to increase their sales of tins of beans – utterly nonsensical.
Jersey’s financial path is guided by an independent group of top UK economists who form the Fiscal Policy Panel and they report each year on decisions that the States make – or should make – and generally guide our financial affairs.
In their report for last year, under the heading ‘long-term fiscal considerations’, they advised the following: ‘Expert analysis produced for the States Assembly in 2019 suggests achieving net zero by 2030 would cost between £60m and £360m… the Climate Emergency Fund will not be sufficient to finance the transition to net zero. The Funding Strategy will need to consider careful use of both taxes and expenditure to create the right economic incentives to deliver net zero.’ So stand by for more charges and tax increases to add to our financial burdens.
When I have raised all of this with some States Members who approved the whole sorry saga I have been told that ‘every little helps’, or ‘we must set an example to the world’ or ‘we must show that we can punch our weight on the global scene’ and I have to wonder what planet they are living on.
If we feel we have to do all that, there is one way that we can satisfy those who believe we have a moral duty to assuage our consciences and that is to offer the UK a donation the equivalent of 0.0008% of the annual States revenue of £960 million towards their funds to combat climate change. I’ll leave you to work it out. It ain’t much – but every little counts.
And we could then live happily ever after.
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Ted Vibert can be contacted on tedvibertt@gmail.com.
