My talk for Sacred Cows, slaying the Net Zero myths and Government approach to climate change.
EIGAN VALUES
Last week, the Government gave its response to a petition calling for the repeal of the Climate Change Act and for Net Zero targets to be rolled back. The response could have been written by a Just Stop Oil activist and can be summarised as “the earth is warming, build more windmills.” I was going to draft an article rebutting their claims, but as luck would have it, the video of the talk I gave for Sacred Cows last month is now available and goes into more detail than I could in a single article. I would be grateful if you could share this article and video far and wide.
The slides accompanying the talk can be downloaded on the link below.
Sacred Cows: Net Zero Worse Than Climate Change
1.21MB ∙ PDF file
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What if the Net Zero cure is worse than the Climate Change disease?
My argument can be summarised as follows.
Climate Change Exaggerated
Although people like Antonio Guterres have made the foolish claim we have entered the era of global boiling, we have to acknowledge that the world has warmed a bit since pre-industrial times. The alarmist response to this is Net Zero which is an example of a so-called mitigation strategy that calls for everyone to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide to save the planet.
Mitigation Can Never Work
The trouble with this approach is that it can only work if two conditions are met. First, mitigation can only work if CO2 is the only climate control knob. But we know this to be wrong, because the IPCC’s first report showed marked temperature fluctuations over thousand-, ten thousand- and million-year timescales when CO2 levels in the atmosphere were pretty constant. Second, mitigation can only work if everyone else follows the same strategy. But we know that global emissions of greenhouse gases are rising sharply even though ours have fallen into insignificance. Global consumption of coal, oil and gas are at record levels. Neither condition is met, so the UK’s Net Zero mitigation strategy can never work.
Impact of Net Zero Policies
Nevertheless this has not stopped politicians and policymakers rushing headlong into Net Zero policies that have resulted in the UK having the most expensive industrial electricity costs in the IEA, some 4X those of the US and 2.6X Korean prices. This is leading to energy austerity with UK primary energy consumption down 23% since 1990 while global energy consumption is up 72% over the same period. Our National Energy System Operator, NESO wants to double down on energy austerity and halve our energy consumption per capita from 2023 levels by 2050.
High energy prices coupled with energy austerity have led to economic stagnation. There is a strong correlation between reduced energy use and slow growth, with the EU27 and US growing faster than the UK because they have had smaller cuts to energy use. Korea, India China and the rest of the world are using much more energy and their economies are powering ahead.
Myths Created to Promote Renewables
Despite the obvious economic and social costs of Net Zero, a series of myths have been created to support the renewables agenda. They claim renewables are cheap, but we pay £11bn/yr in renewables subsidies, £2.5bn for grid balancing and a further £1bn for the capacity market. National Grid have announced £112bn in spending on grid expansion by 2035 which will also find its way on to our bills. Moreover, the cost of renewables is rising and projects like Norfolk Boreas and Hornsea Project Four have been cancelled because the developers cannot make money at the prices they agreed. Ed Miliband wants to spend £260-290bn by 2030 on his Clean Power plan to save only around £7bn/yr of the money we spend on gas-fired generation.
The second myth is that Net Zero will create jobs and growth. But the truth is expensive energy costs are destroying high-productivity industries like chemicals, petrochemicals, ceramics and steel that are growing more slowly than the rest of the economy or outright shrinking. Instead we are growing less energy intensive low-productivity sectors that are damaging productivity and growth for the whole economy. Green energy jobs are destroying real jobs and cost around £250K/yr per job.
The third myth is that renewables increase energy security. But intermittent sources like wind and solar can never deliver security because we cannot control the weather. As a result we came close to blackouts last month as NESO suffered a margin call. We cannot rely upon interconnectors either, because the Norwegian Government fell because of the impact interconnectors are having on their electricity prices.
Finally, it is claimed that wind and solar renewables are green and kind to the environment. But both have very high mineral intensity, meaning massive mines will be scarring the landscape to produce the copper, silver, cobalt and rare earth metals required. They also take up a lot of land, land that would be better utilised to grow food.
Adaptation is a Superior Strategy
By contrast, adaptation is a far superior strategy. Deaths from natural disasters and weather events have fallen more than 10-fold over the past century as we have used cheap, abundant energy to tame nature. Global life expectancy has doubled since 1850 and cereal yields are up three times since 1961. These remarkable achievements have come despite, some might argue because of, the rise in temperatures and global CO2levels.
