In defence of net zero

We can probably agree that there is scepticism among Reaction writers around the drive towards net zero and we should expect nothing less. A centre-right website should always be wary of both government intervention and government group-think especially when the end result is going to be colossal spending by the hard-pressed taxpayer. We’ve seen evidence from Rishi Sunak this week that he has begun to grasp the scale of the issue with the delay to the phasing out of petrol-fuelled cars. However, in being sceptical about net zero, there is the risk that this leads on to being sceptical about man-made global warming and the impact of climate change and it’s here that we should tread much more carefully.

Let’s start with global warming. We have known since the middle of the nineteenth century about how the earth’s atmosphere creates a greenhouse effect making us far warmer than we should be at this distance from the sun. We have known since 1896 that carbon dioxide likely plays a part in warming our planet. In 1911, a paper was published in an American magazine, Popular Mechanics, “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate – What Scientists Predict for the Future”. In 1938, Guy Callendar confirmed that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere significantly adds to global warming.

We also know that our planet cools and warms in line with small adjustments in our trajectory around the sun and it’s these changes that have led to both ice ages and an ice-free planet over the past 650,000 years. But we also know that recent global warming over the past century has been far in excess of any previous phases of warming. As NASA states, “Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that Earth’s climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels. Ancient evidence can also be found in tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. This ancient, or paleoclimate, evidence reveals that current warming is occurring roughly 10 times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming. Carbon dioxide from human activity is increasing more than 250 times faster than it did from natural sources after the last ice age.”

It’s very hard to see how anybody could rebut this evidence but you don’t have to take my word or that of NASA for it: take the word of 97 per cent of the world’s climate scientists; take the word of the Royal Society, the UN, David Attenborough, the Académie des Sciences; or take the word of conspiracy-addled nutjobs like Piers Corbyn, David Icke and Marjorie Taylor Greene because that is the company you’re keeping when you deny man-made climate change. You’re not Galileo; you’re an idiot.

So we can say with 100 per cent certainty that man-made global warming is real and we can say that the effect on the planet is clear: it’s affecting our climate and the evidence is all around us. Two weeks ago we were enjoying the hottest streak of weather ever in September in the UK. Earlier this summer, we had the hottest June on record. Weather records – whether it’s heat or rain or snow or hail – continue to be broken everywhere. The freezing point on Mont Blanc went above the summit for the first time ever this summer: that’s over 5,000 metres above sea level, by the way. Recent storms in China and Italy saw streets turned into rivers by virtue of rainfall alone. There is an inexhaustible list of weather events that tells you that something is up and, if experts sound slightly jaded from time to time as they say that freak weather events were “almost certainly” caused by climate change, it is only because they’re rigorous and honest enough to accept that 100 per cent certainty in life is rare indeed.

Of course freak weather is only part of the picture and just one of the effects of climate change: retreating glaciers, melting ice sheets, ocean acidification, rising ocean temperatures, years-long droughts, unseasonal flooding, even the recent successes of English wine are all just a part of the changes that global warming is creating. And yet there are plenty of people for whom this is all a global conspiracy; a way for governments, George Soros, the Illuminati, the Freemasons, Pfizer, whoever to suppress “sheeple” everywhere. Of course, many of these are the same people that said Russell Brand’s arrest was deeply sinister – the “yes, but why now?” morons who remind me of the selfish man’s hero, Super Hans in Peep Show, who thinks a shamrock in the foam of his pint of Guinness is a sign that global corporations are trying to control us.

So what’s the best way to deal with this reality? It means reducing emissions and doing so quickly and together. It would be daft to deny that the path to net zero is not complex – to say the least. It is fraught with dangers whether that’s potentially making climate change worse, over-reliance on rare metals or ignoring the emissions reducing potential of natural gas. This is the result of three problems: trying to make an enormous societal adjustment that will require sacrifice by this generation for the benefit of future generations; the amount of money required to make the change and the time pressure that the world is under; and the imperfections of technology that has failed – thus far – to provide any simple solutions to a complex problem. 

We’re also doing this in a world that knows it’s doing this. The Industrial Revolution happened in a world without universal measurement and surveillance – it just was. But, while prevarication and procrastination is understandable, we’re in an 1930’s world here. Churchill famously wrote of that decade that “an appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile—hoping it will eat him last” and we’re in the same situation here. We know what the issue is; we know what needs to be done; time to get on with it because the problem isn’t going away. 

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