London, 29 July: As Europe’s EV industry is on the brink of economic crisis, a new study published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation documents the poor track record of governments who cherry-pick technologies in the hope of achieving a policy goal. It warns that the UK is in the process of repeating costly mistakes in the race to achieve Net Zero.
The study reveals that ‘picking winners’ has rarely been successful and almost always resulted in very costly flops.
Written by Martin Livermore, the paper reviews a range of projects from the last few decades in the UK and summarises the factors contributing to their success or failure.
Unfortunately, politicians have not learnt the lessons of these failures and are in the process of repeating mistakes in the race to achieve Net Zero.
The study then reviews current Net Zero projects, in particular:
* electricity generation and storage
* carbon capture and storage
* heat pumps for domestic heating
* electric vehicles as replacements for the internal combustion engine.
Martin Livermore warns:
“In each case, top-down targets have been set and a predetermined route set out, with taxpayers’ money used to drive consumer acceptance of technologies that are otherwise uneconomic. A far better use of resources for both the UK population and, in the longer term, for citizens across the world, is to set broad top-level goals and enable competition between technologies and companies so that better, more economic solutions can be developed.”
Marin Livermore: Picking Winners (PDF)
