The Folly of Climate Leadership: Britain’s Net Zero Masochism and the China Mirage
It is one of the enduring marvels of political hubris that a small, deindustrialising island nation contributing less than 0.8% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions believes it can “lead the world” into abandoning fossil fuels. This belief – sincerely held by Westminster’s political elites on both the Conservative and Labour benches – has birthed an energy policy that combines moral grandstanding with economic self-harm. The outcome is a textbook case study in how virtue-signalling masquerading as “climate leadership” can hobble an economy while empowering the very geopolitical rivals it purports to outpace.
The latest manifestation of this delusion comes courtesy of Ed Miliband’s “Head of Mission Control for Clean Power by 2030”, Chris Stark. Writing in the Telegraph, Stark urged Britain to emulate China in becoming an “electrostate” – a nation powered entirely by abundant low-carbon electricity – claiming that “we ignore these changes at our peril”. Stark’s premise is as breathtaking in its naivety as it is in its selectivity. China, he tells us, is “laying vast networks of transmission lines, rolling out the world’s biggest fleet of electric vehicles and deploying solar and wind at a scale that dwarfs the rest of the world.”
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Stark staring mad.
I agree but the article could have been half the length.
The evidence is clear – British climate ‘leadership’ is a meaningless concept. In 1990, the UK emitted 0.6 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2 and, for example, China and India 2.4 Gt and 0.6 Gt respectively. By 2021, the UK figure was 0.3 Gt – i.e. a 50% reduction. That would seem to be a compelling lead. But did China and India follow suit? No, far from it: their 2021 figures were 12.5 Gt and 2.6 Gt – i.e. 421% and 333% increases.
The reality is that the idea that non-Western countries are waiting for leadership from the us betrays an embarrassing, outdated, neo-colonial frame of mind. After more than two hundred years of what’s widely seen as condescending, arrogant and often rapacious exploitation by Britain, countries such as China, India, Iran, South Korea and Indonesia understandably have little interest in following our lead and haven’t the slightest doubt that they’re quite capable of deciding for themselves and going their own way.
President Trump’s administration is on the way to removing 275,000 government jobs, as a start.
The only way Britain is going to cease all this lunacy in government energy, health, internal and external security, water, roads and so many other parts of government administration is to remove civil service jobs on an industrial scale.
That will also reduce public sector pension liabilities for the future.
Of course politicians like to have hundreds of thousands of civil servants flattering them but enough is enough. The vapourisation of the labour party awaits and a similar fate for every government that does not grip a grotesquely bloated public sector.
The great British Public has lost its patience with all this ruinously expensive nonsense!
I’m hoping that JD Vance was here on a scouting trip, and that a bid will soon emerge from him and Donald to privatise the best parts of Britain (which undoubtedly contains the Cotswolds AONB, with the exception of rabid-left Charlbury, which we can ringfence). Watch those borders close! Watch those taxes fall to zero! Watch Matron make the hospitals work! And not a Pride flag in sight…..
Dear Mr Miliband,
China is not your friend.
Yours,
A Well-Wisher
Over on Jo Nova’s blog there is a discussion of China’s ability to switch off solar panels and batteries remotely.
“In the end, the nation that lied about a pandemic, then launched hostile trade wars when we asked for answers, now potentially has access to many of our homes. It may also have control over explosive batteries and potentially could bring down our grid…”
Missing from this was the ‘smart’ meters.
The more we use the word ‘folly’, the less we use the correct word ‘scam’.
And hoax. A hoax is a deliberate attempt to deceive or to defraud.
The climate hoax is a deliberate attempt to deceive and defraud. It’s not “folly” or “incompetence”.
There is no delusion (on the part of the perpetraors of this this scam, at least).
It’s just another protection racket. The climate is going to harm you, I will protect you from it, do these things that line my pockets, you can’t opt out, it’s compulsory.
Just a protection racket.
exactly – as ever, follow the money…
A protection racket is a certain method of organized crime gangs to make money. Specifically, local businesses are forced to pay a gang for “protection” because otherwise, their premises will get vandalized by gang members.
This is obviously not applicable to climate policy at all, even when leaving the crucial difference that gang operations are illegal while state operations are legal aside.
But, on the other hand… Our Labour government is organised, it is taking our hard-earned cash in the form of taxes, to invest it in all sorts of schemes that it claims will protect us from climate change, while actually achieving nothing except make the nation less competitive, less prosperous, less stable. At the same time it is allowing us to be flooded with foreign criminals, including those who seek to destroy our culture.
It may not be protection, but it certainly is a racket. All under the banner of legality.
