‘Prepare for the populist backlash, if Net Zero becomes an elite project’
By Paul Homewood
From GWPF
In the Sunday Telegraph, the UK’s former energy minister, Chris Skidmore, is unnerved by this likely prospect and warns that the Net Zero agenda will fail unless ministers are honest with the public ‘about the scale of what lies ahead….’
Mr Skidmore’s alert about the geopolitical risks of going green is certainly timely, as is his warning about the growing risk of power shortages if the UK were to follow a renewables-only policy.
But when it comes to honesty and trust, Mr Skidmore would be well advised to refrain from claiming that the cost of offshore wind has come “crashing down.” Empirical data shows that this is simply not the case.
As for the Climate Change Committee and the UK Government, how about coming clean and reveal the dodgy Net Zero cost estimates they are trying to hide?
After all, Mr Skidmore is right when he warns about the true risk Net Zero faces:
Trust means working with people to achieve shared ambitions and potential, not working to a centralised plan without widespread support that will be destined to fail.”
Chris Skidmore’s article is largely self-congratulatory, for instance when he says:
Two years ago today I sat down at my ministerial desk and signed a piece of legislation that quietly committed the UK in law to reducing its carbon emissions to “net zero” by 2050 . We would drastically reduce our carbon footprint, to the point of negating any carbon dioxide that we could reasonably be held responsible for. We would become, in the stroke of a pen, the first G7 country to commit to such an endeavour.
Looking back two years on, little could I have fathomed that the UK’s leadership on net zero would have set off a chain reaction across the globe, with 75 per cent of the world’s land mass now signed up to a net zero target.
We’ll leave aside his evident delusion that the rest of the world is going to commit economic Hari-Kari, just because he signed a bit of paper.
But apparently he is now getting cold feet that the great British public might revolt when they find out how much they are going to have to pay for his green preening. He believes the public will go along with his ludicrous ideas if the government simply levels with them:
“We need to level now with people about the trade-offs, the compromises and sacrifices, but also the benefits that can be secured through making change happen now.”
I have a rude surprise for the grossly out of touch Skidmore. The public will be absolutely furious with him and the rest of the political elite when they find out the truth.
They might even suggest he should have actually done the sums and told them how much it would cost them BEFORE he and his chums passed that Net Zero legislation.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Skidmore’s delusional hubris is summed up in his comment that he proudly signed a piece of legislation ‘that quietly committed the UK in law’ to ‘net zero’ by 2050. Quietly!!!!! A bit like quietly signing the economic death warrant of an entire nation and he rejoices in the fact that he managed to sneakily get this trougher’s charter on to the statute book without coming clean about its’ consequences for the rest of us. The clown should be in jail.
Chris Skidmore MP, after attending Christ Church, Oxford, graduated in 2002 with a first-class degree in Modern History (BA).
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
‘NET Zero’ knowledge, that is, being COMPLETELY IGNORANT of the subject is indistinguishable from being Delusional.
I wonder if there is ANYONE in the upper echelons of the Civil Service that has any idea either, and brave enough to say something!
Perhaps there was, and they have been silenced!
On the back of this, local authorities are falling over themselves to be the most extreme in their declarations of a “climate emergency” and very few seem to have bothered to ask taxpayers what they think. It’s ironic that there’s all the hand-wringing about child poverty, fuel poverty, etc all caused by the nasty government, whilst taking £millions to spend on virtue signaling that will do nothing for the people they claim to be worried about, perhaps even penalising them more. Bloody hypocrites.
May I make a prediction? In time (decades?) the elites and much of the public, when the penny at last drops that AGW is fraudulant science, will wail and moan, ‘it was supposed to be science! Scientists were supposed to be our guardians of trust! How could they mislead us so? We trusted them and they betrayed us! Who or what can we believe in now?’
Who can we trust, I do not trust any of the so called politicians already in place, they are merely money grabbers and liers.
Buxtold, they have been all my life, and I’m 76!
Never ever trust a politician about anything whatsoever. Power corrupts, not I the money sense but in terms of having to compromise your principles and morals in order to gain and then hold on to power. I don’t believe it’s possible to become a senior cabinet minister without that sort of corruption.
And there will be some truth in that. Science sold it’s soul for headlines, celebrity and grant money over 20 years ago. AGW science is the worst offender, but most of science is affected by the disease. No one in our Universities has tried to stop it, rather they have all encouraged it.
And that begs my old question of universities —
“Why do so many universities ‘need’ large publicity departments?”
