War is a choice, not an inevitability

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One of the policies which seems to be increasingly common ground between the Tories and Reform Ltd is opposition to the target of becoming carbon neutral, or reaching net zero in terms of carbon emissions. It’s a policy platform which seems to be implicitly underpinned by two very curious beliefs.

The first is that expenditure on achieving neutrality is in some way consuming wealth whilst continued exploitation of fossil fuels is generating wealth. It is, of course, complete and utter piffle. If we measure wealth in terms of GDP (or GVA), what money is spent on is irrelevant. It is the act of spending it which adds to GDP; money spent in insulating properties adds as much to GDP as the same amount of money spent on drilling for oil – and that’s true whether the spending is in the public sector or the private sector. There might be an argument that multiplier effects mean that spending on X rather than Y ultimately generates more GDP per £ spent. I actually don’t know the answer in this specific case, but it’s interesting to note that it’s not an argument they are trying to make. I rather suspect that they are conflating two different kinds of wealth – national wealth as represented by GDP and private wealth as reflected in the bank balances of individuals and companies. I’m sure, though, that this conflation has nothing to do with the fact that both parties rely heavily on donations from established players in established sectors, such as oil and gas. Not.

The second curious belief is that if nothing gets spent on achieving net zero, the whole amount of any projected expenditure becomes a net saving, and makes money available for other things. Their favourite other things are tax cuts for the wealthy and/or channelling expenditure into donor companies, such as those in the armaments industry. Badenoch’s statement today is a classic of the genre. I suppose that, if they really believe that climate change is not happening at all, then it would be a reasonable belief, although that would be flying in the face of overwhelming scientific opinion. I’m not sure that they really do believe that, though; reading some of what they say, it seems more likely that they believe that we can and will somehow adapt to climate change. The costs of that, they simply ignore – a problem for another day.

Badenoch would clearly prefer war to addressing climate change, which I suppose puts her on the same page as Farage and Starmer. There is, though, more to the cost of war than diverting the finite resources of planet Earth into weapons of destruction. There is the obvious cost of loss of human lives (although they would probably all prefer to see that as a loss of a productive labour force). There’s also the lost opportunities which such diversion of resources would entail – the opportunity to provide a decent standard of living for all, for instance. Badenoch is making it clear that she thinks that austerity (obviously not for her section of society) is a price worth paying in order to prepare for all out war with Russia. And then there’s probably the biggest cost of all: in the event of surviving such a war, the cost of reconstruction would be enormous.

There is one point about which she is right. Governments face choices. Whether the constraint on what governments can do is the availability of money (as she, Starmer and Farage all insist that they believe) or the availability of physical resources (as economic reality dictates), governments still have to choose between options for using that money or those resources. Badenoch is making her choice clear – war. And she’s being aided and abetted by politicians and military types urging the same choice on an almost daily basis. There is an alternative, though: we really don’t have to allow them to make that choice.