Correctly identified as extortion and protection racket. Government is an extortion and protection racket. It burzdly parallels Mafia and other organised crime to get its money by the use of violence or threat of violence.
Don’t believe me? Try not paying your taxes and see how far the State will go to get the money off you and what they will do to you in the process and punish your non-compliance.
It offers the citizens “protection” in various forms, such as health care, welfare, law and order. It then uses the coercive powers of the State to make them pay for this “protection” irrespective of whether the victims want it or can or prefer to provide it privately for themselves.
Everything the State now provides was once provided by the private sector with citizens choosing what they wanted.
eg 75% of British citizens had private health insurance – often including unemployment and sickness insurance – until the 1911 National Insurance Act stopped it. None of the 2 600 hospitals nationalised in 1948 by the NHS, were built by the State. Fire brigades were invented and operated by insurance companies.
Government is not an extortion and protection racket for the simple reason that it’s a legal authority and not an illegal one. It also doesn’t work like such a racket because it’s not selling specious “protection” against actions it’ll otherwise commit itself.
If you want to escape the jurisdiction of the crown in parliament¸you’ll either have to move to a territory outside of it or conquer a part of the territory claimed by it.
Legal, illegal. It’s a protection racket.
They force their protection on you and you have to pay them and obey them. No opting out. Attempts to opt out are met with violence.
The only reason that the protection rackets you call protection rackets are illegal is because there is a bigger.more powerful protection racket that makes the rules. And the only reason the bigger protection racket is “legal” is, well, because they male the rules and call themselves “legal”.
The only reason that the protection rackets you call protection rackets are illegal is because there is a bigger.more powerful protection racket that makes the rules.
Indeed. And the reason why what you call a protection racket isn’t one just because you call it a protection racket is that you’re not the bigger and more powerful entity which gets to make laws overriding those which are otherwise applicable in the territory of the United Kingdom.
This isn’t even a particular good simile because the state doesn’t operate like a protection racket: It doesn’t sell “protection” against acts of violence its otherwise going to commit. Laws about taxation are enforced in the exact same way as regulations about legal disposal of rubbish. For as long as there isn’t some kind of acute danger to the public, the state may do exactly nothing to you. It can just go to court to make its case there while you can make your own case as well. Afterwards, the court will decide who has been acting unlawfully and this decision may eventually lead to an enforcement action.
Second remark: This is also a pretty lame reinterpretation of Hobbes’ theory of the social contract all citiziens of a state implicitly agreed to in exchange for the state ending the war of all against all. Hobbes was an early theorist of the modern state as improvement over the armed anarchy of the middle ages which did actually precede it.
Seen from our perspective, this is seriously remote, however, this just demonstrates that the concept of the state as arbiter of law was a huge success.
How long before some government minister tells us that the record-breaking A-Level results are attributable to:
(i) Climate Change;
(ii) the high academic standard of all the newly-arrived budding doctors and engineers;
(iii) the resounding success of NetZero and UK leadership on the world stage
(iv) the world-class National Health Service;
(v) an educational system that is the envy of the world;
(vi) vaccination?
Stark like his boss millibrain, is a deluded idiot and a clear and present danger to the people of this country..
It has for some time now become more difficult to classify the behaviour of the entrenched political class in the UK as “folly”, and in my view the on.y explanation can be malicious, evil.
Motive? Evil is what evil does.
Net Zero is not masochisme, it’s sadism by psychopaths.
Our Net Zero Policy is the envy of the world…
🙂
I read an article a couple or so years ago that said that Chinese scientists believe that by around 2060 there will be the start of a period of global cooling.
Could that be why the Chinese are building so many coal powered energy plants? And by selling all the EV’s, solar panels etc to the idiots in the west, are making a few bucks along the way?
We really are being taken for a ride in Britain!
TLDR, sorry
It has been apparent to me at least that the primary objective of the whole AGW and climate change scam is the leftward movement of the world’s economic system. I think that is what the article is saying, so two of us then.
Problem: CO2 is causing the sky to fall
Reaction: Countryside blighted with expensive inefficient wind and solar twaddle
Solution: Demand ‘safe and effective’ nuclear power generation
That is greatly what it’s all about (and not shoveling cash at Arabs)
Clearly, as the UN says, it owns the science (around climate change). See UN Director of Communications Melissa Fleming saying exactly this at the WEF in September 2022. Ironically, the subject under discussion was Misinformation (i.e. the proliferation thereof and the need to control access to M).
https://sociable.co/government-and-policy/we-own-science-world-should-know-un-wef-disinformation/
You couldn’t make this stuff up, not even in your wildest drug addled imaginings.