We are all living in Greta’s world now–Ross Clark
By Paul Homewood
How we laughed at Greta Thunberg’s hairshirt world of loosely-knitted jumpers and long overland journeys, a world in which we learn to do without the luxuries of the oil-fuelled economy and go back to enjoying a pre-industrial existence. That wasn’t what net zero will look like, government ministers assured us; rather, miracle new technologies will arrive to ensure that not only do we eliminate carbon emissions; we will enrich ourselves in the process.
Well, it’s Greta’s world we are living in now. Millions are preparing to shiver this winter. Ministers are feeding us tips on wholesome home cooking. We will have to forgo holidays and evenings out just to pay our gas and electricity bills.
The energy crisis has given us a foretaste of what a world without cheap energy looks like. The immediate causes might be a surge in gas prices due to the war in Ukraine, combined with more general supply issues such as the hangover from Covid lockdowns. But it is a product, too, of decisions we have made as we strive for net zero – however much the green energy lobby tries to deny this.
Yesterday, the Prime Minister became the latest figure to trot out the bogus statistic that wind power is now "nine times" cheaper than gas-produced electricity. It derives from false comparison between the long-term, guaranteed, index-linked prices offered to owners of wind farms and the very volatile "day ahead" prices which energy suppliers have to pay owners of gas stations to spark up their plants for a few hours at short notice in order to make up for the lack of sun and wind power.
We have put all our eggs in the wind and solar basket partly because, notionally, the marginal cost of producing it is very low. But you can’t look at the cost of wind and solar power in isolation. You have to factor in either the cost of energy storage, which is so expensive that few people in Britain want to invest in it – beyond a few token battery installations.
The reason for that is that storing wind-generated power in batteries costs around three times as much as does generating the power in the first place. Instead, we are using gas as a back-up. In reality, wind and solar power have made us more dependent on gas, not less. Twenty years ago, when coal was our predominant source of power, we might have been in a better position, but we have closed down coal plants without a reliable replacement. At the same time, the fixation on net zero has led us to pass over the chance to exploit our native shale gas reserves.
Proponents of net zero tend to fall into two camps. There is the hair-shirt wing, which has jumped on climate change as a vehicle for destroying capitalism and replacing it with what they see as a simpler, fairer, more wholesome society. And there is the ‘have your cake and eat it’ wing, which contends that banning carbon emissions will spur such a rapid and transformative industrial revolution that we will arrive in 2050 not only in a clean world but one which is far richer, too.
I wish I could believe in the latter. Sadly, though, I fear that the first group – the Gretas of this world – are more realistic. If we are determined to push ahead with a legally-binding target to reach net zero emissions by 2050 with no real idea about how it can be achieved we are more likely to end up with primitive socialism, and the deprivation that entails, than in the cakeist world of clean energy and riches. This winter will give us a sneak preview.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Christopher Booker warned about power shortages and blackouts 20 years ago.
I almost hope they happen this winter to prove how right he was and how wrong the fanatics are.
I have two Booker books: Scared To Death (Booker and North) and The Real Global Warming Disaster.
Both hardback, and more relevant now than ever. For example, from the cover of the latter: “Is the obsession with ‘climate change’ turning out to be the most costly scientific blunder in history?” Tragically, the answer is being written every day.
Read the latter book too some while back. Booker will be hated for proving his critics wrong.
Ditto. A prophet in his own land…
Etc.
How painful is the truth!
Ross Clark is excellent at exposing the truth, but I think it will be far worse than he envisages. I worry about future generations.
The truth has been in very short supply in the media for a long time .
But the last few days I have noticed several articles in different papers saying that the Net Zero and renewables farces are turning out to be a disaster .
So , perhaps there might be some hope for the future.
There was an air of desperation on the BBC national news a couple of days ago where the newsreader said that it’s not only the BBC that believes that humans are responsible for dangerous climate change; the BBC told me that there are other believers as well, all of whom have created a consensus.
Micky R: the BBC at its best!
The interest I have to believe a thing is no proof that such a thing exists. Voltaire
What you see is almost certainly the first signs of a new Nudge Unit* campaign to prepare the sheeple for the changing message on Net Zero. First there will be the planted stories of scientific doubt, then the heavyweight analysis of the ‘science’, then the trashing of the AGW prophets.
It has to be done as otherwise the politicians will get the blame for the destruction of industry, the hypothermia deaths. Like Johnson’s mouthpieces during the Covid scandal, there’s some serious ordure heading the way of climate science. And the fact that lots of us made these points years ago will be ignored by the politicians, the civil service and the complicit and equally guilty MSM.
Think ‘four legs good, two legs better.’
JF
*G**bells R Us
One of Boris Johnson’s “advisers” i.e SAGE members was Professor Susan Michie, whose cold, fishlike handprint is all over everything to do with nudging…
Unfortunately, successive Govts have spent far too much time reacting to the MSM and currying favour with vocal minorities like XR, MSM and protest groups whose readers/supporters would invariably never vote Tory.
