Gaviscon For Cows
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
In years gone by, you would have been entitled to think this was an April Fool’s joke!
Sadly it is now just a sign of the crazy times we live in:
All dairy cows will be given “methane suppressants” to stop them belching so much under the Government’s net zero plans.
Ministers are planning to force farmers to give their livestock “compound feeds” that contain additives to reduce gassy digestion.
Cows and other farm animals produce around 14 per cent of the total carbon emissions created by human activity worldwide.
Methane is released into the air when cows belch or break wind and is one of the most potent greenhouse gases – warming the planet 25 times more effectively than carbon dioxide.
The Government’s Net Zero Growth Plan, released this week, contained new measures to help Britain reach its 2050 climate goal after the High Court ruled that existing plans were not detailed enough.
The plan said officials “anticipate entry of high efficacy methane suppressing products to the UK market from 2025” and would explore their use for cow farms “at pace”.
“This will include the ambition to mandate the introduction of products with proven safety and efficacy in compound feeds for cattle as soon as practically possible in England,” it added.
The news was welcomed by green campaigners who said it would help the UK to reduce methane emissions.
Britain’s commitment to the Global Methane Pledge requires it to reduce emissions by 30 per cent by 2030, but analysis by the Green Alliance suggests current plans will only cut them by 14 per cent.
Dustin Benton, a former chief analytical adviser to the Government on food strategy, said the suppressants should be given to dairy cows first but could later be adapted for sheep.
“Most dairy cows are milked twice a day, and when they’re going to be milked they usually eat, so that’s a pretty good way of getting it into them,” he said.
“Let’s start with what we can, reduce the methane that comes from cows and work out how we can go further.”
It is estimated that the extra cost of feeding methane suppressants to cows would add around 33p per year to the cost of milk for the average consumer.
But the cost could be borne by taxpayers if ministers choose to subsidise the feed, or by supermarkets in a form of greenhouse gas levy.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/04/01/cows-given-methane-suppressants-net-zero-plans/
The afore mentioned Dustin Benton just happens to be Policy Director at the Green Alliance, something which the Telegraph disingenuously omitted to mention.
Ross Clark: Stop terrorising the young with climate doom
By Paul Homewood
We are not going to drown, starve or die of thirst because of climate change. Rather, the most immediate danger lies in exaggerating the threats and rendering an entire generation incapacitated by fear.
Welcome To Basket Case Britain
By Paul Homewood
In their Gadarene rush to beat the rest of the world to a carbon-free future, ministers appear determined to turn Britain into an economic basket case.
Today was Green Day, when the preposterously titled Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Grant Shapps, unveiled the Government’s latest madcap plans for making us colder and poorer.
Presumably, Shapps had no idea that Green Day is also the name of a popular American punk rock group, whose breakthrough hit was called Basket Case.
Come to think of it, though, what could be more appropriate. In their Gadarene rush to beat the rest of the world to a carbon-free future, ministers appear determined to turn Britain into an economic basket case.
While even the EU hits the pause button on plans to phase out fossil fuels, at least for motor vehicles, our Government has set the controls for the heart of the sun.
Shapps flatly refused even to consider that there might be an alternative to banning the sale of all internal combustion powered cars after 2030.
This is despite Europe having second thoughts following the development of so-called ‘e-fuels,’ which are a clean alternative to petrol and diesel. So while German manufacturers get an exemption for e-fuelled cars and vans, the British motor industry gets a kick in the teeth.
Britain’s ban on the sale of conventionally powered vehicles starts in 2030, five years before the rest of Europe. We’re even phasing out hybrids from 2035.
Shapps said: ‘We are not in Europe. We don’t have to do what Europe does on this stuff. We have always been more forward leaning on this stuff than the EU.’
No, we don’t have to copy Europe. But that doesn’t mean cutting off our nose to spite our face.
Forward leaning? More like falling head-first from a great height.
Already, BMW is moving some of its UK operations abroad. Others will follow suit if they are prevented from at least exploring whether e-fuels have a viable future.
Today, however, the Government doubled down on its deranged carbon-neutral agenda, with Rishi Sunak announcing that car makers will be forced to ensure that 22 per cent of all vehicles sold in Britain are all-electric by 2024, rising to 100 per cent in 2035 — even though the chances of there being enough reliable electricity generating capacity to charge them all are less than zero.
