We must abandon the net zero cult or face ruination

“Do we continue down this path to ruin? Or do we finally wake up and prioritise true British energy security?” That condemnation of the lunacy known as net zero was voiced by Craig Mackinlay, MP, chairman of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group in the House of Commons. Since it is increasingly rare for the voice of sanity to emanate from the Westminster asylum, Mackinlay’s words were welcome, but almost certainly futile.

Net zero is not a government policy, or anything rooted in reality: it is a religious cult and, considering its ultimately catastrophic implications, a death cult. The name itself testifies to its character: it comes from the same stable as “zero tolerance”, an absolutist affirmation of prescriptive impositions, dictated by a clique of fanatics determined to mould everybody else’s life in conformity with their own crazed superstitions.

As with all religions, the hard core of true believers is supported by a broader group of ostentatious conformists paying lip service to all the articles of faith, due either to direct self-interest or an instinct for conformity. For the sane majority there is no indulgence: they are to be coerced legally, morally and materially into accepting the prescriptions of the cult.

Recently, its extravagances have become more absurd. Farming, the most fundamental activity known to human history and the basis of the survival of our species, has been demonised. Because the methane by-products, in particular, of farming contribute to climate change, dairy and beef farming are condemned: the lunatics want to phase them out and switch humanity to a diet of plants and insects.

In the Netherlands, the Rutte government, under the influence of the World Economic Forum, the UN and the EU, was proposing the cull of half a million dairy cows, one-third of the total Netherlands stock, on grounds of ammonia and nitrogen emissions. The victory of Geert Wilders may have prevented that disaster, but since the Netherlands is the second largest exporter of agricultural produce, the consequences for world food supplies of insane ideological interventions are unthinkable.

This is the point we have reached: globally, the consequences of “green” impositions have become no longer an inconvenience, but a threat to our survival, far more substantial than any climate disasters conjured by computer models. Craig Mackinlay’s intervention highlighted the specific dangers to Britain.

Mackinlay denounced the closure of Grangemouth, Britain’s longest-serving oil refinery, for conversion into an import terminal for fuel, at a loss of 400 jobs. That situation perfectly encapsulates the criminal stupidity of the government. Why on earth would an oil and gas producing nation like Britain close a refinery and instead import fossil fuel from abroad – dirtier, more expensive and insecure, leaving us at the mercy of price-hiking cartels or Russian manipulation?

Even the tin-eared Rishi Sunak detected sufficient rumblings of rebellion to postpone the phasing out of oil boilers from 2026 and the ban on new petrol and diesel car sales by five years to 2035. But that is a totally inadequate response. Electric vehicles, once icons of future clean transport, are turning into a car crash. They demand a far-flung support system for refuelling and are liable to burst into flames. Fining manufacturers for not selling enough of these white elephants is destructive of the car industry and an intolerable intervention into market activity.

Britain has been gifted with rich resources in fossil fuels, which all but the most purblind eco-extremists admit will be needed for decades to come, yet is systematically and prematurely dismantling its entire energy infrastructure, for no better reason than to brag at the WEF, COP and other gatherings of the mentally ill about its “world-leading” abandonment of fossil fuel resources and embrace of increasingly discredited “green” energy.

The heat pump fantasy is another instance of such insanity. Expecting households already at their wits’ end how to pay their energy bills to splash out many thousands of pounds on inefficient and intrusive heat pumps is absurd. Lord Haughey, the Labour peer who sells them, has testified they are completely inappropriate for domestic use and that, since they only heat water to 54C, six degrees below the temperature required to kill Legionella bacteria, they are a health hazard.

Net zero is a globalist fantasy that will never happen because it is unaffordable: even in Britain it is calibrated in trillions, rather than billions, of pounds, at a time when this country is effectively bankrupt. In any case, since Britain contributes less than one per cent of the greenhouse effect, compared to China’s 28 per cent, the UK achieving net zero would have no effect on climate change.

More than a decade ago, the climate alarmist lobby announced it would no longer debate the issue and that “the science is settled”. That said it all: science is never settled. Through all the discrediting scandals, the Hockey Stick, Al Gore’s reverse ice-core samples, the University of East Anglia (“Hide the decline”), the fanatics persisted, resorting more and more to coercion.

