The crippling cost of Net Zero-Ben Pile
By Paul Homewood
Another good article by Ben Pile:
The International Energy Agency (IEA) published a special report last week, setting out its proposals for achieving ‘Net Zero’ carbon emissions. One of its headline demands is that gas-fired domestic boilers should no longer be sold after 2025. This echoes one of the main policies in the UK government’s Net Zero plan. This is no coincidence. National governments, including the UK, draw all of their climate policies from faceless global agencies like the IEA (as well as domestic quangos like the Climate Change Committee). This process leaves out one important constituency: the public.
Full story here.
It covers the usual ground, but I loved this bit:
A ban on gas boilers will impose serious costs on ordinary people. A backlash is highly likely. You might think the practicalities of the policy would be of interest to journalists and the media. But journalists have taken the IEA’s proposals at face value, and have mainly reported them without scrutiny.
Take the BBC’s Matt McGrath. ‘To keep the world safe, scientists say that global heating has to be limited to 1.5C by the end of this century’, he writes on the BBC News website. ‘The IEA’s new study sets out what it believes to be a realistic road map to achieve that aim.’ There is no scepticism about the proposals, no consideration of their consequences or even any questioning of why we should take orders from technocrats about how to live.
An excited Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the Telegraph’s business correspondent, also reproduces the IEA’s claims uncritically. ‘Net Zero does not cost jobs: it replaces five million lost in oil, gas, and coal with eight times as many… It does not raise energy costs: it cuts the average bill for households.’ This is bonkers, to put it mildly. When policies face no challenge from the media, they are much more likely to be taken up by governments. But when they inevitably go wrong, none of their advocates will be held accountable.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
“eight times as many…[jobs]” – jobs are a cost, someone has to pay the wages. Who’s going to pick up that tab?
…..Net Zero does not cost jobs: it replaces five million lost in oil, gas, and coal with eight times as many…..
This is true. I have no doubt whatsoever that it will take five times as much labor to deliver the same amount of energy under green policies as is currently delivered under the existing system. Because of the increased energy required for the switch over, I freely concede that it will take another three times the existing labor content to handle the increase.
I don’t agree that there is anyway that this can be considered a good thing and counts as an argument in favor the new green deal. I note that no one ever tries to explain why this is good. They merely simply keep repeating over and over that the inefficiency causing increased labor content is good.
By the same token presumably the pandemic, which has caused a huge increase in demand for health workers, is a similarly “good thing”…
Way back in 2009, an authoritative study published by the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain, following the state’s mad dash to renewables, calculated that for every 4 subsidised green jobs created, 9 non subsidised jobs were lost in the broader economy. A lesson still yet to be learnt by our political masters.
So I’ve been going through that IEA net zero report (it’s quite a long read, over 200 pages), and I’ve noticed a few interesting numbers. First is the share of gross world product that is the energy sector, this is to go up from 2.5% of the economy devoted to energy production today to 4.5% in the future. Second is the size of the economy itself, which is going to more than double by 2050 when net zero is supposedly going to be achieved. And third is the actual energy usage, that is to remain flat from its current value to 2050, thanks to increased efficiency and energy rationing (for instance, number of flights will reduce even though population increases, and car ownership will go down from 60% to 35%). Now let’s do some simple math, if our “world GDP” is more than twice as large, but we are spending 4.5% of it to get our energy needs rather than 2.5% as we do today, and those energy needs are exactly the same as today, that means that we are spending 4 times as much money for the same amount of energy. Yep, energy is going to be 4 times more expensive in Birol’s perfect fantasy world of global net zero. Still not enough to cover 8 times as many jobs, but that is only if wages stay the same. With most of the new jobs (in mining, processing, manufacturing) being created in the developing world, far far away from affluent environmentally conscious westerners who endlessly complain about every single mine and every single factory, it’s reasonable to assume that the average wages in the energy sector will be at least 2 times lower. Mystery solved.
If renewable require 8x as many jobs as oil and gas then productivity in the energy sector is going to fall 87.5%
Either that or jobs will pay only 12.5% of an oil industry job. I know we’re well paid, but I can assure you living on only 12.5% of my salary would be a very long way below minimum wage flipping burgers.
The media have been used to whip up covid fears, with amazing success. This showed the governments that they could do the same with climate fears, its harder because the fear of death is not as immediate, but given the state of the general public’s mental condition after 15 months of covid psyop, its now so much easier.
They intend to press ahead while they have society paralysed in fear, especially timing the climate announcements to coincide with taking the boot of the neck temporarily by easing lackdowns ( as long as enough people have taken the gene tharapies).
The conditioning everyone to thing like ‘hive’ beings is working beyond their wildest dreams.
Here are real world numbers on UK renewable electricity generation Jan to May for 2020 compared to the same period for 2021 (figures in TWh.)
Large hydro: 2.202 (2020) reduced to 1.516 (2021)
Solar : 5.718 (2020) reduced to 3.063 (2021)
Wind: 25.252 (2020) reduced to 21.43 (2021)
Totals 33.172 TWh (2020) REDUCED BY 21% to 26.150 TWh (2021)
Replace that Gas Boiler by an electricity driven Heat Pump? I really don’t think so and neither would the vast majority of the UK public if they were allowed to see the real figures.
https://www.mygridgb.co.uk/last-12-months/
And for those that are interested (who cares) the “carbon intensity” of the UK grid is substantially rising as well.
There is little real knowledge by government and the media that demand equals CO2 rise from generation. The extra demand from electric vehicles and heat pumps would need a matching increase in renewables generation (Not capacity as output is far lower than capacity) and nuclear generation for us just to stay still.
