Now that the cost of net zero has become a pressing political matter, I have been re-reading the prescient words of Matt Ridley in the House of Lords when, in 2019, he was one of very few who opposed the government’s ‘net zero by 2050’ pledge. ‘I was genuinely shocked,’ he said, ‘by the casual way in which the other place [the Commons] nodded through this statutory instrument, committing future generations to vast expenditure to achieve a goal that we have no idea how to reach technologically without ruining the British economy and the British landscape.