Nuclear Power is the Answer
Turning now to the answer. For humanity to thrive, we need cheap, abundant and reliable energy. This will give us the surplus energy that we need to continue to adapt by building flood defences, improving irrigation developing new crop varieties and so on. Adaptation has the big advantage is that it works regardless of the cause of global warming or climate change. The only technology that is proven to work at scale is nuclear power. This will take time, so we need gas as a transition technology. Nuclear power has the added advantage of being energy dense, reliable and requires very little mining so has the smallest overall environmental footprint. We need nuclear power everywhere all at once.
In conclusion, Net Zero is ineffective in achieving its primary goal and can never stop the weather changing. The impact of Net Zero policies is devastating for the economy and high productivity, energy intensive industries in particular. Renewables are not kind to the environment and the lies being told to promote them are untenable. The Net Zero cure is worse than the climate change disease.
Many thanks to Will and the team at Sacred Cows for giving me the opportunity to speak. The venue was sold out and judging by the conversations I had afterwards, the event went down very well on the night.
The talk is now also available as a podcast on Spotify.
Eigen Values now has well over 3,400 subscribers. If you enjoyed this article, please share and sign up to receive more content. There next article will be looking at the recent appearances in Parliament of the new CEO of the Climate Change Committee, Emma Pinchbeck.
This article (Net Zero Cure Worse Than Climate Change Disease) was created and published by David Turver and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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RELATED
Ed Miliband’s Battery Blitz
PAUL HOMEWOOD
The Telegraph falls for the battery myth again!
Amongst all of Ed Miliband’s crimes against the UK, surely the deliberate desecration of the countryside is up there amongst the worst.
Not content with building hundreds of miles of pylons, plastering the countryside with wind and solar farms and wanting to destroy farming, he now wants to industrialise it with ugly and toxic battery storage factories.
The Telegraph reports on how the 800-year old village of Willingham by Stow in the Lincolnshire Wolds has fought off one such giant battery park. But many others are in the queue:
“The emerging battery park blitz will add to that pressure on the countryside, with Miliband planning a five-fold increase in the infrastructure, meaning industrial batteries will become a landscape feature across the UK.
Hundreds of acres of farmland will likely be turned into industrial sites, but those losses will also boost the UK’s ability to keep the lights on, heat our homes and even power our cars as electricity takes over from gas.
It’s part of a green revolution that ironically destroys our greenery. But the prize – and Miliband’s ultimate dream – is a power system that will run largely on free fuels such as wind and solar.”
Sadly the Telegraph goes on to show a gross misunderstanding of what these batteries are capable of, and thus disinform its readers. The article states:
“For Tom Vernon, founder and chief executive of Statera, one of the UK’s leading battery developers, a battery-powered Britain makes huge sense.
Given the intermittent nature of renewables such as wind and solar, batteries have the potential to play a huge part in securing the net zero energy system as Britain weans itself off gas-powered generation sources.
Vernon believes that once Britain hits the Miliband target to have at least 25 gigawatts (GW) of battery capacity, there will be times, especially on cold, windless winter evenings, when batteries provide up to two-thirds of the UK’s power…..
It was Britain’s battery parks that helped save the day when, last month, one such cold, dark and windless bout of dunkelflaute stilled the nation’s turbines and threatened the UK with power shortages.”
Tom Vernon, of course, would say that – his company stands to rake in huge profits on the back of intermittent renewables. But the journalist, Jonathan Leake, clearly does not understand the difference between GW and GWH!
That 25 GW will only store enough electricity to last for an hour or two at the most. It will be absolutely useless when the wind does not blow for days and weeks on end. Even the comment about last month is not correct, because it was our full fleet of CCGT plants which kept the lights on. The real purpose of batteries is to fine tune the grid, offering instantaneous power should frequency dip, thus buying time for generators to fire up.
A good example of Leake’s misunderstanding is the example he uses of Statera’s new battery park in Manchester. Leake writes:
“An even bigger project is underway at another site. Carrington battery park in Greater Manchester will hold 680 megawatts (MW) of battery power able to support up to 2.2m homes.
“These technologies can store energy at scale – not just for hours, but across days,” says Vernon. “This capability is essential for maintaining energy security, reducing the UK’s reliance on natural gas, and ensuring we are prepared for future cold snaps and dunkelflautes as and when they occur.””
