• Privacy Policy
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
Climate Change Dispatch
  • Home
  • Videos
  • Who We Are
  • Facts Vs. Fearmongering
    • Real science vs Junk Science
      • 1100-plus Peer-Reviewed Studies
      • 97% – Myth of the Climate Change Consensus
      • Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
      • Climate change and its causes
      • Climate Science Primer
      • CO2 is not pollution
      • Deceptive Surface Temperature Records
      • Editorial: Great Global Warming Hoax
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 1
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 2
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 3
      • Why CO2 Is A Minor Player In Global Climate
      • Why Politicized Science Is So Dangerous
    • Facts Not Fear
      • A Simple Question For Climate Alarmists
      • Climate Change – The Facts
      • Climate Change Fears Are Empirically Baseless
      • Global Warming 101
      • Global Warming Q&A
      • Understanding The Medieval Warm Period
      • Ocean Cycles and Climate
      • Overview of Plate Climatology Theory
      • Precautionary Principle
      • Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
      • The Skeptics Handbook
      • Weather Versus Climate
      • Why I’m a GW skeptic
      • Winning the climate debate with facts
      • Why Aliens Cause Global Warming
    • Greenhouse FAQs
      • CO2, Plants, & Industry
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • Is global warming real?
      • Measuring temperature
      • Swimming in CO2?
      • Scientists urge caution?
      • Today’s warming trend
      • Variations in temperature
    • Gore’s Greatest Goofs
      • Deconstructing the Truth
      • Fact-Checking Al Gore’s Latest Predictions
      • How Gore Created The Global Warming Hoax
    • Inside Real Climate
      • Closer look at the 97% Consensus
      • GW’s Amazing Story
      • IPCC gets failing grade
      • Real Climate Exposed!
      • Truth about Real Climate
      • We’ve Been Conned
      • What is there a 97% consensus about?
    • Behind the IPCC
      • 1,000 Scientists Dissent
      • Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
      • Climategate Inquiries
      • Climategate Inquiries 2
      • NIPCC Report Now Available
      • Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Videos
  • Who We Are
  • Facts Vs. Fearmongering
    • Real science vs Junk Science
      • 1100-plus Peer-Reviewed Studies
      • 97% – Myth of the Climate Change Consensus
      • Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
      • Climate change and its causes
      • Climate Science Primer
      • CO2 is not pollution
      • Deceptive Surface Temperature Records
      • Editorial: Great Global Warming Hoax
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 1
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 2
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 3
      • Why CO2 Is A Minor Player In Global Climate
      • Why Politicized Science Is So Dangerous
    • Facts Not Fear
      • A Simple Question For Climate Alarmists
      • Climate Change – The Facts
      • Climate Change Fears Are Empirically Baseless
      • Global Warming 101
      • Global Warming Q&A
      • Understanding The Medieval Warm Period
      • Ocean Cycles and Climate
      • Overview of Plate Climatology Theory
      • Precautionary Principle
      • Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
      • The Skeptics Handbook
      • Weather Versus Climate
      • Why I’m a GW skeptic
      • Winning the climate debate with facts
      • Why Aliens Cause Global Warming
    • Greenhouse FAQs
      • CO2, Plants, & Industry
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • Is global warming real?
      • Measuring temperature
      • Swimming in CO2?
      • Scientists urge caution?
      • Today’s warming trend
      • Variations in temperature
    • Gore’s Greatest Goofs
      • Deconstructing the Truth
      • Fact-Checking Al Gore’s Latest Predictions
      • How Gore Created The Global Warming Hoax
    • Inside Real Climate
      • Closer look at the 97% Consensus
      • GW’s Amazing Story
      • IPCC gets failing grade
      • Real Climate Exposed!
      • Truth about Real Climate
      • We’ve Been Conned
      • What is there a 97% consensus about?
    • Behind the IPCC
      • 1,000 Scientists Dissent
      • Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
      • Climategate Inquiries
      • Climategate Inquiries 2
      • NIPCC Report Now Available
      • Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us
No Result
View All Result
Climate Change Dispatch
No Result
View All Result

How To Make Poverty Expensive: Embrace Net-Zero

by John O'Sullivan
September 14, 2020, 9:49 AM
in News and Opinion, Videos
Reading Time: 5 mins read
A A
2

greta thunberg parliament“Do you not know. my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?” That’s a famous remark by a Swedish statesman, Axel Oxenstierna (1583-1654), one of the most celebrated men of his time who is now largely forgotten except by historians.