This is especially true when you realize that the publicity departments often provides (and probably has a big hand in creating) for the media, the over-simplified handouts about the research papers. Handouts that the media (BBC) usually mangle to fit their narrative.
e.g. Oxford has their ‘Publicity Department’ as part of the very old communist sounding ‘Public Affairs Directorate’!
It will be used as another case study to warn of the dangers of science mixing with politics. Just like we look back today in dismay at the excesses of the likes of Lysenko.
The Guilty Parties will say that WE ALL have to consider the lessons learnt, tainting everyone, and ignoring that many did know of the deceit, but were silenced by Legacy Media (the BBC), and overruled by the many PhDs in Academia enjoying the ride.
Chris Skidmore MP moving the statutory order to replace the 80% target with Net Zero, UK Parliament, 24 June 2019, basing government policy on the opinions of a foreign teenager, while omitting to mention his boss, the electorate.
If the government genuinely believes in the practical delivery of a Net Zero target then it has really sealed its fate. Within the last few weeks before COP26 the UK urgently needs to draw up a plan for the achievement of a ‘best efforts’ solution to explaining to the world that a Net Zero result is not unachievable but is actually highly undesirable. This pitch will need to be made by someone of stature with the gift of explaining, like Lord Ridley or the GWPF’s Lord Lawson. Under no circumstances should the Climate Change Committee be involved at any stage.
That should have read ‘…not only unachievable…’ Apologies.
“Highly undesirable”, yes indeed but basically quite unnecessary because absolutely useless, since our manmade greenhouse gas output is negligible, at a vanishingly tiny proportion of the global total, the bulk of which is released by China, India etc,where there will be no curbs.
There is no case for virtue signalling, a disastrous own-goal set to ruin us, to no purpose.
‘As for the Climate Change Committee and the UK Government, how about coming clean and reveal the dodgy Net Zero cost estimates they are trying to hide?’
When it comes to the Climate Change Committee, I’m not opposed to capital punishment. They have done enough damage to have earned it.
The the true risk Net Zero faces can be found in the number of politickers and their advisors who have fallen into the same trap during the Covid scare:
“Trust means working with people to achieve shared ambitions and potential, not working to a centralised plan of …. do as I say and not as I do.”
Campaign for the CCC to front up daily on a podium as per the COVID crisis. My first question; “what is the effect on the temperature in 2100 to be expected from UK’s net zero? “
‘There will be world-leading abatement of man made temperature rises, in the order of 0.00C.
This will be a significant contribution from the UK, of which we can all rightly be proud.’
Blah blah blah
They’re preparing already – maybe starting to hide evidence?
Crown Estates offshore wind turbine map and stats has been down for me for two days
https://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/en-gb/what-we-do/offshore-wind-map/
So if we “find out” about the costs there will be a “populist backlash” but if they tell us we will accept it?
And of course the implication of this is that we haven’t been told and he signed us up for it without our informed consent. But that’s all right.
This has echoes of the mewling that comes when people vote for what is considered to be ‘the wrong option’, especially from the Left. It is not the insane policies that are wrong it is just the presentation as if it had been explained better then the people would have voted for economic suicide, marxism etc. Remember the claims that Corbyn really won the election bar the inconvenience of not getting enough votes.
These things go through an inevitable cycle:
1. Cheery optimism that we will all co-operate and move forward
2. Frustration that we haven’t been educated properly to understand it
3. Dark mutterings about “wreckers” & “deniers”
4. Threats of regulation if we don’t as we should want to
5. Coercion via laws and restrictions so that we have to all comply
See cigarettes, salt, fat, sugar, and now all things climate.
Add to that a government insider intoning that it was a right for people to choose what they eat, in light of the demand for people to stop eating meat. This is a pre-sign of the ordure hitting the fan. When, gradually, the realities start to come to light and fudging starts we will hear more of this sort of thing. Currently, everything bad in this world can be attached to AGW, it’s a game and the fun is in taking the most benign circumstances and using linguistics to paint the terrifying picture. Currently, it is socially demanded that individuals declare their ‘on-board’ qualification and support this attachment while parroting some BBC jabberwocky.
Who will get to the pass first? Will it be the government ‘retirement’ of ministers attached to the project (of which there is proof in the outing of Mr Hancock). Or will there be a Brexit moment when the population decides it has had enough. Who will command me not to eat meat? A bellicose Nazi who is so untrustworthy, so blinkered as to operate like the BBC and simply ignore the facts?