Sunak and Shapps seem hell-bent on doing more damage to our domestic motor industry than useless managements and union militants like British Leyland’s Red Robbo inflicted in the 1970s.
That should go down well in Red Wall seats in Derbyshire and Sunderland, where Toyota and Nissan employ tens of thousands. For now, anyway.
Of course, when it comes to leading the anti-car charge, XR poster boy Shapps has plenty of previous. During Covid, he bunged councils £250 million for ‘temporary’ measures to encourage cycling and walking.
At the time, some of us warned that these allegedly temporary measures would inevitably become permanent, even when the pandemic was over. And so it has come to pass.
In the name of saving the polar bears, local authorities across Britain have declared all-out war on motorists. Net Zero has become a convenient excuse for closing roads and imposing punitive fines and congestion charges. […]
Forgive me for repeating former deputy Labour leader Nye Bevan’s quote about ministerial incompetence in 1945: ‘This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organisational genius could produce a shortage of both coal and fish at the same time.’
Today, our island is sitting on half a century’s reserves of shale gas and billions of barrels of untapped oil and natural gas in the North Sea. Yet our modern organisational geniuses have managed to produce a home-grown shortage of both gas and oil, purely out of short-sighted political vanity.
As a result, we are forced increasingly to rely on forests of hideous, bird-shredding, onshore, War-Of-The-Worlds windmills and the promise of as-yet-untested mini nuclear reactors — which if the Government’s less- than-impressive record on public infrastructure projects (HS2 anyone?) is anything to go by, won’t be operational until way beyond 2050, if ever.
From what I can gather, the only new initiative announced today by Grant ‘Green Day’ Shapps was the launch of two new ‘carbon capture clusters’, whatever they are.
Still, I can certainly think of a word to describe the Government’s Net Zero energy policy. And it definitely begins with ‘cluster . . .’
Welcome to Basket Case Britain.
JRM & The Nutter From Just Stop Oil
By Paul Homewood
Jacob Rees-Mogg interviews Looby Loo!
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
Welcome to the USSR:
Boiler manufacturers will be fined thousands of pounds if they fail to install enough heat pumps under new net zero plans.
Ministers are planning to force production quotas onto large manufacturers as part of efforts to boost uptake of the devices across Britain.
Companies that fail to meet the quotas will face a fine of £5,000 per device. In an example given in consultation papers, a manufacturer with a shortfall of 100 would be expected to pay £500,000.
Allister Heath: Net Zero is a Trojan horse for the total destruction of Western society
By Paul Homewood
Bit by bit, the resistance grows:
Prepare for a people’s revolution against policies that will abolish choice and impoverish millions
I love my electric car, dear reader, I really do. The driving experience is revolutionary, the acceleration mind-blowing and there are no nasty exhaust fumes or engine noise. After almost three years, I’m not going back: it is far superior, for my purposes, to a petrol-powered vehicle.
But I’m lucky. I can easily charge it and I never drive long distances with it. The Government’s plan to impose a UK-wide ban on the sale of new, pure petrol cars in just six years and nine months’ time is insanely detached from reality. The country and the technology are nowhere near ready for a full roll-out. Sticking with this preposterous timetable will impoverish and inconvenience millions and trigger a seismic, anti-green popular revolt.
The EU has already backtracked: after lobbying from Germany, Brussels will allow some internal combustion engines powered by e-fuels. We must go further and scrap the deadlines altogether. The future of driving is zero emissions, but we should trust capitalism to deliver it when the time is right.
Longer range yet affordable models need to be available for people who need to drive hundreds of miles a day for work or leisure. Only 65 per cent of UK homes have off-street parking and, in some cases, only for one car, according to the RAC. In London, this falls to 44 per cent. Millions of on-street and at-work charging points will therefore be required; the roll-out to date has been pathetic. Electricity consumption will surge and yet the country is already on the brink of blackouts.
The cheapest new petrol-fuelled cars begin at around £12,500 for a Dacia Sandero; increasingly steep, but just about affordable on credit for Middle England. Will electric cars with a range of 300 to 400 miles be available at that price by 2030? I doubt it, which means calamity for millions. Eventually, cheap, long-ranged electric models will flood the market and an affordable second-hand market will develop, but not yet. If we really need a binding deadline, the Government should legislate that new electric cars will only be compulsory when there is sufficient on-street charging and generation capacity.