He gave that advice in a letter to reassure his nervous son that he need not worry about the diplomatic negotiations in which the young man was about to engage because he wouldn’t find them that difficult. Message: Don’t be too impressed by important people, son. They may have no idea what they’re doing.

Most people recognize the wisdom of this remark on hearing it but they’re not always able to explain why. My own view is that many of us get it wrong.

We think Oxenstierna is deploring the low vices—greed, ambition, jealous rivalry, etc.—that lead people in positions of power into corruption and disaster. Such things happen and they produce bad results.

But the disaster arising from greed and corruption are fairly minor compared to those produced by great schemes of idealism so virtuous that no one opposed them on grounds of cost for fear of seeming petty. They’re the really big-ticket items.

That was brought home to me this week when I came across a televised debate in the U.K. House of Lords in June 2019 in which Viscount Ridley (in private life, Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist and Innovation, and on climate change a “lukewarmer”) was complaining the British government didn’t seem to have conducted a cost/benefit analysis of its decision that the U.K. would eradicate its net contribution to climate change by 2050.

In fact, when Prime Minister Theresa May announced the decision the previous week, she had said proudly: “This means the U.K. will be the first G7 country to legislate for net-zero emissions.” (Tory cheers!)

Ridley was less proud because he thought that spending a vast but unknown sum to reduce U.K. carbon emissions to net-zero by 2050 without first discovering what it would cost or what benefits it would deliver suggested a spirit of light-hearted financial abandon.

“We’re faced with a measure,” he declared, “that is likely to cost at least a trillion pounds on top of the 15 billion pounds a year that we’re now spending on subsidies to renewable energy. Let’s remind ourselves for a second just how big a sum a trillion pounds is. If you spent a pound a second, it would take you thirty thousand years to get through one trillion pounds. You’d have to start before the peak of the last Ice Age where woolly mammoths and Neanderthals roamed across a tundra where we now sit.”

Ridley went on to point out that when you added in the costs of other measures to reduce emissions—converting gas-heated homes to electricity, switching to hydrogen-based fuels, etc.—the total costs of U.K. policy came to something like £2.8 trillion.

Similarly, writing in the monograph Greenhouse Emissions: the Global Picture, Martin Livermore estimates the various costs of government measures to mitigate climate change as likely to present every family in Britain with a bill for 100,000 pounds.

These are massive expenditures—so massive that we have no real sense of what the statistics mean until someone like Ridley takes the trouble to express them in an arresting way.

That explains why two of the earlier speakers in the Lords debate had dismissed them implausibly as “nickles and dimes” and “manageable.”

These Brits had already swallowed Everett Dirksen’s Kool-Aid: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money”—except that a billion’s no longer real money.

And, finally, they are being spent at a time when other vast sums are being allocated both to treat patients suffering from Covid-19 and to sustain the living standards of workers made unemployed by the lockdown even though the expected recession will greatly reduce revenues going to the Treasury.

A certain giddiness has seized the minds of hitherto sober politicians and officials. If you ask the question: “Is the U.K. taxpayer getting decent value for the expenditures being made on his behalf,” you’re likely to be told that’s not the point.

What is the point then? It’s to save the world by setting a moral example of a mature developed nation making sacrifices for the common good of the world by moving to a net-zero carbon economy.

That argument falls at more fences than there are in the Grand National. We exaggerate our sacrifice. Much of the fall in Western CO2 levels comes from moving our industries overseas to Asia and then importing the goods they produce back home.

china coal pollution

Our consumption levels still push up carbon dioxide levels. Even if we went without those goods, that would persuade Asians not to cut back on CO2 emissions but to look for new markets.

They want higher production and higher standards of living which, in the absence of major technological breakthroughs, will require greater use of fossil fuels and higher CO2 emissions.

And for Western countries to make the deeper emission cuts promised by their leaders, that would mean much higher electricity and other fuel prices and a much-reduced standard of living, inflicted on Western voters by their own governments.

Even then, in the case of Britain, it would have no impact on global emission levels because the U.K.’s share of them is so small.

As the Brits were making these painful but pointless sacrifices for the common good, China, India, and the former developing countries would be surging ahead and pushing up carbon emission levels ahead of themselves.

Indeed, that’s exactly what they are doing and why carbon emissions are not falling but rising. Among other consequences, the shift of economic and financial power (and ultimately of military power too, as we’re starting to realize) from the West to Asia would be greatly accelerated by our own energy policy!