In 2008, the British government masochistically imprisoned itself – or, rather, its unfortunate taxpayers and citizens – in a straitjacket by passing a law requiring the achievement of carbon neutrality by 2050. We need to repeal that law and abandon net zero in favour of a bespoke strategy, tailored to meet Britain’s needs in the face of any climate change that may take place.

We need to go back to the drawing board by convening a panel of neutral scientists to investigate the truth about climate change. We need, above all, to discover what proportion of the greenhouse effect we can conceivably influence. At present, the situation is distorted by the routine presentation of graphs containing only the man-made “anthropogenic” greenhouse gases. That gives a misleading impression of the extent to which we are responsible for emissions and to which we have a potential to influence them.

The anthropogenic greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane and ozone. Of these, CO2 is the largest component, estimated at as much as 82 per cent of the greenhouse gas effect. But that is completely misleading for two reasons. The first is that methane, though only estimated at 10 per cent, is 23 times more powerful than CO2 in its warming effect (hence the war on belching cows), while nitrous oxide, though only calculated at 6 per cent, is 296 times more effective at warming than CO2.

But the other reason why the obsession with CO2 is absurd is the exclusion from these calculations of non-anthropogenic greenhouse gases, most notably water vapour, or H2O. Water vapour is excluded from the equation because it is not man-made and is not regarded as a “driver” of the greenhouse effect, but only as a “feedback” (i.e. reactive) gas. Yet it is a far larger component of the greenhouse effect than CO2 and contributes by aggravating the warming process which it has not itself initiated, to a degree that scientists are uncertain.

The point, though, is that for policy purposes it is necessary to look at the entire picture, including water vapour, in order to assess what proportion of the greenhouse effect is even notionally subject to our influence. We could, at enormous sacrifice, reduce CO2 emissions and deceive ourselves into thinking we had made a significant inroad into global warming when, in actuality, we had only fractionally influenced the anthropogenic gases. But – and this is the nub of the matter – the fact that we have not generated water vapour ourselves will not prevent it hugely influencing the greenhouse effect.

It is also significant that the alarmist lobby abandoned “global warming” terminology in favour of “climate change”, a universally acceptable term, though not when misused to put a patina of credibility on alarmist claims. In 2008, we were warned the Arctic would be ice-free in summer by 2013. It did not happen. NASA records show a modest decline in Arctic ice coverage since 1988, but not uniformly: last month recorded the third highest monthly gain in Arctic ice coverage, at 2.71 million square kilometres. NASA reports Antarctic sea ice is flatlining, but that icecap is on the same planet.

While the UN’s IPCC bears responsibility for much of the hysteria generated at successive COPs and in the La La Land of the WEF, in recent years there has been an interesting development. If one inspects the core of IPCC documents, the areas where scientists contribute their most up-to-date research findings, and reads the small print, there has been a noticeable, if unobtrusive, downgrading of the alarmist claims of yesteryear. The term “low confidence” qualifies a number of predictions, though the media routinely proclaim each report the most apocalyptic yet.

Have we been sold a pup? The likeliest explanation is that there is a modest amount of warming taking place, with completely different implications for various parts of the globe, which makes a uniform world response wholly inappropriate. To some extent, such considerations are academic, due to the seismic change in the politics of climate.

Until recently, climate politics were consensual, with the elites enunciating their modish beliefs and imposing them upon the rest of the community. But the advent of green taxes, astronomic domestic fuel bills, the EV crusade, the heat pump controversy and all the other impositions have changed that. The elites are losing control of the situation.

The public sees its standard of living threatened, its liberties in areas such as domestic heating and choice of vehicle to drive being impinged upon. It looks to see who is responsible for net zero miserabilism and it sees that those driving this nightmare are the same clowns who promoted HS2 as a transport miracle, who opened our borders to an unsustainable immigrant invasion, who defer to the dogma that there are 106 sexes, who have run down our armed services to the point where we are naked before our proliferating enemies, who imposed serial lockdowns on the nation at massive social and economic cost.

How much credibility can the public be expected to repose in so-called “elites” with such a track record? That has all the flavour of 18th-century boudoir government. The establishment imagines it can rule by a kind of Gnosis, believing it has an intelligence and insight superior to the masses. But its surrender to groupthink and its record of failure and incompetence has lost it any authority it once commanded.

The British public will eventually end net zero, as it ended our subordination to the European Union. The concern is, by the time it is finally driven to assert itself, how much irreversible damage will have been done to our energy infrastructure and economy?

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life