Net Zero Crunch Time–Dieter Helm
By Paul Homewood
For years, Net Zero was something in the far distant future. Politicians could make all sorts of vague promises and set targets, in the knowledge that their successors would actually have to pay for it all.
Now, quite suddenly, it has all become more more immediate. Sure, 2050 is still a long way away, but 2030 is not. And according to all of the plans and targets, that is when major changes to our energy system need to be taking place.
Dieter Helm destroys the simplistic arguments of both major parties, that we just need to build more wind and solar farms. The UK’s energy infrastructure simply is not up to the job of transitioning to Net Zero, yet no politician is prepared to tell the public the truth about how much this will all cost.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
The main thing is that Net Zero will achieve nothing but poverty. Carbon dioxide is a good gas and essential to life. Climate change is only affected by the sun’s activity and nature. Man made carbon dioxide is blameless.
net zero electricity targets net zero electricity, well, at least for much of the time.
The “net zero” gospel essentially demands that we stop doing any and all the things that allow people to earn a living. So they will simply become dependent on their state which will have no tax revenue to help them.
Net zero means famine.
The upside is that quickly the population will fall. Is that their fully predictable “unforeseen” consequence? The lie at tge heart of all this?
“Look at the outcome, and infer motivation.” – Peterson
Yesterday the total. wind generation was about 2% in the UK. And demand was low how can we be ever nett zero. The global average for wind power is still only 3% and solar less than that.
Lucky that in the UK domestic aircon is rare or the demand would be up in the warm weather. Mind you the cost of our electricity might put people off running it.
Even the thickest of our politicians (even Davey and Milliband) must realise that net zero is just impossible to achieve. So what is the hidden agenda, the only explanation is the WEF and UN(2030) crazy plan to impoverish us so “we own nothing and are happy”. I am well aware of the technical impossibilities of maintaining reliable and affordable electricity with wind and solar, but it has taken me a long time to accept that it is just one objective in a massive plot to destroy western economies and transfer that wealth to the impoverished third world, a wonderful plan to equalise a world in terms of living standards. So our leaders under the influence of rich philanthropic megalomaniacs believe THEY ARE DOING GOOD.
Too many careers and investments have tied themselves to Net Zero to let them admit it was all a big mistake.
Politicians have also invested too much in Net Zero and their pride will not let themback track.
Joanne Nova has an interesting article where a BlackRock recruiter spills the beans about their motives.
http://Www.joannenova.com.au/2023/06/these-guys-run-the-world-blackrock-recruiter-caught-boasting-about-buying-senators-cheap/
More third world despots living in luxury solves nothing.
“…yet no politician is prepared to tell the public the truth about how much this will all cost.” because no politician understands it!
I recall that many years ago a maharajah was asked how he viewed the poverty around him when is so wealthy. His reply was if I gave up all my wealth after a week we would be back to poverty. The UN’s 2030 plan is unknown to the general population and I would bet it is unknown to politicians as it is a heavy read and beyond their mental abilities. The plan boils down to international poverty except for the self styled WEF elites and the international UN bureaucrats. The French revolution will be replayed and the lumiers (lampposts) will be rigged to take care of WEF and UN elites is short order. Something similar Lenin’s decimation of fellow Marxist Menshevik’s will follow. I do not see the conservative American’s getting on board, but, the self flagellating Western Europe’s “wet” leadership may opt in
It should be obvious that by definition NET-Zero is impossible. We can’t take out as much CO2 as has been put in. That requires massive negative emissions. Even Zero emissions is impossible. There is no replacement for fossil fuels when it comes to all the transportation needed to make the energy transition.
Sadly, even if we burn all available ´fossil’ fuels we cannot reach the ideal 1000ppm CO2 food crops like, let alone the 3000ppm dinosaurs enjoyed.
Absolutely nothing to do with the subject but I thought I’d share this paragraph I saw in the DT. I actually laughed out when I read it and I realised that the content just backed up my feelings that this country is now completely f**ked. Goodness knows what the Chinese thought of it.
“This newspaper has also found examples this month of a drag queen singing to the Titanic theme tune at the British embassy in China and the UK’s ambassador to the US, Dame Karen Pierce, merrily waving a Pride flag while wearing a feather headdress on an official visit to an LGBTQ+ rally in Washington DC.”
“…while wearing a feather head-dress…”
I hope she had a little more on than that!
Was she ‘appropriating’ Red Indians?