And what makes the position of Western governments still more uncomfortable, as Livermore points out, is (1) that their long-term strategy for getting to net-zero is neither economically nor politically plausible without carbon capture and storage technologies that don’t yet exist, and (2) that they will have to modify it by adopting energy solutions such as nuclear power that they and their peoples have rejected until now.

Livermore’s picture of Western policy is like a maze with exits that close as soon as you approach them.

No sensible analyst thinks that the plans for net-zero carbon economies by 2050 (let alone 2030) can possibly succeed. They have no justification unless it’s an exercise in multicultural masochism and the politics of sainthood.

The voters won’t tolerate them even if small groups of fanatical greens agitate violently to impose them or if the Eurocrats try to close down democratic access to energy policy, which Andrew Willshire recently hinted at in his Spectator piece on the EU’s new energy targets.

And their enormous cost will become increasingly burdensome as the bills for so many other better causes fall due.

Read more at The Pipeline

  • Truth
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Gettr
  • Threads
  • gab-logo Gab
  • Mastodon
  • Buffer
  • Telegram
  • Email
  • Copy Link
  • Share Using More Networks…

Popular Posts

Electric Vehicles (EVs)

The ‘Green’ Scam Of The Century: How ‘Renewables’ Increase Fossil Fuel Demands

Oct 23, 2024
News and Opinion

Antarctica Is Colder, Icier Today Than At Any Time In 5,000 Years

Apr 15, 2024
Energy

30-Plus Signs That The Climate Scam Is Collapsing

Apr 09, 2025

Comments 2

  1. Chaamjamal says:
    5 years ago

    And do you not know my son how little they know about the meaning of the phrase NET ZERO?

    https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/02/25/net-zero/

Stay Connected On Social Media

gab-logo

Donate Today

Beating back the alarmist narrative takes time and money. Please donate today to help!

Recent Posts

  • COP30 Amazon17 Republican AGs Urge Trump Admin To Skip COP30 Over Green Energy Policies
    Oct 24, 2025
    The attorneys general say attending COP30 would back costly, unreliable wind and solar and risk U.S. energy security. […]
  • severe storm over cityClimate Expert Reveals Latest Scandal Tied To Billion-Dollar Disasters
    Oct 24, 2025
    Climate Central takes over the Billion-Dollar Disasters tabulation, sparking fresh controversy over its methods and motives. […]
  • ocean sun cloudsNew Study Finds 75% Of Rising Ocean Heat Likely Natural, CO2 Not A Factor
    Oct 24, 2025
    Study shows ocean warming driven mostly by natural cycles, not greenhouse gas emissions, challenging mainstream global warming narratives. […]
  • LNG terminal in germanyU.S. And Qatar Push Back On EU’s Climate Mandates That Threaten LNG Exports
    Oct 24, 2025
    U.S. and Qatari officials warn that the EU’s latest climate regulations under CSDDD could endanger Europe’s access to affordable natural gas. […]
  • marines trainingCrazy Hill Op-Ed Demands Generals Respond To Climate Change ‘National Security’ Threat
    Oct 23, 2025
    The Hill warns of climate Armageddon unless U.S. generals join the fight against ‘Mother Nature,’ now deemed a national security threat. […]
  • Shipping port near power plantEurope’s Energy Crisis Shows Net Zero Dogma Comes At A Cost
    Oct 23, 2025
    While China’s rare earth threat exposes U.S. supply chain risks, Europe’s energy crisis shows how net zero policies backfired spectacularly. […]
  • wind farm climate outDemocrats Ditch Climate Messaging As Rising Utility Costs Hit Voters
    Oct 23, 2025
    As Democrats struggle with climate messaging, voters feel the pinch from rising utility bills and the party's costly green energy policies. […]
  • Protest system change not climate changeLead Attorney Admits Real Goal Of Climate Lawsuits: Backdoor Carbon Tax
    Oct 23, 2025
    A top lawyer spearheading climate lawsuits says the quiet part out loud: litigation is a backdoor carbon tax on oil companies and consumers. […]
  • WMO reportHow The World Meteorological Organization Lies To You—Using Your Taxes
    Oct 22, 2025
    The WMO’s 2025 greenhouse gas report hides key data that undercuts the so-called climate 'crisis' narrative—funded by your tax dollars. […]
  • Hurricane generating ocean waves2025 Hurricane Season Is Flopping As Alarmist Predictions Fail
    Oct 22, 2025
    The 2025 hurricane season so far has seen no major U.S. landfalls, exposing alarmists’ failed predictions of catastrophic storms. […]

Get Instant Email Notifications

Subscribe to receive a digest of daily stories, or get emailed once they're published. Check your Junk/Spam folder for a verification email.

