Les jeux sont faits, Ed Miliband. The chips are down, the game is up. We knew Labour was no closer to solving the energy trilemma than scientists are to explaining dark matter. [emphasis, links added]
That, for now, we cannot have net-zero emissions, security of supply, and affordability. We knew that using public money to import gas to manufacture CO2 was less a display of moral leadership on climate change than brazen hypocrisy.
Perhaps most importantly, we knew that the pursuit of net-zero policies, regardless of cost, would impact our lives in ways the gentleman in Whitehall could not possibly foresee.
It already has, as anyone who has driven into a clean-air zone can attest.
Yet the ruling class insisted on living in some alternate reality where there were no trade-offs; just cheap, abundant, secure renewables.
So we should thank Bill Esterson, Labour chair of the Commons Energy Security and Net Zero Committee, for letting the cat out of the bag.
“We will all have to change our lives” if we are to decarbonize the grid by 2030, he has just admitted.
Keir Starmer is offering no such candor; at COP29, the climate jamboree many world leaders had the good sense to snub, the Prime Minister not only set us another target (an 81 percent reduction in emissions by 2035) but peddled the line that he “won’t be telling people how to behave”.
This will surely only be true in the most literal sense. Impose congestion charges in British cities, and people might be forced to travel by other means, or not at all.
Foist mandates on car manufacturers to sell a certain number of EVs on penalty of hefty fines, and they may be forced to cut sales of petrol vehicles, pushing prices up and consumers out.
Introduce green levies on energy bills – they now make up 16 percent of electricity bills – and households will have to cut spending elsewhere.
Did the Government “tell” us to change our behavior? No, it just left us with no alternative.
And we are only in the foothills of the transition. Yes, the UK last year became the first country to halve its emissions since 1990 – a milestone about which the eco-zealots remained surprisingly quiet.
But this was achieved by accelerating existing trends, such as abandoning much domestic production, and we could rely on renewables because fossil fuels were there to provide baseload power.
The next half will be far more painful – though the climate cult will likely dismiss such concerns, insisting that clean energy sources are low cost and jobs will be provided aplenty.
When wind turbines are running, the marginal cost of energy produced is close to zero, whilst energy produced by gas has a positive marginal cost because we have to purchase the fuel.
But gas-fired power stations are easy to build and link to the grid. Wind turbines, on the other hand, are costly to install and maintain, especially offshore.
They don’t have a long life, are in places far from population centers, and are expensive to link to the grid.
They also need backup when the wind doesn’t blow, or if it blows too hard. But these issues are hidden by government subsidies and delusional eco-hype.
Yet the Tories are hardly in a position to challenge it – assuming they want to. The timetable they set for the transition to clean energy was excessively ambitious.
Tories did nothing about the 2008 Climate Change Act, failed to dismantle the supposedly independent Climate Change Committee, and enshrined the Net Zero by 2050 target in law.
As a result, the country that birthed the industrial revolution, and created the oil refineries and steelworks that transformed people’s lives, now has the world’s highest electricity prices – and only the ghost of an industrial sector.
Read rest at The Telegraph
Club of Rome, limits to growth report, Sierra Club. UN, WEF, global control etc…etc… Nowt to do with Climate.
All that is true. Net zero policies, based in a simple deceit regarding the now provable by measurement deceit regarding the contribution of humans to global climate variability, was always the inevitable consequence of ignoring the realities of the laws of physics when selecting supposed improvements to our means of generating electrical and other forms of enrgy. Mostly mechanical. Ignorant politicians simply ignored the physical properties of the available energy sources, the absolute reasons why we abandoned wind and water for fossil generated steam energy and then steam turbine generated electricity as well as oil for flight and transport and synthetic materials. Even ignored the obvious and the absolute inadequacy and mismatch to demand of solar PV at 50 deg North, in particular as regards energy density, the dispatchability of the different energy sources and the means of collection, transmission and distribution, all of which are unchangeable by politicians because they are natural absolutes.
Subsidies enrich lobbyists, they don’t change physics and nature. And less than 150ppm of CO2 means no life on Earth. A natural gas that plants and stupid politicains are made of while calling it a pollutant, to enable the subsidy rackets destroying our economy and destroying individual prosperity by laws that composing pointless measures that can achieve no measurable benefit. Only costs. These are deeply ignorant and/or corrupt people. Unsuitable to govern a developed society.
At the most basic level of economic competence they also denied the economic basics of the absolute need for developed economy to have access to cheap, affordable, secure and sovereign energy on demand, at whatever scale is required. Net zero makes every one of these things worse, and adequacy at scale impossible . All this is simple to quantify using maths and physics, it cannot be change, but politicians cannot understand reality so impose deceitful religion through state propaganda to falsely enrich their elites when the supposed problems have solutions that require no such measures, because they work as physics says they do, but politicians refuse to consider. This is truly a massive fraud on the people by the political classes on a massive scale. Wholly unnecessary in the realities of the nature we measure and know, whether or not the suppoesed problem was real, which it demonstrably is not at scale..
Planetary climate is change is mostly, measurably, natural. Neo feudal enrgy generation can only support a neo feudal society.
Net-Zero is the Pipe Dreams of the Screwballs who spend their whole days meditating in the middle of the forests going OOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM OOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM OOOOOOOOMMMMMMM