We saw with COVID how the MSM was running the show with ‘crisis’ calls for lockdown, ventilators, PPE….. and the Govt knee jerking in reaction. The MSM were running the show and setting the agenda
However, we are now seeing an increasing number of MSM articles on how the Govt got COVID wrong and the damage lockdown caused. Talk about having your cake and ….. the MSM win/win.
We are now seeing some ‘opposition’ to Net Zero in the MSM, will the Govt react aka COVID and start changing tack before the silent majority have their say in a General Election?
“…Greta Thunberg’s hairshirt world of loosely-knitted jumpers and long overland journeys…”
I remember it more as a very comfortably indulged middle class world with pr gurus and camera crews always on hand. Not to mention the diesel backups on the long journeys.
Like you I remember it as a couple of multi millionaire parents guilty of child abuse of a mentally unwell child and making a fortune out of it.
Yes. Sad…..but true.
We’ve had barely a century of affordable electricity and other energy resources. No historical novel I have read mentions the hardship of living by candlelight after sundown, but our ancestors had a much harder time of it, you may be sure. Our ancestors would be astonished to see the wonders made possible by 24/7 energy, and would be appalled at the proposal to return to a “golden age” which was nothing of the sort. This attack on our energy by the pious and the rich must be defeated. The coming winters will force a massive shift in public opinion away from the Greta Thunberg / Boris Johnson / Al Gore extremism.
“Cranford” by Mrs Gaskell is about women living with an ‘elegant economy’. Candles had to be rationed. Beeswax candles were expensive, the poor used rush candles made with tallow. The BBC adaptation of Cranford showed this.
…and beds were cold to get into – once you’d checked underneath for foreigners.
Apparently the Govt have been rehearsing a return to mechanical typewriters and carbon paper copying . Very sensible in the light of their commitment to Net Zero , the zero encompassing any digital and electronic methods of data communication. Planned apparently long before the sanctions against russian oil and gas.
https://swentr.site/news/562115-uk-government-carbon-paper/
Net Zero is unachievable.Even Putin can’t control the sun ||
Why are Ed Davey and Miliband get off scot free?
Ed Milliband, Ed Davey and Theresa May in particular, should all be charged with Treason seeing the damage done to this Country. They encouraged their colleagues to vote for Policies, and regressive legislation to control the people, changing the whole way that Western Civilisation functions, without a single reference to Democracy or consultation with the Electorate.
This is a tragedy since man made carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels cannot be the cause of climate change. The sun and nature are the only causes. 90% of greenhouse gases are water vapour and clouds. Carbon dioxide is less than 0.04% and being saturated has little or no effect. Until there is a good alternative we must use our fossil fuels for cost effective energy.
Pollution of the marine/atmosphere interface with oil/surfactant will smooth the surface, lowering the albedo. reducing evaporation (plus other effects). See Benjamin Franklin’s Mount Pond demonstration.
For a very outdated data set of how polluted the surface was, see SeaWifs. It’s much worse now. The Sea of Marmora is the canary in the coalmine.
I wish someone would look at the warming caused by pollution.
Paul?
JF
All correct and all foreseen. If the UK must go totally green then at least we should have done it in an orderly fashion, retaining fossil fuel back-up. But the Green zealots have made any investment in extraction or storage anathema. If my 90-year father should die of cold this winter because he can’t afford heating then will he simply be considered collateral damage in the Green Revolution? The Green Revolution that is chipping away at the UK’s relatively minuscule emissions whilst the likes of China and India (and the US and Russia and even, now, coal-loving Germany) carry on full steam, & full CO2, ahead. Still at least we can console ourselves with the thought that we are doing the Right Thing. I just hope that the warm glow of moral superiority is enough to insulate us from the cold this winter. Meanwhile I’ll tell my old Dad that he won’t be dying in vain. I’m sure that’ll be a great comfort to him.
“And there is the ‘have your cake and eat it’ wing, which contends that banning carbon emissions will spur such a rapid and transformative industrial revolution that we will arrive in 2050 not only in a clean world but one which is far richer, too.”
There is a reality wing that points out and emphasizes that no rapid and transformative revolution, transition, can take place without transportation involving conventional vehicles that run on gasoline, diesel and renewable biofuels. Banning those emissions will send us further back to the dark ages. Alternative energies don’t just appear ready to go.
I accept that emissions do have to be clean. Pollution is not an insoluble problem, needs a bit of effort, yes.
For some, the definition of ‘air pollution’ includes Carbon Dioxide emissions. 🙂
I mean clean, friendly and necessary to life, carbon dioxide. Other pollutants must be filtered off
What “pollution” do you believe to be a problem and based on what?
