CHRIS MORRISON

Forty years ago, the Liberal leader David Steele told his party to return to their constituencies and prepare for government. Today as the second reading of the Climate and Nature (CAN) Bill is before the British Parliament, the current leader, the clownish Ed Davey, is effectively telling his MPs to return to the voters and prepare to live in mud and grass huts. All 72 Lib Dem MPs are supporting the CAN bill which will cut hydrocarbon use across the entire UK economy by around 90% within a decade. As the Daily Sceptic noted on Tuesday, the bill if passed could lead to mass starvation, death, disease and societal collapse in the near future.  Around 200 MPs are reported to support the private member’s bill and with many MPs departing for weekends in often distant constituencies, there is a dangerous chance it could pass.

The massive CAN cut in hydrocarbon use is much higher than the one suggested by the UK Government-funded UK FIRES reports. Assessing the state of current technology, UK FIRES provides a rarely encountered honest assessment that the UK will have only a third of its energy if Net Zero is attained by 2050. All flying and shipping must stop and beef and lamb will be banned. The only new building materials allowable will be earth, stone and timber. A recent United Nations report set out a collectivist global vision of primary building materials under Net Zero consisting of mud bricks, bamboo and forest “detritus”.

The CAN bill calls for a halt to all hydrocarbon exploration, extraction, sale and importation in the near future. This Wednesday, wind and solar contributed nothing to the UK electricity grid and the lights only stayed on, the sewerage works only continued operating and the hospital ventilators were only able to keep critically ill people alive due to the 70% contribution of natural gas. In the ‘near future’, a society without hydrocarbons will collapse and be reduced in short order to brutal primitivism. Of course the bill is little more than a thinly-disguised attempt using meaningless climate and nature claptrap to ration and control almost everything citizens consume. Control of hydrocarbons looks like the magic bullet that command-and-control collectivists have sought for nearly two centuries.

Despite the heavy support in Parliament, the bill has attracted no interest in the legacy media. Even the Guardian does not appear to have noted its existence. Maybe this is because it is a private members bill that is not expected to pass. But perhaps also it is because discussing the bill opens a pandora’s box. Hardly anyone in the UK, apart from the committed zealots, would support such a drastic reduction in hydrocarbon use. A wider discussion of the bill would open up considerable opposition to the Net Zero campaign and the invented climate emergency that supports a fantasy that is fading fast across the world. Not every journalist has kept schtum, so a shout out to Bev Turner of GB News who has produced an excellent 15 minute commentary on the bill that is available on YouTube.

As we noted on Tuesday, supporters of the bill are either zealots or boobies. The zealots have a political campaign to pursue and know full well what they are doing, but the boobies are almost certainly unaware of the vital role that hydrocarbons play in the modern economy. Hydrocarbons are essential for food and medicine production, they power the modern economy and are the basis for materials such as plastics, cleaning fluids and high-quality steel. Possibly Baroness ‘Joan’ Bakewell thinks the organic hummus will still appear on the shelves of Waitrose if this ghastly bill passes into law, while TV personalities such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Chris Packham assume they will be able to continue to broadcast onto every electronic device imaginable around the world. Disappointment inevitably awaits.

The CAN bill is being re-introduced by Lib Dem MP Roz Savage, having failed in the past to gather support when promoted by the former Green MP Caroline Lucas. Support both within and outside Parliament is being whipped up by the campaigning group Zero Hour. Needless to say, much of the funding of its efforts comes from the Green Blob with Friends of the Earth, the Wildlife Trusts and the Climate Coalition mentioned. This latter operation brings together numerous woke-riddled organisations from the Women’s Institute to the National Trust. Also identified as a sponsor is Dale “jail the deniers” Vince, whose Ecotricity operation has collected over £100 million in subsidies running onshore wind turbines over the last couple of decades.

Down the ages, revolutionary groups have often favoured ‘citizen’s assemblies’. Not based on the Parliamentary system with universal suffrage of course, rather they are bodies that are closely controlled and curated to support the wishes of the people as determined by the Dear Leaders. CAN’s proposal for such an assembly is a hoot. It will be established by an “expert independent body” and comprise a “representative sample” of the UK population to “advise” the Secretary of State. The assembly will consider “relevant expert advice” and all its recommendations must have the support of at least 66% of the members. Of course juries can be unpredictable, so to avoid any unwanted opposition the 66% recommendation can be ignored by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee.

The whole idea is laughable if it wasn’t being proposed in all seriousness. Who can forget the last Climate Citizen’s Assembly when 108 unfortunates were kettled in early 2020 over six weekends and fed a diet of extremist green propaganda? Who would wish to miss the guidance of selected experts such as Chris Stark, then the Chief Executive of the CCC and now the right-hand man to the Mad Miliband? Unfortunately a big disappointment occurred after a hate meat, love veg session when only 10 members out of a third of the Assembly voted that eating less meat was a priority. But the experts rose to the challenge with Mike Thompson, then the Chief Economist at the CCC, putting a slightly different spin on the ball. ”The Climate Change Assembly said it would be happy with a 20-40% reduction in meat consumption. We looked really carefully at the Climate Assembly recommendations and actually we were quite engaged in the process as well,” he said.

Isn’t democracy (properly run by the right people) grand.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

Stop Press: Labour MPs who vote for the CAN bill risk losing the whip, the Express reports. Keir Starmer’s backbenchers have been warned not to defy the party by voting for the bill in a sign of worry from the Labour leadership that its MPs will put ‘planet’ before party.