Massive governmental undertakings, save perhaps wars where national survival is at stake, often fail.
There are several reasons for this. One is that the politicians and administrations change; a project expected to take decades may be initiated in one administration, dropped or greatly de-prioritized in the next, and then ramped back up in a third — causing these projects to grow as huge houses of cards, just waiting for the slightest nudge to come crashing down. Add to that the fact that, sadly, we are increasingly seeing elected representative governments, like the United States and the United Kingdon, descend into kakistocracy, as public service so rarely attracts the best and the brightest in this day and age.
In one such example, the United Kingdom's government is worrying that they won't make their self-defined carbon emissions goals, so they are using an accounting trick to kick the can down the road.
Thanks in no small part to Covid, the U.K. cut emissions by more than it was legally required to in the last five year-round.
Now U.K. government officials are actively looking at “carrying forward” these surplus emissions to the next five-year budget period.
It’s an accounting trick that would effectively give the U.K. headroom to pollute more in the years ahead without breaching its own rules.
But climate experts argue it’s a bureaucratic wheeze that could further dent Britain’s global climate reputation — and fails to really factor in how the planet works.
“Cashing in ‘phantom credits’ wouldn’t change our international commitments,” said Dustin Benton, policy director at the Green Alliance think tank. “It just means we’d need to double the rate at which we cut emissions later this decade, making the job much harder.”
That, in fact, is the very definition of kicking the can down the road. Dustin Benton, whatever his thoughts on other areas of the whole climate change hooraw, is precisely right on the emissions credits things being a false hope; it's much like Al Gore's famous "carbon offsets," which were nothing more than the substance one often finds behind the north end of a southbound bull — except that they did achieve their primary purpose, further enriching Al Gore.
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While the UK's emissions dropped during COVID (along with everything else), they are now facing a problem; that can they are kicking down the road is soon to be stuck against the curb.
But ministers are already off track to hit the U.K.’s big 2030 emissions reduction target, according to analysis by the same watchdog. The position would be jeopardized further if carbon budgets are weakened “on a technicality,” the CCC has said.
The CCC warned that any attempt to slacken the next budget, which will cover emissions between 2023 and 2027, poses “a very serious risk” to future green goals.
But wait! There's more! They are also falling behind on transportation and heating technology goals.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak rolled back other key climate deadlines last fall, including a slower transition to new electric vehicles and delaying plans to ban off-grid oil boilers by almost a decade.
They aren't just kicking the can down the road. The UK's government is kicking that can into a house of cards that is standing atop an enormous straw man, that being the faulty assumption that the UK's government perfectly understands the enormous, complex, utterly chaotic systems and subsystems that are the Earth's climate. Sooner or later that can will hit the straw man and the whole thing will come down.
I won't say that the climate never changes. It always has, and it always will. As recently as 50 million years ago, during the Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum, the earth was quite a bit warmer than it is now, with tropical forests covering much of Europe and the poles ice-free. Humans could have lived fairly comfortably then, even with all the titanotheres driving around in their fossil-fueled SUVs. And we can live through whatever happens next, as well — at least as far as climate is concerned. Do humans have an effect? Of course — everything affects everything else if you're willing to calculate it to enough significant figures. The question these politicians — and too many of our own — are not answering is: "Will it be worth the cost?"
What Britain is doing is doomed to fail. They are already missing goals and having to resort to smoke and mirrors to make it look like their plans may still bear fruit. But the farther down this road they go, the farther they will have to kick that can out in front of them — until it either hits a curb or goes down a storm drain, leaving the ministers of the UK to try to figure out how much of the British taxpayer's money they have wasted.
