Ending Net Zero Doesn’t Mean Replacing One Doomsday Scenario With Another

In the Telegraph yesterday, an editorial only somewhat rightly claims: ‘The global scramble for cheap energy exposes Britain’s folly.’ Other governments, it observes, are making moves to correct the green agenda. “Trump has acted to strengthen America’s role in energy markets,” it explains, “by contrast the British Government seemingly does everything in its power to worsen our energy position.” The framing here is security, based largely around events in Ukraine, Venezuela and China, and it has two major flaws. First, the newspaper’s desire to get Britain further entangled in geopolitics is no positive answer to Net Zero nonsense – it just trades one urgent necessity for some other form of moral blackmail. Second, it might just as well make the argument for more wind and solar farms on the same basis. The proper answer to the green agenda needs to understand green ideology in its entirety.

What is the green agenda? For some sceptics, it is simply that somehow, some bad science got into the political process. On this view, once climate science’s errors are corrected, we can return to business-as-usual. But a deeper, longer and broader view of the green movement reveals that to be a misapprehension. The biggest flaws in the green agenda preceded climate alarmism and persisted. The neo-Malthusian end-of-the-world demographic predictions of the 1970s failed, but were rescued by global warming hypotheses in the 1980s and 90s.


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Jon Garvey
3 months ago

“Wanted – Eastern Dictator willing to occupy Britain and invest several trillion dollars in a recovery plan for its post industrial poverty. All offers gratefully received.”

LadbrokeGrove
LadbrokeGrove
3 months ago
Reply to  Jon Garvey

Or a western leader?

James.M
James.M
3 months ago
Reply to  LadbrokeGrove

I can think of one!

Gezza England
Gezza England
3 months ago
Reply to  James.M

Orban of Hungary perhaps.

ComradeSvelte
ComradeSvelte
3 months ago
Reply to  Jon Garvey

I have thigh length leather boots, a small moustache and enjoy marching up and down…. Shirley I qualify!

rms
rms
3 months ago

Excellent Piece. Well done.

sskinner
3 months ago

The Club of Rome is a good place to start, but we might as well go back to Karl Marx while we are at it.

Ben Pile
Ben Pile
3 months ago
Reply to  sskinner

Marxists/communists, until the mid C20th, at least *wanted* factories and farms, and believed that they could unleash more productive capacity than capitalism. Latterly, it is both communists and capitalists that do not believe in industry or even in wealth.

varmint
3 months ago
Reply to  Ben Pile

Except they are not really capitalists as such anymore. That has all been replaced with Stakeholder Capitalism and ESG point scoring. Capitalsim has morphed from being a tool for wealth creation into being a weapon for ideological enforcement.

RW
RW
3 months ago
Reply to  Ben Pile

Many of the latter a probably (not-so-)former communists (of the 1960 and 1970s) who made a fortune in the capitalist economy (or inherited one from someone who did).

kev
kev
3 months ago

We live in the era of the “Omni-crisis”, until we remove the imbeciles in charge (of whatever stripe) we will be forced to live through one or more crises at any given time.

If the majority ceased being terrified of “something”, where might they instead direct their focus? Maybe on those causing all the problems, divisions and orchestrated crises?

The media are very much a massive part of this, the true purveyors of fake news, misinformation and disinformation, also its what they suppress and don’t report – with few exceptions they are utter scum.

The most hated people right now should be the politicians and the media, and any “celebrity” that support and/or champion their narratives and agenda’s.

varmint
3 months ago

Energy Policy all across the western world (except Trumps America) is dominated by one thing. –CLIMATE CHANGE. Not because it is all true, but because it has become unchallengeable. To challenge this dogma is to be ostracised, and branded as a planet hating “denier” of science. Climate Change has become a belief system where ordinary weather patterns are now proof of a catastrophe, and public are being indoctrinated and trained to fear what is supposedly coming. This is an engineered and manufactured fear. To halt this inevitable “climate emergency” governments following the UN/WEF lead made emissions targets like Net Zero without ever explaining to the public what this would actually acheive, other than astronomical electricity prices, energy poverty and the destruction of the Industrial Base. These targets are bureaucratic ones rather than environmental ones, but the public are led to believe that the planet must be saved. What we have here is the classic GRIFT. There is a problem that cannot really be identified by anyone. Along comes the Political Class to provide the solution to it all and there is a huge price to pay (forever). But the promises of a saved planet never materialise, all that happens is… Read more »

