Net zero is a fantasy but it could destroy Britain before it is killed off

Net Zero is not an energy policy. It is a slogan, a wish list, a delusion and, by now, a cult. It derives from the same petulant, absolutist mentality as “zero tolerance”, an attempt by people aspiring to control the lives of others to endow their ambitions with spurious authority. It carries to the extremes of caricature the authoritarian instinct to throw other people’s money at problems, real or imagined, for which it is claimed to be the solution. Net zero is a massive problem, not a solution. It is a far worse catastrophe than the lesser threat it pretends to avert. It is completely unaffordable. In no respect is it a practical proposition.

So, of course, with all those attributes, politicians love it. It opens opportunities for state control of the minutiae of people’s lives on the massive scale to which they and the parasitic lobby groups that swim around them have become addicted. Lockdown, when an entire nation was caged like convicts, gave them a taste for totalitarian control and an insight into the possibilities of micromanaging a servile population. If fear of infection could reduce people to unresisting compliance with Beijing-style authoritarian policing, the prospect of the planet imminently burning to a cinder could surely effect a similar acquiescence. Net zero is a totalitarian’s dream.

The whole climate issue is so marinated in lies and misinformation that the truth is almost inaccessible. The point at which many people began to smell a rat was when the alarmist climate lobby announced it would no longer engage in debate, but proposed to regard its claims as unassailable and to counter the most informed challenges with the mantra: “The science is settled.”

The chief characteristic of genuine science is that it is never settled: a few years ago, a rogue result from an experiment at CERN’s large hadron collider temporarily brought Einstein’s law of relativity into question. The scientists involved did not arbitrarily discount that disconcerting result, declaiming that the science was settled; instead, they repeated the experiment until they detected the anomaly, leaving the law of relativity settled – for the time being.

Junk science, on which the alarmist cult relies for its bogus authority, brooks no challenge. In a pioneering drive that became a template for the imposition of gender orthodoxy and the other accumulating impostures of the control-freak Left, an entire profession was intimidated into acquiescence. Publishing one paper that even marginally queried the “narrative” of anthropogenic global warming was a career-ending move for any scientist; the carrot complementing that stick was IPCC patronage, lavish research grants, professorial chairs and guru status.

The inconvenient untruths that unravelled – Al Gore’s inverted ice core samples, the discredited “hockey stick” theory, the “Hide the decline” scandal at East Anglia University – were papered over and the brute power of mainstream media collaboration prevented serious interrogation of extravagant claims. “Global warming” was replaced with “climate change” in the alarmist propaganda, on the basis that everyone accepts climate change has always occurred (cf. The Mediaeval Warm Period – when Northumbrian wine challenged Bordeaux – and the annual freezing of the Thames in the eighteenth century, so that a popular fair was held on its ice surface).

Anyone who asked awkward questions was labelled a “denier”, on the analogy of those refusing to acknowledge Nazi atrocities. That was significant: any cause that has to resort to such demonisation of anyone querying its claims has something to hide. Where does this leave the average, intelligent citizen, overwhelmed with alarmist propaganda? To listen to BBC Radio 4 (though only a dwindling proportion of the population does) is to encounter the monomaniac fanaticism of extravagant cultists. 

Everything is related to the “climate emergency”; there is no activity, from chess to petit-point embroidery, that cannot ingeniously be linked to supposed climate catastrophe by the BBC’s obsessive propagandists. These are shrieks from behind the walls of Bedlam. The Greta Thunberg phenomenon, an outburst of juvenile hysteria comparable to the Children’s Crusade, is treated with solemn respect by world statesmen, which is the euphemism for the cowardly and incompetent buffoons that the much-hyped system of democracy has imposed on unfortunate populations.

The emergence of the climate hysteria at the beginning of this century marked the zenith of scientism, the aberration that began in the nineteenth century, whereby “progressives” invoked “science” to support their nihilist prejudices. Recently, however, science has had to be rejected by the Left, as an embarrassment to the now dominant “gender” imposture, so that it is necessary to displace chromosomes with pronouns. This must present some difficulties to those who simultaneously support climate delusion (“The science is settled”) and gender fantasy, where the term “biological” is banned.

In the climate alarmist wing of the asylum, the inmates have now found their ultimate palladium: Net Zero. It is, in essence, a project to return the world to the Stone Age. Britain is a mountain of coal surrounded by an ocean of oil and gas and it is apprehensive of energy failure. Every winter is a white-knuckle ride. In Scotland, each winter, more people die of hypothermia than in Finland. Yet the craziest aspect of net zero is that it increases energy demand.

Net zero by 2050, we are told, is a legal obligation and so it is – because a UK government passed a moronic law making it so, like a compulsive gambler excluding himself from a casino. “The government must meet its legal obligations.” Who is imposing that obligation? The government: so all it has to do is pass another law repealing the first. Or why not apply this novel concept in other areas, e.g. by legislating that the government must achieve a minimum growth rate of 10 per cent every year? Job done.

As for the international commitments that governments have made on our behalf, we should ignore them. Britain is responsible for producing one per cent of the greenhouse effect; China produces 28 per cent and Xi Jinping has repetitive strain injury from cutting ribbons at the opening of new coal-fired power stations. If Britain reached net zero tomorrow, it would have no – absolutely zero, nil, zilch – effect on the climate.