Until now, the costs of decarbonising society have been disparate or borne by industry – one reason why voters remain supportive. Fuel duty has been frozen. Home energy bills have gone up, but other factors have had a far greater impact on the cost of living. Taxes on long-haul flights have been hiked, hurting British-Asian and African communities, but the general public hasn’t really noticed. Voters have accepted the shift to reusable bags and paper straws and are happy to recycle. But those were easy – in some cases, costless – tweaks that haven’t required massive behavioural change and they fooled our elites into believing that voters will put up with endless misery to go green. They won’t.
Given enough time, a seamless transition to zero-emissions cars that don’t impact a person’s quality of life or their pocket is eminently possible. The same cannot be said of the proposed shift to heat pumps, or decarbonised air travel, or low-carbon construction, or reduced meat diets. These are likely to end up being explosively expensive and unpopular. We will eventually crack a new way of powering planes, but not a commercially viable one by 2050. The public will go wild if every home is forced to stump up a five-figure sum to retrofit a heating system that doesn’t even work properly when it gets really cold, or if foreign holidays are effectively banned.
The growing civil disobedience and furious rejection of low-traffic neighbourhoods and other anti-car diktats is a harbinger of things to come, as is the anti-Ulez movement which is galvanising many outer London and Home Counties demographics. These are notable given how few protests advocating explicitly centre-Right policies there have been over the past 40 years: the Countryside Alliance march, which failed, the fuel protests, which succeeded spectacularly, and the pro-Brexit demos, which eventually triumphed.
The speed at which the pro-car movement has grown is remarkable, as is the diversity of its grassroots leadership. The political elites and the net zero movement need to pay close attention: their policies have barely started to be implemented and yet they already risk triggering the British equivalent of the Dutch farmers’ party, which won the most seats in the provincial elections in fury at a savage green crackdown on agriculture.
There are two kinds of environmentalism. The first is the one exemplified by conservationists, nature lovers, green technologists, free-market environmentalists, Elon Musk, Boris Johnson before No 10, or my colleague Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. They love human civilisation as well as the natural world. They believe that new technologies – hydrogen, nuclear fusion, geoengineering, carbon capture, electric cars or cultured meat – are the solutions to environmental degradation. They dream of near-free, abundant clean energy and high-yielding agriculture; they seek new ways of enhancing our quality of life, feeding the world and growing our economy while not disrupting the environment. They support democracy, reason, choice, international travel, rising living standards and the universalisation of consumer goods.
The second kind of environmentalist are control freaks who have hijacked and warped a great cause. They don’t want to save the planet so much as to control its inhabitants. They love net zero – an extreme vision incapable of nuance, trade-offs or cost-benefit analysis – because it is a form of central planning. They are eternally disappointed by real-life human beings and their individualism.
Many have adopted a woke, quasi-religious worldview: we have sinned by damaging Gaia, we must repent, we must self-flagellate. They believe in “degrowth” and a weird form of autarkic feudalism. They dislike freedom and don’t want us to choose where to live, shop, eat or send our children to school. They want to reduce mobility. The Welsh government has banned road- building. One French minister called for the end of the detached house: we should all be forced into flats to minimise our carbon footprint, a cause now advocated by some UK commentators.
The public backs the first approach, not the latter. The net zero fanatics have already overreached. Our politicians must break with these extremists, or they will unleash a popular revolt that will make Brexit look like a gathering of Davos technocrats.
By Paul Homewood
The collectivist Net Zero political project is starting to come apart before our very eyes. Making everyone poor, cold, hungry and confined to small living territories was always a tall political ask, but decades of green virtue-signalling, backed by a ‘settled’ version of science that cannot be debated in polite society, has kept the show on the road.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph last Wednesday, Sherelle Jacobs said there comes a time when the sacred mythology that underpins an orthodoxy simply crumbles. She was writing about liberalism in general, and the pieties behind mass illegal migration, but she could easily have been referring to Net Zero.
The recent decision by the European Union to allow the sale of internal combustion cars after 2035 was a small sign that reality is starting to intrude on those overseeing the destruction of Europe’s industrial base. There was a fig leaf to hide the blushes in the announcement suggesting that the cars must be run on carbon captured from the air and mixed with hydrogen produced from ‘green’ energy. As always with such hypothetical green technologies, one is inclined to discount those based on pure wishful thinking. The U.K. is still committed to banning the sale of internal combustion cars after 2030, but developments in Europe may produce a rethink.