Hound of Heaven
Hound of Heaven
3 months ago
Reply to  varmint

I really don’t think people have woken up to the destruction of our industrial base. The impossibility of complying with Energy Performance Certification means the certain demolition of perfectly usable industrial and commercial buildings. It’s a truly horrific prospect, but lacks glamour and sensationalism so is grossly underreported. This sector provides employment and is the backbone of the country, soon to be destroyed by fanatical communist ideology.

varmint
3 months ago

They might not understand because mainstream media don’t tell them much. They might tell them a little about the Grangemouth plant closing or jobs lost in oil in gas and Aberdeen, but all of that is usually accompanied by claims it is all necessary to meet Net Zero targets, and ofcourse this silly country has signed Net Zero into law. The Net Zero Amendment was signed into law in 2019 with no debate, no cost/benefit analysis and NO VOTE. WE are all to just to assume and accept that the only thing in this world that is important is reducing emissions of CO2. Not just reducing them, but reducing them at breakneck speed by 2030 because the UN and WEF say so, and our feeble quisling politicians align and comply with no concern for the consequences. We see the same thing in Germany, once one of the economic success stories but now a country covered in about 40,000 huge Industrial Turbines and energy prices similar to ours.

Hound of Heaven
Hound of Heaven
3 months ago
Reply to  varmint

The complete weaponisation of energy and emissions to control the globe and space. Scam doesn’t really cover it, does it?

varmint
3 months ago

wink

Howard Arnaud
Howard Arnaud
3 months ago

A correct assessment of the lunacy of our governing classes, to which should be added their embedded post-colonial guilt syndrome, which holds that it is the British in particular who must atone for unleashing the industrial revolution on the world, which in their view is just a litany of exploitation and environmental destruction.

And then on top of that, we have a Fabian Socialist government that thinks it’s a good idea to destroy capitalism from within, a process which they seem to be well on their way to succeeding in.

No wonder the country’s doomed. It’s going to require a revolution to fix things. 

varmint
3 months ago
Reply to  Howard Arnaud

YEP——Most ordinary people think it all about the changing climate, but that is simply the seemingly plausible excuse that the public fall for. It is very easy in a northern country like UK for people to imagine the weather is all messed up because it is so naturally variable. But in reality there is nothing unusual about current climate or temperature. You can only really understand this issue if you look at the politics involved —–The UN Politics called Sustainable Development

RW
RW
3 months ago
Reply to  varmint

There is something unusual about our current climate or temperature when employing a sufficiently short perspective: Anybody who grew up in the 1960s or 1970s will remember winters with a real lot of snow which gradually disappeared during the 1980s and in the 1990s, there was basically none of it anymore. And that’s when the global warming story took off, originally supposed to be caused by the ozone hole¹ over the arctic. When the supposed causes of that were addressed, the global warming story quickly acquired CO₂ as new cause for it and since the “no snow in winter” trend has been gradually reversing since about 2000, slowly morphed into climate change (because of global warming but we don’t say that so often anymore because it isn’t getting warmer and people experience this as such) and began to rely on ever more fakery, trickery and outright politcal oppression.

Climate policy is intellectually/ philosophically stuck in the mid-to-late 1990s because by then, it seemed to be getting warmer all the time, and in constant forceful denial of the changes which have occurred since that time.

RW
RW
3 months ago
Reply to  RW

Forgotten footnote:

Translated into English, the lyrics of a song of a German punk band from 1989¹ essentially are

Imagine in 50 years, there’ll be lions living in the fenlands
We’ll lie under palm trees at the shores of the North sea.
Making love to each other in eternal summer and only grandpa
Still remembers the times of winter and rain and snow.

[…]

A fabulous future, the hole in the sky
Will become larger and larger
If we only want that

That’s a story of dangerous global warming before the CO₂-thinigie was invented.

