The IEA Book Club will be hosting an upcoming event with Ross Clark on his latest book, “Not Zero: How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won’t Even Save the Planet)”. This event will take place on Tuesday 13th June from 17:30 – 19:30 at the IEA Westminster offices. Chairing this event will be Andy Mayer (IEA Chief Operating Officer and Energy Analyst).

The British government has embarked on an ambitious and legally-binding climate change target: reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions to Net Zero by 2050. The Net Zero policy was subject to almost no parliamentary or public scrutiny, and is universally approved by our political class. But what will its consequences be?

Ross Clark argues that it is a terrible mistake, an impractical hostage to fortune which will have massive downsides. Achieving the target is predicated on the rapid development of technologies that are either non-existent, highly speculative or untested. Clark shows that efforts to achieve the target will inevitably result in a huge hit to living standards, which will clobber the poorest hardest, and gift a massive geopolitical advantage to hostile superpowers such as China and Russia. The unrealistic and rigid timetable it imposes could also result in our committing to technologies which turn out to be ineffective, all while distracting ourselves from the far more important objective of adaptation.

This hard-hitting polemic provides a timely critique of a potentially devastating political consensus which could hobble Britain’s economy, cost billions and not even be effective.

Ross Clark is a journalist who writes extensively for the Spectator, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and for many other publications. For many years he wrote the Thunderer column on the Times.
Ross is also the bestselling author of How to Label a Goat: The silly rules and regulations that are strangling Britain, The Road to Southend Pier: One man’s struggle against the surveillance society, A Broom Cupboard of One’s Own: The housing crisis and how to solve it, and The Great Before, a satire on the anti-globalisation movement.

This event is exclusively for IEA Book Club members. For more information on the Book Club, please click the link here or get in touch at bookclub@iea.org.uk.