Official Government commitment to the New Nuclear saviour of us all, announced yesterday Friday 2nd September. Doesn’t seem a lot of money but its a start. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/33-million-boost-for-next-generation-nuclear-technology?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=govuk-notifications-topic&utm_source=ba59c316-c5d3-48ab-98b5-52aef841e8a7&utm_content=daily
Not that different to North Korea.
If the madidiots of JSO and Ins Reb get their way we will be living in a real pre industrial society. No personal transport, no modern medical care, no roads, no electricity. No cars, no tarmac, no electrical engineering, no plastics, so no electronics, no computer technology, no mobile phones to jabber into, so no social media – wait!
From what we know of the background of members of Extinction Rebellion they are very well off people. They have never lived anywhere near absolute poverty or seen what it looks like in other parts of the world.
Ross Clark has also penned the below piece for the Speccie.
Thought I’d copy it rather than link. The gist is pretty-much as per the Telegraph. Tory media now practically screaming at the ‘Conservatives’ to ditch or suspend Net Zero.
**************************************************************************
Few will be minded to believe Russia’s explanation for cutting off Nord Stream 1 pipeline – that it is a maintenance issue – and I don’t suspect we are expected to believe it, either – any more than we were expected to believe that the would-be Salisbury assassins had an interest in cathedral spires. It is pretty blatant what game Vladimir Putin is playing: Europe has announced, grandly, its intentions to wean itself off Russian gas and oil and Putin has set out to pre-empt that, to cut off the gas while Europe is still pretty much reliant on it.
Gas supplies to Germany from Russia were already down to 20 per cent of the level they were before the Ukraine invasion. No one should count on the gas being turned on again. Eventually, Europe will manage just fine without Russian gas, once we have commissioned more terminals to receive liquified natural gas (LNG) from the US, Qatar and elsewhere. But that will not be this winter.
In February, the West set out on an economic bombardment of Russia, to punish it for the Ukrainian invasion. It has succeeded in many ways, with the Russian economy in deep trouble. But this has been no Cold War-type victory – rather it has been a case of mutually-assured economic destruction. That should have been clear from the outset, yet European governments, in their hubris, failed to anticipate the consequences. They assumed that Russia would carry on selling its oil and gas to Europe even as the West was announcing its intention to end Russian oil and gas imports for good. It was like going to war before the Spitfire factories were open.
Soaring gas prices have exposed another form of hubris, too: that of the UK government in trying to assure us that Britain was not exposed to supply problems from Russia because it was deriving only a small proportion of its gas from Russia (since reduced to zero in June). But of course, we are at the western end of a pipeline which is fed at the east with Russian gas. Of course, we were always going to be exposed to the kind of crisis we are in now.
Britain and Europe face an additional problem which Russia does not: climate protesters who will automatically oppose any initiative to produce more oil and gas in Europe, or to construct infrastructure to import it, either. That, apparently, is leading us down the wrong road and we should be investing in more wind and solar instead. Except that in 2019 wind and solar accounted for just 4.2 per cent of Britain’s total energy needs – and, in the absence of more than a token amount of energy storage, we are absolutely reliant on gas power stations to fill in when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining.
True, it takes time to bring new oil and gas capacity on line. But we are decades away from constructing energy self-sufficiency based on renewables. We are already waging economic war with Russia, and not winning. To keep the lights on, the government is going to have to win the battle against Just Stop Oil and all others who are opposed to any investment in oil and gas.
No argument from me!
I already posited a few days ago that the UK (and other countries as well but less so for a variety of reasons) desperately needs an Essential Infrastructure Act to allow such infrastructure as gas, coal, major highway, nuclear power, etc. work to proceed without danger of interference from Extinction Rebellion and its offshoots and useful idiots.
And yes, I do feel a little queasy about what could happen if this Act were not very tightly drawn and future governments were allowed to engage in mission creep. But the country as a whole has the right to live in safety and go about its lawful business without that safety being put at risk by the actions of a small minority regardless of their beliefs, misguided or otherwise.
Cormack Mccarthy would be the very man to write a novel about the present crisis. No, wait, he’s already written “The Road”.
This is becoming more of a possibility, every day:
Putin has a message for Germany
NET Zero is being used as a means to a political, WEF, end.
Europe is importing some replacement Oil/Gas from China, but where is China getting its extra supplies? It’s from Russia, but Europe is buying it at a much higher price and, transported by ship as LNG, it will be even higher. I have also heard that the Greek ships are very busy. 🙂
It’s clear now that there is a subset of people in the population who actually want us to regress to nasty, cold medieval living conditions. Like the Puritans of old they disapprove of anything that makes life comfortable or enjoyable. They have latched onto the green, “climate crisis” as a sort of religion in which we are being punished for what they see as our too comfortable and profligate lifestyles. Their predicted “climate armageddon” if we don’t mend our ways is the same as the hell fire with which old style priests used to threaten their flocks. Unfortunately they have somehow captured the minds of too many of our scientifically illiterate politicians so we are being saddled with absurd eco policies whether we like it or not.