Carrington will actually store 1360 MWh, ie two hours storage. As batteries cannot be totally drained, the realistic amount of storage is less still.
The idea that plants like this will keep the grid running during dunkelflautes is dangerous nonsense.
Maybe the Telegraph should send Mr Leake on an energy training course!
SOURCE: Not a Lot of People Know That
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Miliband sacrifices Britain to his global warming god
DAVID WRIGHT
THE TOTAL DESTRUCTION of Great Britain is well under way and proving a highly successful venture, thanks to one man and one man alone: Ed Miliband.
Given free rein by Sir Keir Starmer, Miliband has been religiously concreting fracking wells, shutting down North Sea oil and gas exploration, and enthusiastically acceding to a misguided and out-of-order judge who has banned the expansion of two important North Sea oil fields, Jackdaw and Rosebank. He has been hard at work at removing ten per cent of food-growing farmland to install solar panels (made in China) and destroying yet more farmland for wind farms and the thousands of additional pylons needed to transmit the unreliable power from them.
The utter absurdity of it is made even more outrageous because wind and solar rely on subsidies, currently £12billion a year, to ensure that the operating companies (mostly foreign owned) make a profit regardless. That’s not the end of this farce. Under the so-called Contracts for Difference, when the renewables are generating more electricity than the grid can handle, the operators are paid to turn them off.
With electricity prices the highest in the developed world, and four times higher than in the US, what remains of our manufacturing industries are closing down – Port Talbot Steelworks, Grangemouth Refinery, and Vauxhall factories to name but some – or they are moving abroad. Meanwhile, coal-fired power stations in Germany are being restarted, and having their lives extended in Australia. In Britain, the last one was shut down in September 2024 and demolished.
Miliband’s fanatical promotion of wind and solar power is accompanied by lie after lie. Power prices will not come down; they will continue to go up. Jobs will not be created; they will be destroyed. It takes seven staff to run a 12-turbine wind farm; a 1,400-megawatt coal fired power station in New South Wales, Australia employs 378 staff, not including all the employees of the supplying coal mine.
The tragedy is that it’s all totally unnecessary. The global warming crisis, as awake TCW readers already know, is a fiction. None of the world’s wind farms, solar farms and electric vehicles is necessary, rather a polluting waste of space, effort and, above all, money. Not one of the multitudes of rent-seeking scaremongering organisations has ever produced a scintilla of provable evidence for manmade global warming. None of the wildfires, droughts, floods, hurricanes or other so-called extreme weather events is unprecedented. Empirical data in the public record going back centuries proves this. Eminent scientists have demonstrated there is no climate emergency, that climate change is natural and has been going on since Planet Earth was formed. Interestingly too, historical data unfailingly shows that warm periods in the past thousands of years have been followed by increased CO2 in the atmosphere, not preceded by it; the mediaeval warm period and the Roman warm period being good examples.
All of this is detailed in Climate: The Movie. It also explains how and why the climate cult been so enthusiastically embraced by so many supposedly well-educated and smart world leaders and industrialists.
It also debunks the widespread belief that 97 per cent of scientists are said to agree that CO2 is warming the planet, a figure that is entirely fabricated, based on 77 anonymous scientists who, out of 10,257, responded to a survey. The original rebuttal made in a lecture given by Marc Morano of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) in 2016 is, typically, no longer accessible online.
Everything is either blamed on or seen to be responsible for climate change: dramatic weathers are the symptom; growing your own vegetables in your allotment or cows are the cause. It’s the reason for increasing rat populations in cities around the world, in case you missed that one. Panicked by this onslaught of ‘annihilation’ terror, over 300 local authorities have declared a climate emergency.
As the madness comes closer to affecting every aspect of our everyday lives, can it be stopped? The vigorous pursuit of climate change indoctrination throughout schools and universities, and too many beneficiaries of the global climate lobby – of USAID and Bill Gates – peddling scare stories daily, make it a tough but not impossible challenge.
The arrival of ‘drill, baby, drill’ Donald Trump in the White House and his pulling out of the WHO and the UN, while also dismantling USAID, offers a glimmer of hope. We have to hope it has not come too late for the UK. Hopefully, we won’t have to say goodbye to all the trappings of the developed world’s agreeable lifestyles and say hello to austerity and poverty, the all-too-real dystopian horrors that Miliband fanaticism will bring.
SOURCE: Conservative Woman
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