Mean time here’s more of the net zero bill. £390m to split off grid system control from transmission grid ownership
Meanwhile National Grid admit
Investments in Great Britain’s electricity networks will contribute an average of £18.4bn to GDP each year between 2024 and 2035
Which is one way of admitting the investment at the transmission level will be £200bn. Plus rather more for digging up the streets to reinforce distribution networks, of course. But as an American general is reputed to have said to French resistance leaders on being begged for assistance “Ce n’est pas dans mon arrière.”
Helm knows that that the net zero option involves hardship for a terrible provision of service.
He should say so and stop hedging his bets. He has two eyes on his bank account.
Dieter Helm’s POV and policy prescription was expounded in his March 2022 paper Energy Policy.
Introduction
“Energy policy is not rocket science. It is about achieving core objectives – security of supply and decarbonisation – and achieving them at the lowest cost. Neither will be met by purely private markets, since the former is a public good and carbon is an externality not properly integrated in competitive markets. Furthermore, energy is a primary good for citizens: not to have energy deprives people and businesses from access to the wider economy and to society. It is a core USO: a Universal Service Obligation. That is why energy cannot be treated like any other commodity, as some of the architects of the “privatisation, liberalisation and competition” paradigm believed. Citizens are more than just consumers.”
Helm’s Paper:
Click to access Energy-policy-30.03.2022.pdf
My synopsis:
I see the paper link has changed. This should work:
https://dieterhelm.co.uk/economics/energy-policy/
However much sense is in the Helm paper and report, the underlying issue is the risk of CO2 driving temperatures ever upwards. This issue has been assumed as massive, as in IPCC recent use of RCP8.5 to enhance its fear campaign. The evidence, both empirical (i.e. the lack of any clear climate change indicators); and, theoretical, for example with Humlum’s paper that fairly conclusively proves that Temperature leads CO2 and Coe’s paper showing how low the actual emissivity of CO2 is, should lead to a radical revision of western policies. The climate models should be treated as the oversimplified, and far from useable, models that they are.
If there was any credible evidence of the doomsday predictions coming true, would the superpowers have tolerated the rapid and massive expansion of coal use in China and India and even supported it!
The models should be ignored until they can actually model clouds – which, as I understand it, have more say on warming than anything else.
Jack, what you say is rational and logical, and I agree. The problem is that media has whipped up fear of CO2 so that much of the public demands the pols “do something.” It’s also true the public support for trashing hydrocarbon fuels is overstated by rigged polls and media hype. Still, policymakers have painted themselves in a corner and lack the courage to back out.
Thanks for the comments, Ron, the fear-campaign has resulted in people being afraid to criticise the “proven science” that is certainly not proven. I find that advocates fall back to the “precautionary principle” once they are not able to refute the real science. You and Paul Homewood do us all a massive service with your excellent websites.
It always amazes me how the Dieter Helms of this world can talk so much sense about the impossibility of achieving net zero but still never go the extra mile to say the problem it’s supposed to solve just isn’t a problem. Nothing is happening out there with the climate that hasn’t happened before.
The concept of “Net Zero” needs an adjustment in the manner of “an ice free Arctic.” In scientific notation the ‘Wadham’ [the metric: 1 Wadham = 1M km2 Arctic ice extent] was born.
Let’s assume the UK’s emissions are about 500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per year. Then an amount, say 50 mt, could be used as the needed metric of net zero. I’ll leave it up to the UK residents to coin a name for this new metric. Just don’t name it after me! 🙂
A Boris?
The problem with “net zero” is the cost of “net zero” increases the more “net zero” you do, until the cost is infinite at “net zero” (or at least so great that it may as well be infinite).
Of course, it doesn’t actually work that way. Because energy (and I count food calories as energy) is so ubiquitous to any economy, energy is unlike almost any other product in that the value of our wages is directly determined by energy. So, that rather than talking about energy going up in price, the reality is that as the “cost” of energy increases, so does the cost of everything made by, transported by, heated by, fed by … energy increase. So, that everything except wages is going up … so it is simpler to talk of the purchasing power of our wages decreasing …. aka, we get poorer.
So, “Net Zero” is not so much the infinite cost of energy, but the zero purchasing power of wages. Or making us so poor, we cannot afford anything beyond that which a peasant in the pre-industrial age could afford.
I might be wrong, but I suspect that is not a future any populace will accept. So, Net Zero is not an achievable goal, not anything approaching Net Zero.
I said everything would start to break down. And true to form prices are beginning to rise rapidly, discontent is growing, and it will continue.