It takes time to build renewables and nuclear generation will fall as power plants close this decade. There is also a practical limit of how much renewables can be connected to the grid before stability becomes a major problem and trips occur.
Rather than reducing CO2 emissions by elctricfication, I feel that this is just not going to happen, but we will spend an awful lot of money in an ineffective course of action?
Half the world genuinely believe in the supernatural .
So a belief in this stuff is not unusual.
Seems the journalists just don’t understand economics at all. “Net Zero does not cost jobs: it replaces five million lost in oil, gas, and coal with eight times as many”. If you need 8 times as many people to supply the same amount of power, then that energy costs you 8 times as much, since in truth all types of energy cost nothing except the person-hours needed to extract them or otherwise produce them, and of course how much money those people are paid for their hours. Thus the only way you can make that energy cheaper is to pay those people less per hour – in this case they’d need to be paid around 1/8 of the wages of the oil, coal, and gas workers.
Changing the house-heating over to air-sourced heat exchangers would work in some countries, but in the UK the air temperature does go below 7°C in winter. At that air temperature, the COP of the heat-pump gets down to around 1 and the heat-exchanger will ice up if you try to take a few kW out of the air, thus the heat-pump really has to switch to resistive heating. With the advent of hourly price-changes on electricity to help balance supply and demand (by restricting demand), this is also when the electricity price will be highest because the demand will be highest. Thus when it’s coldest, and you need to keep your house warm, the cost of doing that will be excessive.
I suppose the journalists might reply that people should instead install ground-source heat exchangers. Not actually possible for flat-dwellers, and even in the leafy suburbs if you figure a grid of ground-source extraction then over enough years that source will reduce in temperature because it’s only fed at around 40mW/m² (on average) from below. Thus the efficiency of that will gradually drop the more people try to use it.
There will be a few situations where using a heat-pump would be effective. They do however wear out and the replacement costs (which will indubitably increase if the cost of energy rises) will impact the economic argument.
I looked into the costings for here (SW France) quite a few years ago, but since we do have twice-daily electricity-price change with the maximum cost around 10 times the minimum cost, I would have been very much out of pocket on running costs let alone the capital cost. It’s just not practical.
I honestly believe that the EN16147 testing standard for the CoP of air source heat pumps being recorded at 7°C is borderline criminal misrepresentation. This “required” standard applies throughout the EU – Munich has a mean daily temperature well below that figure for 5 months of the year, in Leeds it is 4 months!
It always amazes me how many apparently sane people are completely hoodwinked by the NetZero concept. They see CO2 is an evil dangerous compound, far worse than Covid 19. The saving grace is that I believe commonsense will appear in due course, not in a small way because of this site. But it is painful waiting.
‘it replaces five million lost in oil, gas, and coal with eight times as many’
5,000,000 X 8 = 40,000,000
Y’all got 40 million workers?
No? So the lights go out.
The push is to go to electric residential heat . . . while destroying electricity generation. How’s that going to work out for you? You will have no residential heating. But you have 20k
artwork – called a ‘heat pump’ – to remind you of your stupidity.
Local news carries a story about child poverty, quoting the local (Labour) mayor. At the same time they are planning to spend £millions on virtue signalling “active travel” and net zero policies that haven’t been put before voters. Even opposition politicians haven’t the guts to ask WHY?
Ditto rising homelessness due to ending tenant protections.
It’s a trick! All children are extremely poor, totally dependent on others. Like their parents.
‘Child poverty’ is Leftist emotion talk. Trashy argumentum ad captandum.
Stop the World, I want to get off.
If “we” are to achieve zero carbon fuel emissions by 2050 to keep global temperatures below some artificial Paris Accord value, that must mean rapid “urgent” elimination of petroleum products. Gasoline, diesel fuel and biofuels. The immediate consequences of that will impact transportation at all levels, even those few that are battery-driven with recharge available. Solar and wind do not move vehicles. And without vehicles there is no way that jobs can increase in any sectors. Net-zero requires carbon removal and geological storage and that cannot take place with renewables either.
Can someone at some elevated policy position please explain how all this job creation can take place in the real world “we” live in?
Note that Matt McGrath uses the term “global heating”, a construct pushed by the Guardian amongst others to propagate climate alarmism ad absurdam.
Most of the jobs are a mirage in a green haze.
The infamous Spanish study is out of date now, but things will not have miraculously turned around.
***https://docs.wind-watch.org/jobs-renewables-Spain.pdf***
Each “green” megawatt installed destroys 5.28 jobs on average elsewhere…….
…..resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,500 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs destroyed for every “green job” created…..
etc.
Spain again.
https://www.verdict.co.uk/spains-renewable-energy-jobs
Miners will be re-skilled, a lot in state-paid re-wilding/conservation type stuff it sounds like, oh, and 60% will be thrown on the scrap heap of early retirement.
It sounds like enormous new costs will fall on the taxpayer, but green energy is so cheap they tell us!
“This echoes one of the main policies in the UK government’s Net Zero plan. This is no coincidence.”
Indeed not, because, according to the IEA, the report was produced at the “request of the COP 26 president”.
Alok Sharma = hoakS Alarm
Almost perfect!
‘it replaces five million lost in oil, gas, and coal with eight times as many’
This is a significant underestimate. Given the intermittancy of ‘renewables’ there will be tens of millions of opportunities in manual electricity generation.
The phrase we used for the low grade manufacturing jobs we had in the ’60s “Another day at the treadmill” is about to take on a much more literal meaning.