The hard politics behind this decision is that Germany has enjoyed 70 years of unprecedented prosperity based on heavy industry reliant on cheap energy, recently secured from Russia. Its car industry is one of the most innovative and competitive in the world, and faces near destruction in the move to battery cars. This fate of course is likely to be shared by most European countries including the U.K., with China monopolising both the production of electric cars and the refining of vital minerals.
Writing recently in the Daily Sceptic, Andrew Montford, the Deputy Director of Net Zero Watch, said that inhabitants of the Westminster Village were happy to hype up fears of climate purgatory and fib about the cost of the renewable road to redemption. “Once the public understands the depth and extent of the deception, and the damage done to the economy and the prospects for our children, the trickery over Covid is going to look decidedly peripheral,” he added.
Read the full post here.
By Paul Homewood
The bloc is backtracking on its plan to ban combustion engines. It’s time for Britain to follow suit
If anyone had any lingering doubts that the EU is run by German car-makers (in association with French farmers), they will surely have been dispelled by the news that the bloc is to backtrack on its plan to ban combustion engines from new vehicles by 2035. While petrol and diesel cars will still be banned, carbon neutral synthetic "e-fuels" will be permitted. While bringing the EU’s green juggernaut to a skidding halt may have required some very powerful lobbying, it is also the right decision.
Proposed bans on petrol and diesel cars in the EU and in Britain were put in place without any proper consideration as to whether electric cars were capable of replacing them. It was simply assumed that improvements in technology would solve the issues of range, ease of recharging, the cost of buying electric cars and their over-reliance on rare metals such as cobalt – which are extracted in troubled parts of the world. Yet prices of electric cars – not to mention the electricity to run them – have remained stubbornly high. Moreover, their manufacture can involve rather more emissions than a petrol or diesel equivalent.
Some are already trying to play down the significance of the EU’s decision, arguing that "e-fuels" will be so expensive that internal combustion engines will become a high-end, niche product. Yet two decades ago, long before we had a net zero target, drivers in Wales found to their pleasure (and to the annoyance of the then HM Customs and Excise) that an ordinary diesel engine could run quite happily on waste oil from chip shops. Since then, the government has made petrol with a 10 per cent renewable ethanol component the British standard, so most of us are already running our cars partly on non-fossil fuels.
As for synthetic fuels made from carbon dioxide and hydrogen produced by electrolysis of water, the German Aerospace Centre estimates such fuels could be made for aviation purposes using existing technology for around 2.26 Euros (£2 per litre). That is expensive – it currently costs around 50 pence to produce a litre of unleaded, the rest being tax and distribution costs – but it is not much higher than recent at-pump prices. The EU’s change of heart means that the car industry can now work developing what could be the ideal compromise: plug-in vehicles which could run 50 miles or so in pure electric mode, but which have a small engine – powered by synthetic fuel – to keep the battery charged on longer trips.
But what will Britain do? The government is showing no signs that its own ban on petrol and diesel cars will not go ahead as planned – which would mean no new pure petrol and diesels sold after 2030, and no hybrids from 2035. This is foolish, and the government will be forced to reconsider. No manufacturer is going to make cars exclusively with the UK market in mind, so if the internal combustion engine does remain a standard product in Europe and elsewhere in the world, UK motorists are going to find themselves restricted to a handful of pure – and expensive – electric models. What remains of our car industry will be put under even greater pressure.
If the electric car makers do improve and bring down the cost of their product, then that’s great – most of us will want to drive them. But in keeping options open for internal combustion engines the EU, for once, has done something sensible that Britain should emulate.
The point Ross Clark makes about manufacturers not wanting to make a car just for the UK market is a strong one. As he says, we will end up being restricted to a handful of expensive EVs, along with cheap Chinese ones. Quite where this leaves the UK car industry is debatable.
Melting Antarctic ice will slow down a major global deep ocean current by 40% by 2050
By Paul Homewood
Will slow down?
Only in their computer models!
By Paul Homewood
London, 30 March – Commenting on today’s package of energy policies released by the UK government, Net Zero Watch warned that Rishi Sunak and his colleagues appear to have learned nothing from the bitter experiences of the energy cost crisis and are ignoring the growing burden of renewable energy.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 