But net zero offers a prospect of utter disaster for Britain. If all fossil-fuel energy generation were to be abolished by 2050, electricity usage would expand from 12.8 kW/hours per day to 126.8 kW/hours. The demands of business would similarly increase. National Grid itself has stated that, over the next seven years, it will have to install five times the transmission infrastructure in England and Wales that it has built over the past 30 years – just to meet the government’s target of 50 GW of offshore wind by 2030.

We are disrupting all the basic infrastructures of our economy and living standards to chase a fantasy. Recently, Labour peer Lord Haughey, whose company makes electrical heat pumps, said they were unsuitable for domestic use and only heat water to 54C, six degrees below the level required to kill Legionella bacteria. They are also prohibitively expensive for householders. 

Laws enforcing electric cars will cause manufacturers to relocate overseas; many working people, deprived of their petrol-powered vehicles and unable to afford an electric replacement, will become involuntary pedestrians. Not only will there be inadequate refuelling points for electric cars, the grid will be incapable of meeting demand.

The ultimate irony is that, in pursuing net zero, on a global dimension we are increasing, not reducing, the greenhouse effect. To produce the raw materials necessary to support “renewables”, global mining activities (one of the most environmentally damaging activities there is), including processing and transportation, would need to be increased to around 40 times their present level. 

Hydropower, represented as ultra-clean, generates not only CO2, but up to 8 per cent of human methane emissions. Solar panels? For every ton of silicon produced for solar panels, four tons of toxic waste are created. Biomass requires mass burning of forests, with adverse CO2 effects. As for “clean” wind energy, every turbine has multiple components, from carbon fibre to rare earth materials, all of which require intensified environmentally damaging activity. For every ton of rare earth separated, 2,000 tons of toxic waste are generated. One step forward and two steps backwards…

And when did desperate politicians take nuclear out of the naughty column and file it under “clean”? As we have seen in Ukraine, a nuclear power station is just a house-trained nuclear bomb. In military terms, it turns every enemy, even the most threadbare terrorist outfit, into a potential nuclear power. 

All the enemy, whether a foreign state or terrorist group, needs to do is use conventional explosives to detonate the nuclear device we have obligingly sited on target, and that enemy becomes effectively a nuclear power. Lunatic proposals to pepper Britain’s landscape with small nuclear power plants would secure blanket coverage for hostile actors. We may call it a clean energy source (remind us, what is the half-life of plutonium? Oh yes, 24,000 years, a nice legacy for future generations, if there are any), our enemies will call it a target.

The reality is that net zero is not going to happen. Financially, it is calibrated not in billions, but in trillions of pounds. The inexorable ratcheting up of green taxes to support it would finally break our economy, already foundering under the weight of the highest taxation in 70 years. The public will revolt, long before 2050. The growing mutiny over Ulez, not itself part of the net zero fantasy but similar in malevolence, control-freakery and politicians’ entitlement, could be an instructive trailer for the main feature.

And what if it is all for nothing? We cannot trust our politicians, our scientists, our mainstream media, or any of the elites to tell us the truth about climate. Polar bears are a cuddly totem much exploited by alarmists. Recently the WWF generated alarmist headlines about a 40 per cent decline in the polar bear population in the Beaufort Sea, attributing it to climate change. Whatever the circumstances in that area, globally, the polar bear population has “declined” from around 6,000 in the 1950s, to over 30,000 today.

Similarly, the BBC forecast, more than a decade ago, that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2013, specifically by October, the corporation added with scientific precision. Embarrassingly, Arctic ice, after a period of mild decline, increased by 33 per cent that year. If we do not free ourselves of the prescriptions of these quack soothsayers, we shall have no means of preparing properly for the future.

The Climate Change Committee, hardly a forum of climate “deniers”, has estimated the cost to Britain of net zero by 2050 at £1.4 trillion, or £1,700 a year per household. On the analogy of upwardly mobile estimates for the cost of HS2 and all other major projects, we may confidently assume that will be a fraction of the actual cost. UK government gross debt is currently £2,516bn, or 101 per cent of GDP.

Where is the money going to come from? Answer: it does not exist. Net zero is never going to happen. So, we can do this the hard way or the easy way. The hard way is for government, taking refuge in the musical chairs effect of general elections, to gamble on the national explosion of resentment not happening until it has passed the parcel to the incoming party, meanwhile persisting in green virtue signalling to win the applause of globalist elites, in which case the desperate, impoverished public may eventually find a new use for lampposts along Whitehall.

The easy way would be for the government to come to its senses, like David Cameron’s moment of lucidity (“We have to get rid of all the green c**p”), and abandon net zero. It should start from square one, by convening a committee of uncompromised scientists to assess actual risks and devise bespoke solutions for Britain, independently of all the absolutist madness elsewhere that threatens to kill millions in Sub-Saharan Africa and similar societies, deprived of development by green colonialist diktat.

Realistically, it is unlikely that a government that is still insanely burning billions of pounds on the white elephant that is HS2 will come to its senses. So, the Net Zero cult will continue to exact ever more demanding sacrifices, until public patience snaps. This will not end well.

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