Net-zero: banging on

By Richard North - September 13, 2023

In the Telegraph today is an impassioned piece by columnist Allison Pearson (not someone I normally read) in which she rails against net-zero.

Her title is: “When will our leaders admit that achieving net zero will cost trillions and is unachievable?”, with the sub-heading: “How can our gravely indebted country afford to splash the cash on grand, almost certainly corrupt and futile, international eco-projects?”.

Not least of her concerns is Sunak’s decision at the G20 meeting to splash out $2 billion of our money on the Green Climate Fund, which he boasts is “the biggest single funding commitment the UK has made to help the world tackle climate change”.

“Was there really nothing better at home to spend that money on, prime minister?”, Pearson asks, going on to suggest that an alternative home might be “those special needs children whose funding your government just cut by 20 percent”, remarking that perhaps the 1.9 million kids struggling with talking/understanding language are “insufficiently “vulnerable”.

In the same vein, she asks: “How about building a couple of new hospitals and creating bursaries for 1,000 desperately needed nurses? Or maybe put up some new houses to deal with the pressure of the 606,000 immigrants you allowed into our country last year against the very specific wishes of the majority of the population?”.

It may be me, but my impression is that this sort of robust criticism against net-zero is appearing more often in the Telegraph, and possibly some other papers. Furthermore, criticism is by no means confined to the UK, as we see from this contribution from German finance minister Christian Lindner.

He, we are told, has “slammed politicians in Brussels” for seeking to enact stricter clean energy rules for buildings, warning that such plans could spark a dangerous voter backlash and fuel the rise of the far right.

He argues that Europeans are suffering from overregulation and urges Ursula von der Leyen to “pause” new EU legislation aimed at curtailing greenhouse gas emissions during a time of economic stagnation wrought in part by high energy costs.

Despite this increasingly vocal criticism, though, there is little sign of it having a noticeable effect. Far from toning down the enthusiasm of our masters for ruining their respective economies, the obsession continues unabated, joined most recently by Kemi Badenoch who pleads for continued relations with China as we need it “to hit net zero”.

Since the chances of China even attempting seriously to achieve its net-zero targets is remote, one wonders why the Tories rate Badenoch so highly. She seems as thick as the rest of her colleagues.

But there we have another example of the power of the net-zero obsession, and a reminder that the policy is so deeply embedded in the social and legislative fabric of the UK, bolstered by a network of global policymaking, diplomacy and international agreements, that it’s going to take a lot more than adverse publicity from a few critics to shift it.

An indication of how far the rot has gone comes with yet another bit of lunacy which has small island nations “disproportionately affected by the climate crisis” taking “high-emitting countries” to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (Itlos).

During the two-day hearing in Hamburg, the tribunal will be asked to determine whether greenhouse gas emissions absorbed by the marine environment should be considered pollution. If it finds in favour of the island states, the hope is that it will give “guidance” on the emission reductions necessary to commitments under the Paris climate agreement.

One can just see China and many other countries clearing the decks to implement any “guidance” – or maybe not. But the very fact of the hearing adds to the continuous flow of propaganda, keeping the issue of climate change in the public eye. Crucially, it will also give activists and politicians yet more opportunities to lecture us on the importance of “saving the planet”.

All this points to the fact that net-zero doesn’t exist in isolation and relies for its continued momentum on a flow of climate change propaganda, aimed at keeping the population in a heightened state of alarm.

So far, 2023 has been a good year for the alarmists. Early heatwaves throughout the world, combined with claimed record temperatures, served to reinforce the impression that the planet is heating up, while the unseasonal snows and the record lows in Antarctica and elsewhere were assiduously ignored.

The temperatures also gave the fool Guterres the excuse to proclaim that “the era of global boiling has arrived”, a proposition supported visually by the outcrop of wildfires, which provided graphic illustrations of a “planet on fire”.

This has made it all the more important that there is a rational counter-commentary, pointing out the limitations of the evidence used to claim links between climate change and wildfire incidence and extent.

The case for such rationality stands even for those who buy into the AGW Kool Aid, as the answer to wildfire control is not the aspirational target of reducing “greenhouse gas” emissions, but better land management and other practical measures directed at the situation on the ground.

That matters as much with the claimed links between flooding and climate change, where we’ve seen episodes throughout the year shamelessly enlisted to support climate alarmism.

No more has this been the case than in the recent floods in Greece, with the storm spilling over into Libya to be linked with the disaster in Derna which may, according to the latest reports, have taken as many as 10,000 lives. That loss is being widely attributed to the storm rather than the failure to maintain vital protective dams.

There is some hope for us when the Guardian has published a relatively measured piece which acknowledges that “the storm itself was not wholly to blame for the destruction wreaked on Derna, where infrastructure, including the burst dams, was already in a parlous state”.

We also get Prof Lizzie Kendon, professor of climate science at the University of Bristol Cabot Institute for the Environment, who is allowed to say: “Storm Daniel is illustrative of the type of devastating flooding event we may expect increasingly in the future, but such events can occur just due to the natural variability of the climate – as they did in the past. Therefore, care is needed before linking any specific extreme event to climate change”.

Also particularly helpful was a piece in Aljazeera headed “Infrastructure in Libya’s Derna not built to withstand storm”, a comment from deputy mayor Ahmed Madroud who admitted that the dams had not been maintained since 2002.

Additionally, we had Hani Shennib, president of the National Council on US Libya Relations, telling us that: “The erosions in the dams in Derna are not new. They have been reported repeatedly, including in scientific journals from 2011 and moving on”. He accused officials of not paying attention to the problem, declaring: “This is not just a natural disaster; this is a human disaster as well as a result of the neglect of the city”.

Arguably, this was not even a natural disaster. Periodic and torrential flooding of dried-up watercourses (Wadis) is a normal feature of the North African climate and one for which the Derna dams were constructed. That they failed so catastrophically is almost certainly due to human fallibility, as well as the lack of emergency planning.

The trouble is that, as with the publicity on wildfires, the occasional rational piece is obscured by the rush of climate change claims and, by the time the hue and cry is over, the alarmists claim whatever has just passed as their own. It thus gets absorbed into the corpus of “evidence” supporting net-zero zealotry, regardless of the facts.

However, if the Pearson and other pieces are any guide, we may just be looking at a push-back against the zealots which, in time, could turn into an outright rebellion. The only way that can happen though is if we all keep banging on about what is probably the most important – and dangerous – political issue of the century.