Net zero: on the path to destruction

By Richard North - August 10, 2023

According to Guardian writer, Rafael Behr, Britain is trapped in political purgatory waiting for its undead government to fall.

That may well be the case – or wishful thinking – but Behr goes on to add that “policy that can’t work and laws written purely for campaign slogans are clear symptoms of a moribund regime”.

He is, of course, talking about the controls over illegal immigration, which the entire Guardian collective would like to see junked, with no indication of what they would do to control the situation, other than open our borders and let all comers in.

Not one of the collective, though, would dream of substituting Behr’s homily on immigration with the same thought directed at net-zero. Yet it would be hard to find a better example of a policy that can’t work.

Whether the climate change laws were written purely for campaign slogans is moot, but the determination to press ahead with something which is so fatuous on the one hand, and so damaging, is quite obviously a symptom of a moribund regime.

In that the ambition to wreck the economy and much else besides is shared by both government and opposition, it is also definitely a regime defect, not just a “wobble” by the current administration that can be remedied at a general election by voting for the other side.

This is something made clear by Allister Heath in the Telegraph, writing under the heading: “The public still isn’t being told the full, horrifying truth about net zero”, adding the observation that “a restrictive architecture of carbon budgets and climate committees is killing democratic choice”.

The main heading itself had me thinking. Given that people are increasingly switching off from the news media, one wonders how Allister Heath would have people told of the “full, horrifying truth about net zero”.

I would venture that by far the majority of people, if they have any awareness at all of net-zero, only have the vaguest idea of what it actually is and have almost no perception of how it affects them personally. It is too far in the future and altogether too theoretical for most people to take notice of it.

I experienced a similar effect in trade politics. Even when I wrote detailed notes about forthcoming legislation for the members of the trade associations for which I worked, most took not the blind bit of notice until the law came into force. Then my phone would be ringing non-stop with members complaining that they hadn’t been warned.

Thus, the Telegraph and others can write all the blood-curdling stories they like about the adverse effects of net-zero, but the horrors will impact only on a very small number of people.

It is not until the lights go out, or they are forced to spend £20-30,000 (or more) on heat pumps, or they find that swapping their cars for EVs costs them twice as much, only to find it impossible to charge them, will people start waking up to the impact of what has been done in their name.

Nevertheless, Heath is right about net-zero being a denial of democracy. As he says in his piece, a green nomenklatura now yields immense power. Tories, Labour, Lib Dems: all have signed up to legally binding five-year plans, known as “carbon budgets”, which stipulate a detailed programme to re-engineer society to cut emissions by a specific amount.

Scandalously, he adds, “what the electorate thinks of these grossly under-scrutinised plans matters little”. In fact, it matters not at all: the plans are set in stone, embodied in law by Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act in 2008 and fortified by Theresa May’s statutory instrument which paved the way for the detail of net-zero.

This is picked up by a Telegraph editorial which pays homage to the small scale uprising in the parliamentary Conservative Party over net-zero, but remarks that the Tories are trapped by net-zero legislation. The dilemma facing ministers, the paper says, is that they are bound by statute to meet certain carbon reduction targets.

In theory, relying on the doctrine that no parliament can bind another, any new parliament could simply repeal the statutes and reset the entire corpus of climate change legislation, but we all know that isn’t going to happen. Most MPs have already swallowed the Kool Aid and are committed to the cause.

And, in any case, the “Green blob” is so well-organised, and embedded in the fabric of society, that any attempt at a reset would provoke a torrent of protest aimed at intimidating those who stray from the path. Only the very brave and the determined would withstand the assault, and there aren’t many MPs who are either.

Nevertheless, the politicians – and their media handmaidens – are living in cloud-cuckoo land; net-zero isn’t going to happen because it can’t.

People simply are not going to be bullied into spending tens of thousands for useless heat pumps. Existing ICE cars can be refurbished endlessly and there is little government can do about a burgeoning market in rebuilt second-hand cars. And when the lights go out, the riots will follow.

This glimmering of awareness is beginning to percolate beyond the Telegraph, with Juliet Samuel in The Times offering the nostrum that “Blind faith and bans won’t get us to net zero”.

Acknowledging that the Climate Change Committee, the papal seat of net zero, says we are not going to meet our targets, she argues that the problem is that the government’s primary tool – the target – is insufficient and, on its own, downright damaging.

Ministers, she says, appear to think that if they legislated the ends (all new cars electric by 2030, all electricity green by 2035 and net zero by 2050), the means would simply appear.

We are then offered an analogy which sets Samuel on a path to her own particular solution. The energy system, she says, is not a dartboard. It is more akin to a patient undergoing a blood transfusion. If you wish to switch the blood supply from red to green, the responsible approach would be to secure a supply of compatible green blood before draining out the red.

“Man-made climate change?”, she posits. “Yes, most of us believe in it”. But no, that does not give self-appointed climate martyrs permission to visit unplanned, impractical policies upon us. Climate change belief should be tempered by scepticism of dramatic predictions of what’s coming, theories rolled out with great fanfare and based upon massive simplifications.

Her solution to this dilemma is that “we should adopt a proactive but pragmatic approach”. In her view, “the surest way to get emissions down globally without crashing economies would be to replace coal generation with gas, ramp up nuclear power generation and move to new energy storage systems when they are ready”.

Locally, she says, the government should stop taxing the North Sea to death, stop lobbying allies against gas development and accelerate the glacial pace of nuclear funding decisions.

However, this seems to be as much in cloud cuckoo land as the cultists. Net-zero, on the established timescale, is a peculiarly British obsession, imposed regardless of what is happening elsewhere in the world. Many believe that climate change is only the excuse, and that the real agenda is control.

Rational, or even irrational alternatives, therefore, are not going to fly. The mania which drives net-zero is locked on its path to destruction and only when the full weight of its devastating effects becomes apparent will there be a popular reaction.

Until then, democracy is suspended and general elections are a meaningless farce. But then, we knew that already.