I’m now at the stage, rather than being concerned about Net Zero, which will never happen, I’m absolutely intrigued as to what is going to happen. How poor are people going to have to get, before they rise up and drag the hapless politicians away … (add your own ending).
We need ‘a little list’: one that lists the names (and addresses?) of all policy-makers, influencers, communicators (BBC), and MPs who are recorded as being gung-ho for NZC. They should go on the list for future reference. At the end of the day – or the end if days, as it could become – our descendants would know who to go after. (I have a few names in mind already…)
It matters not a jot.
If proved wrong “We were only following the science” and the scientists will say “We did tell them that there were large uncertainties”
Ask any MP what is the exact CO2 content of the atmosphere and they will not have a clue. Yet they are promoting NetZero.
Gives me an idea. All MPs should be subject to a session of ‘answer me these questions three’ as they stand on the edge of a pit with the barrel at the back of their heads. The CO2 content would be a good first question. For the second I would ask should the UK rejoin the EU Customs Union – I know a bit of trick question given the UK can’t but I guarantee that a lot of those who have survived question 1 will be lying in the pit after question 2. Any suggestions for question 3? (Monty Python & The Holy Grail if you don’t know where this comes from)
Why is Sir Dieter Helm (despite having written a report for the Government in the past) so widely ignored by net zero zealots in politics? I touch on his latest report here:
https://www.skynews.com.au/world-news/russian-army-ramps-up-security-in-moscow-amid-coup-fears-as-wagners-yevgeny-prigozhin-storms-rostovondon-hq/news-story/061f9ddf79fb5653538f8e25a7fbe7f7
Shades of the Mercenary War in Carthage 241-237 BC.
BBC News says they’ve gone back to base.
In the words of Cartoon Book Store Man:
“Worst coup ever!”
Elias Canetti, in “Power and Crowds,” pointed out that what a leader DOES, is use a certain charisma to make his followers
run the risks and, in the event of failure, suffer in his place. However, sometimes, his tricks do not save the leader, and it is up against the wall time.
Professor Dieter Helm is an ivory-tower economist who knows next to nothing about climate science or energy infrastructure engineering. He offers two choices on Net Zero:
1. Buckle down and get on with it with higher taxes, higher bills and lower consumption which he says would lead to a sustainable future but he is wrong, it would only wreck our economy.
2. Give up on Net Zero which he says would mean “giving up on our responsibilities”. But we, the people who have never been asked, have no such responsibilities.
Naïve Professor Helm and his like are part of the problem. Either he is play-acting or he still doesn’t realise that Net Zero has got nothing to do with climate. It’s all about one-world governance control of global resources and the global population. It is all predicated on the Club of Rome declaration that “The real enemy, then, is humanity itself”. It’s not even going to work globally because the BRICS will never go along with it.
The evil (mostly western) globalists pushing Net Zero showed their true colours through the democidal skulduggeries of their Covid “plandemic”, both scams obediently facilitated by our puppet politicians. It’s time to wake up as to what is really going on.
Fellow “Notalota…” subscribers, I do agree that Prof Helm seems to be living on a different Planet to the rest of humanity.
However, unlike ourselves and the Great Paul Homewood, let’s remember (as far as I can see from here in Denmark) that our politicians do take him quite seriously!
During his Podcast at https://dieterhelm.co.uk/energy-climate/podcast-42-net-zero-crunch-time/, Helm quite amusingly but very accurately ridicules all the current British politicians’ pathetically useless claims to deliver “net zero; Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat!
Just make sure his message reach your MPs!
While you are about it, make sure that your MPs also understand that anything we are doing in UK, the rest of Europe or under the catastrophic Biden regime to deliver “net zero” is totally ignored, rightly so, in Asia and Africa where devestating poverty cannot remotely be cured by “renewables”.
China delivers more “renewable power” than the rest of the World combined but as Helm also points out is increasingly dependent on coal.
If there are any opponents of Brexit among you, do make sure you read the EU-ad for EU Greenery in today’s Financial Times. Here is the vomit-worthy ad
https://next-generation-eu.europa.eu/index_en
Yes Dieter Helms seems very good in his podcasts on the economics of our unsustainable life styles pointing out the costs of sorting it out if it can even be done.
But he is certain, it is well proven, without a doubt that increase in CO2 is causing climate change. It would be interesting to know what he thinks of contrary views.
“…unsustainable life styles…”
Such as being gullible to the nth degree.