Submit a tip

Please enter your email, so we know you're human.

Books You May Like

exposing great lie

Have a suggestion? Let us know! We swap out books based on your input. We participate in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. See here.

  • About
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact Us

© Portions copyright Climate Change Dispatch

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Videos
  • Who We Are
  • Facts Vs. Fearmongering
    • Real science vs Junk Science
      • 1100-plus Peer-Reviewed Studies
      • 97% – Myth of the Climate Change Consensus
      • Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
      • Climate change and its causes
      • Climate Science Primer
      • CO2 is not pollution
      • Deceptive Surface Temperature Records
      • Editorial: Great Global Warming Hoax
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 1
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 2
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 3
      • Why CO2 Is A Minor Player In Global Climate
      • Why Politicized Science Is So Dangerous
    • Facts Not Fear
      • A Simple Question For Climate Alarmists
      • Climate Change – The Facts
      • Climate Change Fears Are Empirically Baseless
      • Global Warming 101
      • Global Warming Q&A
      • Understanding The Medieval Warm Period
      • Ocean Cycles and Climate
      • Overview of Plate Climatology Theory
      • Precautionary Principle
      • Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
      • The Skeptics Handbook
      • Weather Versus Climate
      • Why I’m a GW skeptic
      • Winning the climate debate with facts
      • Why Aliens Cause Global Warming
    • Greenhouse FAQs
      • CO2, Plants, & Industry
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • Is global warming real?
      • Measuring temperature
      • Swimming in CO2?
      • Scientists urge caution?
      • Today’s warming trend
      • Variations in temperature
    • Gore’s Greatest Goofs
      • Deconstructing the Truth
      • Fact-Checking Al Gore’s Latest Predictions
      • How Gore Created The Global Warming Hoax
    • Inside Real Climate
      • Closer look at the 97% Consensus
      • GW’s Amazing Story
      • IPCC gets failing grade
      • Real Climate Exposed!
      • Truth about Real Climate
      • We’ve Been Conned
      • What is there a 97% consensus about?
    • Behind the IPCC
      • 1,000 Scientists Dissent
      • Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
      • Climategate Inquiries
      • Climategate Inquiries 2
      • NIPCC Report Now Available
      • Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us

© 2025 Climate Change Dispatch

 
Share via
  • Facebook
  • Like
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Digg
  • Tumblr
  • VKontakte
  • Print
  • Email
  • Reddit
  • Buffer
  • Love This
  • Weibo
  • Pocket
  • Xing
  • Odnoklassniki
  • WhatsApp
  • Meneame
  • Blogger
  • Amazon
  • Yahoo Mail
  • Gmail
  • AOL
  • Newsvine
  • HackerNews
  • Evernote
  • MySpace
  • Mail.ru
  • Viadeo
  • Line
  • Flipboard
  • Comments
  • SMS
  • Viber
  • Telegram
  • Subscribe
  • Facebook Messenger
  • Kakao
  • LiveJournal
  • Yammer
  • Edgar
  • Fintel
  • Mix
  • Instapaper
  • Copy Link
  • Truth
  • gab-logo Gab
  • Gettr
  • Baidu
  • Mastodon
  • Threads
  • Bluesky
Share via
  • Digg
  • Tumblr
  • VKontakte
  • Print
  • Email
  • Reddit
  • Buffer
  • Love This
  • Weibo
  • Pocket
  • Xing
  • Odnoklassniki
  • WhatsApp
  • Meneame
  • Blogger
  • Amazon
  • Yahoo Mail
  • Gmail
  • AOL
  • Newsvine
  • HackerNews
  • Evernote
  • MySpace
  • Mail.ru
  • Viadeo
  • Line
  • Flipboard
  • Comments
  • SMS
  • Viber
  • Telegram
  • Subscribe
  • Facebook Messenger
  • Kakao
  • LiveJournal
  • Yammer
  • Edgar
  • Fintel
  • Mix
  • Instapaper
  • Copy Link
  • Truth
  • gab-logo Gab
  • Gettr
  • Baidu
  • Mastodon
  • Threads
  • Bluesky