Our World in Data (and many others) tell us that wind and solar have fallen dramatically to well below the cost of coal- and gas-fired electricity. But their data look suspect for anyone who remembers the wholesale price of electricity in the mid-2000s. The claims for wind and solar have received a lot of well-justified scrutiny. They are nonsense. In this article, we look at another element - the cost of coal-fired electricity. It has apparently remained almost constant at around $110/MWh from 2009 to 2019. In reality, it was a fraction of that in 2009. The cost of coal has varied dramatically over the period, which will have produced much more variation in the cost of coal-fired generation than indicated by OWiD's misleading charts. When you look at how the costs and shares of various electricity technologies have varied over the period, it is impossible to square the claimed costs with the volumes and prices (wholesale and retail).

We can't falsify claims about the future until we get there. If those in power justify bad policy on the basis of questionable "pathways", we can't beat them by claiming to know better about the future. But we do know that the pathways are highly uncertain. And we know that dirigisme is a bad approach to policy where there is a great deal of uncertainty and complexity. We don't need a better crystal ball to counter the bad policy. We just need to show that the uncertainty is such that we should rely on emergent order and discovery, rather than human-imposed order and central planning. Net Zero is an extreme case of bad policy based on uncertain expectations; some of them so uncertain that they haven't even been invented yet. We should not be planning a path to a particular outcome (Net Zero 2050). We should be internalising the externality (i.e. polluter pays) so that the climate impact is factored into our choices, and seeing what emerges as a result.

BP's Statistical Review of World Energy is widely used as a reference source for energy statistics. Sadly, it turns out that BP's bias as an oil company leads it to distort the data badly. Their categorisation seems to lead to ignoring biomass heat, the largest use of biomass. Consequently, they significantly underestimate biomass's share of primary energy supplies.

Clean energy advocates think we can use the batteries in an electrified road transport system to balance the supply of intermittent renewable electricity with the demand for electricity, including electrified heat and transport. They are wrong. It can work to a small extent, but it barely touches the sides of the problem.

The Renewables Obligation, Renewable Heat Incentive and Feed-in-Tariffs renewable subsidy mechanisms generated nearly 150 different implicit carbon prices, from 1 to 300 p/kgCO2e (see linked chart). And there were plenty of other implicit carbon prices generated by other mechanisms. There should be only one.

The West is often asked to take on a greater share of the burden of decarbonisation, because of the climate debt it owes for centuries of carbon emissions. But do the sins of the father deserve to be visited on the children in this case?

Green armchair experts see interseasonal energy storage as the technology that will bring their plans together, and think it is just a matter of investment and technological progress. Most sceptics also think it's about technology, but believe there are insuperable technical barriers. In reality, the main barrier is economic not technical. We explore this fundamental economic challenge with reference to a recent announcement regarding one of the more promising technologies.

The IEA's data on China suggests that there has been minimal growth in its carbon emissions since 2011. Advocates of wind, solar and nuclear like to claim this as a triumph for their technologies, but they are actually an insignificant component. Climate sceptics point at the continued growth of coal-fired generation and assume that China's emissions must still be increasing. The truth is more interesting. China appears to have been moving its industry away from coal towards gas, allowing the leeway to increase coal-fired generation without increasing overall consumption. In the process (and, one assumes, the key driver), they are probably significantly improving their notoriously-poor air quality, as the coal-fired power stations are likely to be equipped with much better back-end cleanup equipment than small/old industrial coal burners. The competence and pragmatism of the Chinese approach compared to the incompetence and dogmatism of Western decarbonisation policy suggests lessons for the developed world.

A carbon price internalises the externality and allows the market to take account of the social cost of participants' choices. If there are other externalities, they should be internalised by their own mechanisms. If government has erected inappropriate barriers (e.g. regulations), then the inappropriate aspects should be redressed. Governments should not intervene to address barriers that are neither externalities nor unnecessary barriers of its own creation, but rather simple commercial obstacles. Sadly, governments intervene so much to help the winners they have picked that it is nonsensical to combine such a skewed environment with a mechanism like carbon pricing whose raison d'etre is to avoid the skewing. Yet economists (even ones as senior as Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Professor Nick Stern, the Lord Stern of Brentford) are happy to oblige governments' rent-rewarding habits by pretending that the carbon price can and should be calculated taking into account the winner-picking interventions. The result is a nonsense carbon price that misleads policymakers and market players.

Green technology evangelists argue that solar electricity will continue to experience exponential learning curves forever. Experience of other technologies that experienced similar learning curves at an earlier date (under the UK's first support mechanism: NFFO) is that they eventually stop - things do not keep getting cheaper forever. The evangelists rely on absurd assumptions to make this case: if solar capacity doubles 5 times from here as they envisage, it will be 2.5X more than total generating capacity of all technologies in the world at present!

In 2009, National Grid and Ernst & Young published a report on "The Potential for Renewable Gas in the UK", which claimed that by 2020, biomethane should make up at least 5% of our gas supplies, and could be 18% at a stretch (nearly 50% of domestic gas). In the event, biomethane makes up 0.7% of UK gas supplies in 2020. The projections were absurd, and obviously motivated by commercial interest, yet they were widely cited, including by government, and influenced policy. We explore in this report the evidence that the projections were not credible at the time, and the impact of this successful rent-seeking effort.

Labour's energy and climate-change proposals in their 2019 manifesto are vastly more expensive than they recognise - probably £1bn by 2030 and £1.5-2bn ASAP in the 2030s. This spending would reduce carbon emissions by less than 50% by 2030. One unintended consequence is that, despite so much infrastructure spending, electricity supply would occasionally be insufficient to meet the radically increased demand.