¹ Fehlfarben, Stell dir vor, Die Platte des himmlischen Friedens, 1989.

varmint
3 months ago
Reply to  RW

I recall some council in England planting Yukka Trees all along their promenade because they were seemingly convinced a tropical climate was coming. The next year they mostly died and the few remaining turned brown. —-This is what happens when you “believe” stuff

varmint
3 months ago
Reply to  RW

Yep trust me I have read well over 200 books on this issue and been investigating it since 2007—–Cheers.

zebedee
zebedee
3 months ago

It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms; for in this case there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from marriage. Although some species may be now increasing, more or less rapidly, in numbers, all cannot do so, for the world would not hold them.

There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate, in a few thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for his progeny.

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, ridiculing Malthusians. Note that Darwin says no organism grows exponentially as the Malthusians claim, not even epidemics.

mike r
mike r
3 months ago

Deep in the human psyche is fear of change brought about by progress. Throughout history there have been prophets of doom in most, if not all, cultures that have proclaimed we have greatly sinned, we need go back and atone for our sins and don on sack cloth and ashes. Otherwise we are doomed and will be wiped out by a god we have offended. This was in response to changes from old, traditional ways of doing things, which are a challenge to the established hierarchies, relationships and pecking orders. We now have the god of Settled Science that will impose that wipe out according to the high priests of climate dogma. Yes, Climate Science is just another in a long line of religious cults.

RW
RW
3 months ago
Reply to  mike r

This is a core part of from Egypt to the promised land story of the Jews in the old testament who repeatedly left God in favour of something which seemed more appealing to them and who had to endure all kinds of mishaps because of this eg, the 40 years in the wilderness. It’s also patterned on the chronologically earlier story of the deluge. It got into Christianity from there. But not into Islam where the core idea is Jews and Christians are more sinful than we are because they keep straying from God’s true path while we don’t.

I don’t think something like this appears in many other culture or at least, I’m not aware of any.

RW
RW
3 months ago

This is a bit of an odd article. Some people care a lot about foreign politics. To them, as evidenced here, Net Zero is bad because it’s bad for foreign politics. A deindustrialized country which has crippled itself with experimental and even entirely unsuitable domestic technology cannot act on the foreign stage in the way one with more robust underpinnings could because it ends up being consumed by its self-made domestic problems. Solving or avoiding these domestic problems will make the foreign policy people happy because it’ll enable them to do foreign policy more effectively. But it’ll also make us happy because we then won’t have to cope with the domestic problems anymore, like artificially inflated energy bills to subsidize technologies which aren’t competitive in the market-place because they don’t meet market demands well. Both Cheap and abundant energy is a Good Thing for us because it lets us make and do the things we need and Cheap and abundant energy is a Good Thing because it’ll improve our global standing and influence in a world of competition and conflict are perfectly valid standpoints. In particular, the latter implies the former. Some people might not care about global standing and… Read more »

varmint
3 months ago
Reply to  RW

Global Standing according to who?—–Certainly not the UN or WEF. Certainly not to ESG Point Scoring. Certianly not rabid Environmental Groups like Freinds of the Earth, Greenpeace, Exctintion Rebellione etc, and certainly not to our own Political Class who align themselves with the idea that givinging people cheap abundanyt energy is like handing an idiot child a macine gun.

RW
RW
3 months ago
Reply to  varmint

Global standing as great power capable of making others do its bidding in one way or another. To use Helmut Kohl’s immortal words:

Wichtig ist, was hinten rauskommt¹.

Applause or good grades from all kinds of national or international organizaions don’t matter. What matters is getting real stuff done in the real world.

¹ A translation of what he wanted to say would be Only real-world results matter. But the wording he used could also be understood as Only what comes ouf of the backside counts. But despite he hailed from Oggersheim/ Pfalz (Palatinate) he certainly didn’t mean to say that. 🙂

Norfolk-Sceptic
Norfolk-Sceptic
3 months ago

In surprised that the biggest Climate Activist organisation hasn’t been mentioned: the BBC.

The secret 28Gate meeting, around 2006, set the policy, and the Public drank the Fabian inspired agenda, peddled by the publicly funded BBC. It was enforced by ridicule and physical threats (like tattooing ‘Climate Denier’ on the forehead of dissenters, so their children and grandchildren would know who to despise), and perpetuated by those with negligible STEM knowledge, yet knew they were right.