Dear Editors,
Net Zero needs to be parked – it is just impoverishment and deindustrialisation by the back door.
Mattie Brignal writes about the End of the Road for Net Zero. This is a good start, but we need to go further.
The idea that petrol engines – and in fact CO2 emissions as a whole – are somehow ‘bad’, needs fully debunking.
Clean air is something to strive for, but the green lobby’s efforts to equate ‘clean’ (= particulate-free, NOx-free) air with an atmosphere that has a fixed maximum level of CO2 is utter madness.
Carbon dioxide is plant food, and a healthy earth needs plenty of it for survival. We should be grateful that CO2 is increasing from levels that not so long ago were at historically low plant starvation levels. The world is greening because of this, and it is good news for crop yields.
In any case, the ‘CO2 is driving catastrophic temperature increases’ causal link is highly suspect – the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods are head-scratchers for climate change alarmists.
An alternative – more plausible – explanation is that temperature variations (driven by long-term sun cycles) have of late resulted in some overall warming of the sea, leading to a c. 50 year lagged release of CO2. The globe is not materially hotter today than at many points in recent decades, centuries and millennia. In geological timescales, however, we’ve got it good: we’re due an ice age, and I’d be more worried about catastrophic cooling than warming.
Absent gigantic extra-terrestrial shocks, catastrophic tipping points seem less plausible than a set of complex interactions and balancing feedback loops.
Surely these are topics for rational debate? Being lectured on this matter by governments and administrations that have got so much wrong in recent years is somewhat galling. Nick Clegg vetoed nuclear power in 2010 because it would “only come on stream in 2021 or 2022”: just think how different things would be now if that infrastructure spend (at historically low interest rates) had gone ahead.
Let us stop this climate alarmism, as full de-industrialisation will just impoverish the West. There is also the pragmatic argument that the rest of the world will avoid doing the same, so there is no point destroying our children’s future just so that we can become subservient to economies that continue to grow over the course of the next decades. Given the environmental footprint of a breakneck shift to new technologies (before we have considered the human impact of mining new materials and the toxic pollution caused by the disposal of solar panels and wind turbines), surely there is a sustainability case to be made for continuing to efficiently use the infrastructure we have while replacing our nuclear fleet post haste?
And to those in whom these short paragraphs have triggered a zealot’s rage, consider this: nothing screams ‘partisan belief system’ more than resorting to ad hominem smear tactics and an inability to debate actual facts when confronted with genuine inconvenient truths.
Alex Starling
London, UK
Did the public impose lockdown on the government?
Dear Editorial Board
You ask the question, did the public impose lockdown on the government, and you answer it by saying yes indeed the public forced the lockdowns and cite opinion polls as the evidence for such. I suggest this is a circular argument.
Right from March 2020 we were bombarded with dire warnings, then followed up with daily press conferences producing endless unverifiable terrifying statistics (witness Professor Ferguson’s so-called research), and advertising campaigns designed to nudge us all into obedience. Under the circumstances, Putin and pre-war Germany-type propaganda, of course the majority of the public voted to lock themselves up. But don’t blame us, it is Hancock and his fanatical cohort that were the guiding lights, which steered us onto the economic and mental rocks.
As will recall there was a vocal minority that poured cold water on the government’s pandemic policies almost from the start. Indeed I wrote several City Grumps exposing the myths SAGE and the government were pedalling throughout. Some of us were even prepared to pour their money were their mouth was and Dr Alex Starling, who sometimes writes for Reaction Life, was kind enough to retweet a tweet of mine from 24th February 2021, which called for a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for a legal action against face masks on school children. Yes I was fortunate because, being City trained, I am used to cutting through surface noise and also because my wife is a highly experienced critical care nurse who could explode much of SAGE’s non-sequiturs. Most of the public didn’t have these advantages and thus were easy to terrify into obsessive obedience.
Stephen Hazell-Smith
Penshurst
Don’t forget the Palestinians
Sir/Madam – The flaw in Bruce Anderson’s analysis is that he overlooks the agency of the Palestinians and the continuing political mistakes of their leaders.
A two state solution has been on the table since the original UN partition proposals. Sadly, no Palestinian leader has grasped the nettle that a two state solution will require Palestinians to recognise that 4th and 5th generation descendants of 1948 refugees will not have a right of return to Israel within its pre-1967 borders. Peace will only come when both sides are ready to compromise.
Yours faithfully.
Mike Adam
London
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