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.
