Ukraine realities expose Net Zero delusions

One of the many features of William Shakespeare’s writing that testifies to his acute understanding of the human condition is his penchant for juxtaposing interludes of low comedy among narratives of tragedy or high politics. The bard understood that, even amid cataclysms encompassing the fall of kings, or tragic interactions between significant individuals, buffoons – like the poor – we have always with us. There is one public forum where that truism is more evident than almost anywhere else: since Shakespeare dramatised the obscure Dark Age politics of England’s northern neighbour in The Scottish Play, contemporary Holyrood governance has degenerated into The Scottish Farce. Patrick Harvie, co-leader of the Scottish Green loons whose public-spirited vocation is to keep the minority SNP in power, has warned that reducing imports from Russia must not be used as an excuse to increase energy production from the North Sea. 

Well, of course not, when we have the green alternative of allowing Scottish pensioners, many of whom are already deterred by energy costs from switching on their heating, to expire from hypothermia. Under Nicola Sturgeon’s matriarchal care, more people in Scotland die each winter from hypothermia than in semi-Arctic Finland.

“Here in Scotland,” said Harvie, “the Tories and their cheerleaders are shamelessly using this scenario to justify expanding oil and gas exploration and production. For them, barely months after COP left Glasgow any excuse will do to ignore the pressing climate science which should be keeping them awake at night.”

There you are: any excuse, even a piddling little war in Ukraine that could lead to nuclear conflict; and many people are so lacking in a sense of proportion that they allow themselves to be kept awake at night by fears of Vladimir Putin ordering a nuclear submarine to incinerate the planet, when their insomnia should more properly be induced by Greta Thunberg’s warnings of the threat from deadly cows breaking wind.

Patrick Harvie, for the benefit of the countless happy millions who have never heard of him, can most succinctly be described as a Scottish politician who makes Ian Blackford look like Winston Churchill. He is an extreme example of the kind of buffoon that has been directing Scotland’s destiny since devolution, taking up space that might more profitably be occupied by a vacuum.

Harvie told his party conference last weekend that “extreme fossil fuel ideology would throw our future away” and that reduced imports from Russia must not be used to justify an increase in North Sea production. That epitomised the propensity of leftists to ascribe their own characteristics to their opponents. Use of fossil fuels is not an ideology, it is the pragmatic employment of available resources by people who want to heat their homes, drive their cars and engage in similar lawful occasions.

The only “extreme fossil fuel ideology” is the obsessive campaign to demonise and dismantle energy sources of proven reliability even before there is an adequate structure to replace them. Nicola Sturgeon’s resistance to any further development of North Sea fields such as Cambo, while energy bills are reaching levels that will cause real hardship, is the irrational behaviour of an ideologue, as was her petty claim, obscene in the tragic circumstances, that the war in Ukraine proved the urgent need for a further referendum on Scottish independence (in Mariupol they speak of little else).

Unfortunately, the tunnel-vision obduracy that drives Scottish politics is no longer peculiar to the Democratic People’s Republic of East Germany tribute act that is the SNP administration: it has also colonised the equally deranged government that now rules the most powerful nation on earth. On his first day in office Joe Biden shut down the Keystone XL pipeline project, as a totemic gesture to the green lobby.

The Keystone cop then moved to hobble the American oil and gas industry while petrol prices at the pumps rose astronomically: in little more than a year in office, Biden added two dollars to the cost of a gallon of petrol, in a nation that pre-eminently identifies with car ownership. Simultaneously, his administration pressured banks to deny funding for investment in the oil and gas industry. Yet there were already vivid portents of the unreliability of renewable energy sources, notably in the shapes of the heat-driven blackout in California in August 2020 and the cold-driven emergency in Texas in February 2021.

We are now witnessing the ludicrous situation whereby the president of oil-rich America is begging OPEC to increase its production and waving a flag of surrender to Marxist Venezuela, in a desperate attempt to bring more oil online, while still suppressing the United States’ own production. It is a completely perverse scenario – “pathetic and embarrassing”, in the words of a Republican senator – preventing US energy companies from profiting, while potentially enriching unsavoury states whose politics are hardly pro-Western.

That is the hypocrisy of the green ideologues, from Scotland to America: virtue signal by suffocating your native fossil fuel industry, then try to plug the gap left by unreliable renewables by buying those same fossil fuels at higher costs from sources whose extraction processes are more environmentally damaging. This nonsense must stop and there could be no sharper reminder of energy fragility than the war in Ukraine and the associated sanctions, which are destabilising the world economy.

Green energy is not even green: it is a smoke-and-mirrors sleight of hand, to deceive the mug punters into thinking we are creating a cleaner planet. The penny has now dropped with most people that biofuel, the mass deforestation and burning of trees for electricity, is not the ideal way to beat climate change, but other, less obvious, flaws in the green prospectus have largely eluded the public.

Each wind turbine requires the production of 230 tons of steel, fuelled by coal; if 25 per cent of global power were generated from wind turbines, that would have involved the fossil fuel equivalent of 600 million metric tons of coal. Solar panels are made from quartz, mined and then heated by coal, to transform it into polysilicon, every single ton of which generates four tons of hugely toxic tetrachloride.

The outcome is a confused mess of renewable energy systems which are vulnerable to weather and intrinsically unreliable. The bottom line regarding green energy is that we cannot control it nor marry it to the undulating requirements of the electricity grid. Some claim the problems will one day be solved; even if that is the case, it is insanity in the meantime to close down reliable systems and replace them with problematic resources.

It is at this point in the dilemma that we hear the siren voice of the nuclear power enthusiasts, proclaiming the virtues of their solution: clean, futuristic and increasingly affordable. Nuclear waste? Don’t worry your pretty little head about that, it can be compressed, put into a matchbox, carried in my pocket… These people are as short-sighted as the Green buffoons. Hype the safety regime as hard as you like, every nuclear power plant is a potential Chernobyl or Fukushima.

And that is in fair weather times, when all is peaceful. If there is one lesson we should already have learned from the Ukraine war, it is the unacceptable security risk posed by such installations. As Ukraine has demonstrated, we now have a situation where a target country obligingly provides its own nuclear bomb, which an aggressor nation can detonate using conventional explosives, perhaps a traditional artillery piece fired at a reactor, without crossing a red line in terms of using nuclear weapons, but securing a similar outcome.

We should be decommissioning nuclear power stations rather than building new ones. It is typical of the skewed perception we have of the world today that societies hysterically fearful of the massively exaggerated threat from climate change are content to sow such deadly seeds in their communities. It is on a par with the negligence of world leaders in failing to take decisive steps to halt nuclear proliferation or to negotiate down, systematically and multilaterally, the absurdly large nuclear arsenals of major powers.

We need to pause in our stampede towards inadequate green energy provisions and to reinstate fossil fuel exploitation at least for the short term. Above all, we should abandon, without further bluster, or fantasising, or self-deception, the wholly unaffordable chimera of Net Zero. Boris Johnson will not abandon it, despite his pragmatic instincts, because Yoko Ono won’t allow him. But if the Tories continue to preside over soaring energy prices, while additionally enforcing the taxes and other impositions – heat pumps, electric cars, et al. – required by the Net Zero programme, they can say goodbye to government for a generation.

In a less obvious style than Patrick Harvie, but just as deluded, the metropolitan elites are clinging to yet another fantasy, similar to their Remain crusade, which is unacceptable to the British public. David Cameron, just once – and fleetingly, under pressure – voiced an insight that was undoubtedly correct, when he reportedly said: “We have to get rid of all the green c**p.” That is the agenda that must now be implemented if we are to avoid energy famine and bankruptcy.