However long the planet has been inhabited, there has been environmental change and the article about Stoke-on-Trent (like a view of the Deccan Traps) gives chapter and verse. Under that mirk normality there was a thriving society that made beautiful things. To say we are adaptable is to be grudging.
Bezos’s ‘s funding of cold fusion is indicative of someone looking beyond the petty issues of today, being hopeful and adventurous. Wind farms and photo-voltaic cells strewn about the countryside are an impatient and narrow-minded approach to something grossly over specified about the future. Put those sandwich boards away Boris, man has no mind to live in a terrifying environment and the current circumstances are little but a spur to ingenuity. The hauteur attached to thinking that this generation is some sort of crusade beggars belief. The Crusaders imposed themselves on a situation that was nothing to do with them, spurred-on by necromancers. There outcome was ignoble, one where the Lionheart became the imprisoned (in Austria) and England, in his absence, was given over to tyranny.
ICYMI
“Don’t charge your EVs”
Will Mr. Harrabin + chums treat us to one consequence of California’s “renewable revolution”?
Thankfully, there is clear and simple evidence of whether or not Net Zero makes any difference, strangely this evidence never gets shown in the MSM, it is of course the measurements of atmospheric CO2, such as from Mauna Loa, which show that the atmosphere is blissfully unaware of the efforts of politicians to change it.
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
I wonder what the populist backlash would be if we had the weather conditions of the past week?
Little wind and cloudy weather reducing solar generation.
The country would have ground to a halt.
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uh
The past few months haven’t been much better apart from the occasional burst of activity, nowhere enough to power the nation AND recharge the batteries.
Matt McGrath is at it again, highlighting the growing possibility of more lawsuits against fossil fuel companies.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-57641167
If this comes to pass it might well backfire on the Alarmists as defendants will be forced to produce evidence that challenges the man made influences on CC. Stuff that has been hidden from the general public and not a few politicians will be there for all to see.
How has it come to pass that fossil fuel companies are responsible for what its customers do with the products?
Net zero is a political policy concept.
Political policies nearly always fail in implementation.
However politicians do not blame policy they always blame implementation.
The current policy of everything will be solved by forcing every UK citizen to get vaccinated with vaccines whose efficacy is uncertain, may be failing as we watch.
It’s always been like that ever since the dawn of civilisation.
I have said it many times on here. The public backlash, when it comes, is going to be spectacular. The Poll Tax is going to look like a polite rebuke. No government or political party will be able to hide this for much longer, all the stuff coming is going to impact directly on peoples lives and very visibly. And if the Conservative Party doesn’t back peddle quick they will lose their natural support. No politician can hide from this stuff – they all voted for it, they all agree on the Net Zero etc.
However, the further issue is the political pact signed by all 2.5 major parties back when Cameron was in charge. All 3 of those parties have the same agreed policy. Destruction of democracy in action, but who can you vote for?
And if the Conservatives step away from these ruinous and vote losing policies, will Labour double-down, or follow suit? The lLib Dems won’t, they will try and garner the Green vote, but given that < 4% nationally vote green why do they major parties bother beyond lip service? Its bizarre.
I suspect for many its the Messiah complex – "saving the planet". Blair had that in spades, its just a bit less obvious amongst the rank and file politicians perhaps. But they all suffer from huge egos and monumental hubris.
TS: The way things are progressing in our political class – here, in Europe and the USA; and the fact that China owns so much of the raw materials and the means of production both in China and the rest of the world – like Africa (I was gob-smacked to read that CCP has a v big stake in UK’s natural gas plays) leads me to suspect that the world is not far from a serious war. Although I shall probably not be around when the fan starts to distribute the brown stuff, I fear that my grandson will be just the right age to have to sort things out. O tempora! o mores!
Can we start the lynchings yet?
No need to go that far, tempting though it is.
“Civil disobedience” is enough, if total or even by a majority.
The politicos are paid to get us the best results, otherwise they must go, especially since they have lied so much and are so incompetent.
The problem is to find useful replacements.
I tentatively back Sir John Redwood, who is starting to see the light.
Redwood has always been a sceptic and I suspect he still makes his views known behind the scenes in the Conservative Party, along with a few others.
When I wrote to my MP (Desmond Swayne) with the details of the shenanigans of my complaint to BBC and BBC Trust concerning 28gate I also copied John Redwood. He wrote back and was quite supportive and interested.
Yes, indeed the strongest point against UK decarbonization is our negligible CO2 output compared with the great bulk from none compliant nations mainly South and East.
Late I know, but all that comment and not a single reference to the role of UN 2030 Agenda. Sooner or later we are going to have to take it seriously.