Actually the Puritans were nothing like that. They wanted purity in religion and disliked anything not explicitly mentioned in the Bible as part of “the church.” Thus they objected to vestments and other things but only in relation to religion.
The big difference, Chris, is that the Puritans practised what they preached. They took a very literal interpretation of the Bible (ignoring the number of translations it had been through!) and demanded an abstemious way of life because they believed that was the only way to eternal salvation rather than eternal damnation.
And accordingly they demanded (rightly, it can be argued) the same standard from their wives, children, employees, etc.
All the evidence today is that the eco-Puritans have no intention of giving up the luxuries which the Puritans would despise and consider sinful while demanding that the rest of us revert to a pre-industrial existence.
And if you take any account of the 18th and 19th century nonconformists (the Puritans’ moral descendants) it is quite clear that they would have had very little time for the cynical, self-centred, anti-science hypocrites who are trying to dictate our behaviour today.
I recently looked up the Geneva of Jean Calvin. A man who knew what was right and made sure other people conformed. I think he was a lawyer ! Many politicians are lawyers,too and don’t see what the problem is. Just follow the rules we wrote for you, is their idea ( New Zealand viewpointz0
ChrisP: You are right , it is a religion. It has its creed, its Apocolypse , its priest hood and so on. But remember, please, that there is a sinister side to all religions. The “believers” are the useful idiots who are fleeced by the hierarchies. The Papacy is no different from the WEF and the men of Davos. And they both cling to the same mantra “give us the children and we will give you believers”. Its all there.
What happens when we don’t meet our Legally Binding net Zero Targets?
Who sues us/our government?
Ben, based on what has happened in The Netherlands, the activists sue the Government and the courts find in favour of the activists ( as the Government has not done enough to implement it’s net zero policies). Then the Government has to introduce more rules to achieve its net zero policies by imposing blanket speed limits to reduce CO2 emissions or destroying farmer’s livelihoods. Presumably this carries on until everybody left is living a hunter/gatherer lifestyle.
Regarding “the bogus statistic that wind power is now “nine times” cheaper than gas-produced electricity”, consider a trendy Sail Car. This is a powerless go-cart with a large sail to propel it using wind power.
The Sail Car is promoted as emissions-free, and cheap to buy and own (low maintenance costs and no fuel costs). What’s not to like about that!
The Sail Car performs well on downhill slopes and when the wind is behind it. Otherwise, not much good at all. As a result, the Sail Car is more of a leisure accessory because it is not reliable for trips where getting to your destination is important.
To use the Sail Car and to be able to reach your destination on time, you need an accompanying motor. This will tow the Sail Car on uphill stretches and when the wind is not blowing in a suitable direction.
The Sail Car might be cheap to buy and own, but there are additional costs of for those who wish to reliably arrive at their destination on time. The total cost is the Sail Car, the cost of owning a motor car, plus the running costs of fuel and a second driver to accompany the Sail Car on those towing sections of the journey.
This is why electricity prices increase with renewable penetration, given the level of energy security required to run a modern and comfortable economy. It is not possible to reach a level of intermittent capacity beyond which electricity prices will decrease. Every unit of renewable generation requires the costs of something to accompany it to “do the towing”.
Re: singing popinjays…No teeth in that army!
Re: “The Prime Minister said…” Only PM for one day more!
As the British economy slumps to low levels, with fish and chips closed, electricity blackouts and pubs shut for winter, here is some advice from those already there.
Brilliant!
At least the World Climate Declaration is gaining a number of distinguished signatories – https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/03/scientists-flock-to-sign-world-climate-declaration-and-declare-there-is-no-climate-emergency/
The only way out of this mess is to campaign for the repeal of the Net Zero Act and, ultimately, the Climate Change Act. That would at least get rid of the Climate Change Committee.
The Govt, so used to listening to vocal minorities, should take XR up on their latest campaign ‘Let the People Decide’ and call a Referendum on Net Zero!
Only then will we see a proper debate on Climate Change and a chance to expose the real reason beh”ind the CC scam as outlined by the UK:
“The United Nations has been one of the organizations leading the manmade climate change push. The paragraph below, from the February 10, 2015 Investor’s Business Daily article “U.N. Official Reveals Real Reason Behind Warming Scare” seems to state the goal clearly.
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism. “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said.”
Will the people really support regressive socialism?
‘Instead, we are using gas as a back-up.’
Gas generates nearly half of UK electricity. Not to mention much of the buildings heating, industrial use etc. Some back-up 🙄
Uptick!
Reblogged this on Calculus of Decay and commented:
Sadly true