Net Zero threatens the UK’s future.
The enemy is within
The climate disaster is here, apparently. A terrifying headline that were it not in the Guardian might be taken seriously. The Guardian always reports with the sort of dramatic pessimism of someone not getting enough attention at a party, so breaks down in tears or collides with the snack table. Were it a person and not a newspaper, it would never leave its safe space where it colours-in calming pictures of My Little Pony and rainbows and scribbles articles about the patriarchy of heathland and how keeping a pet tortoise is racist.
As we know, they are not alone. “We are on a catastrophic path,” says António Guterres, secretary general of the UN, “We can either save our world or condemn humanity to a hellish future.” His hyperbole limiter must have short-circuited when he added that humanity has “opened the gates of hell.” Climate alarmists always sound like they’re auditioning for a Roland Emmerich disaster movie. The world’s favourite truant and WEF quockerwodger Greta somehow managed to finish her lines “We’re at the beginning of a mass extinction” without wailing and beating the floor with her fists. Meanwhile, the Two-Tier Starmer robot stated in 2020 that “There is no more important challenge than the climate emergency.”
The Independent isn’t far behind the Guardian in the tantrum stakes, reporting that the United States is historically responsible for the largest share of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.’ As though this is established fact rather than an increasingly challenged theory, by scientists such as Nobel prize laureate John Clauser, who identifies natural mechanisms such as solar cycles, orbital/lunar cycles, cloud variability, ocean cycles, volcanoes, ozone variability, urban heat islands, in affecting earth temperatures. He is someone who is identifying the real hellish future: the Net Zero world.
UN client scientists claim climate change has caused an increase in natural disasters fivefold in last 50 years. In fact, there’s been a 92% decline in natural disaster deaths since the 1920s, during a period in which the global temperature rose 1.3 degrees centigrade. Wildfires and hurricanes are always the headliners at any global boiling catastrophe festival as examples of ‘extreme weather’ as claimed by news reporters before they have even stepped from their PRESS vehicles. But hurricanes aren’t increasing in frequency, while wild fires are a historical phenomena, and have been often been proved as arson.
However, the climate disaster is here, it’s in the UK, and is not being reported as fully as it might be. This involves the loss of farmland the same size as that within the M25. It involves mass job losses in car manufacturing, and the oil industry at Grangemouth in Scotland, not to mention the decommissioning of North Sea rigs. The UK is losing its primary steel industry and much of its chemicals industry. The crisis risks blackouts with unreliable energy supply and volatile prices of electricity. The bleak climate change outlook from the governing bodies and billionaire funded charities is resulting in mental illness and stress. There are moments when the UK is paying some of the highest prices for power in the world, costing consumers at least £17m extra on their bills to import gas to keep lights, medical equipment, and indeed society on line. Is this the gates of hell that Guterres mentioned?
The manmade UK Net Zero crisis involves losing £billions of tax payers money who are paying for fundamentally flawed energy provision. Subsequent tax rises makes everyone poorer. It’s a crisis that is desecrating the countryside with industrialisation, with eyesores that kill protected birds, while covering fertile farm land with mirrors that produce energy during daylight hours only, often barely. It might be a slight exaggeration, but basing national energy supply on the weather is like a florist basing their business model on the Titan Arum, which only blooms every three to seven years
The Net Zero crisis is of a magnitude global warming can only dream of. Amnesty International claims climate change is one of the most important issues facing the world, yet remains silent on the impact of Net Zero on working class jobs, or say the 12 whale deaths off the East Coast in December due to wind farms. The now multi billion dollar green industry occupied by graduates in jobs they can’t draw, instead draw red lines through the professions of working class people in the oil, steel and car industry; writing lives off from overheated offices in London in the name of the spurious and unscientific belief that humans are driving a slight increase in planet temperature.
An example of this is Net Zero zealot Tony Bosworth from Friends of the Earth. He might be friends of the earth, but not to the people who populate it. In January 20205 the UK had to depend upon gas for at least 70% of its energy production due to low wind and the surprising discovery that the UK isn’t sunny enough in winter to generate meaningful solar power.
As with politicians like Miliband, Bosworth believes that the only way to save the planet is to destroy industrial civilisation. He suggests we return to the preindustrial age: “The priority now is to move away from gas as well,” he told (shock horror) the Guardian. His clownish commitment to unreliable renewables suggests he hasn’t ever looked at what’s powering our National Grid, or where his soy milk comes from, or what is in his iPhone case. “We have an abundance of natural resources like wind and solar,” he says on FoE’s website. “They’ll go on forever, and we won’t be reliant on expensive gas and oil.” Well, not on a windless night they don’t, and energy is required continually. These are the same luddites who oppose nuclear reactors, the cleanest, most reliable and safest energy source, because they watched the Simpsons.
Depending upon the unreliability of the weather – although it is reliably dark overnight – for reliable energy is deluded. People have been sectioned for less. Perhaps we should be grateful for rainbows not being harnessed for energy production. I guess they’re too busy alienating heterosexuals from every other sexual proclivity. Two weeks ago NESO warned that the U.K.’s demand for power was coming dangerously close to exceeding supply.
The reason for the UK’s rabid pursuit of Net Zero is to set an example for the world to follow, which is an example of exactly how not to run a country’s energy supply. It’s telling everyone how warm it is once you’re in, while holding your jaw to stop the shivering from loosening your fillings. Miliband probably choked on another bacon sandwich as Trump left the Paris Climate Accord, overturning Biden’s pledge to reduce Co2 emissions as much as two-thirds by 2035 compared to 2005 levels, with his declaration of ‘drill, baby, drill’. Trump understands that dependable and cheap energy drives prosperity and a secure society. Miliband seems to think he can save the entire world from warming by driving the UK off a cliff. With the rest of the world’s industrial nations preferring not to sacrifice their economic and energy security at the Net Zero altar, the UK stands alone in saving the world from ‘global boiling’ as it aims to reduce it’s 1% of global emissions to, well, zero. Our 1% is evidently far more significant than China’s 32% or USA’s 12% or India’s 7%. It takes someone of higher intellect than Miliband to realise that the UK could succeed in Net Zero at the cost of living standards, jobs and energy without having the slightest impact upon global temperatures even if they were impacted by manmade Co2 rather than natural cycles.
Recently, the most terrifying development is the Climate and Nature Bill, a private members bill already with support of 195 MPs, brought by eco-loon Caroline Lucas who is taking a break from destroying Brighton to apply her destructive vision to the entire UK, who is supportive of the disaster of nuclear reactors going offline.
This bill adds to Miliband’s target of reducing Britain’s carbon emissions by 81 per cent – relative to a 1990 baseline – by 2035 by demanding that the UK reduce the carbon emissions embedded in imports by a similar proportion. This includes steel, chemicals, fertilisers, foods and many other products that create carbon emissions. Having removed steel emissions from our own carbon figures by closing down our primary steel industry, this lunacy will presumably include carbon-free steel, which is impossible; it’s wrought iron, which is inadequate in strength and flexibility for modern construction. This woeful State meddling would affect everything from the energy that heats homes and drives a modern economy, to all the medicines, fertilisers, chemicals and food that sustain life.
For politicians like Miliband and Caroline Lucas who live in a world of such privilege that they are immune to taking the UK back to pre-industrial times, it appears that the only way to save the planet is to destroy contemporary civilisation. It’s easy to see why most countries ignore him. The Labour Party once represented working people, now they attack them from every angle. This is the end of the world we need to be warned about. Net Zero is the disaster that is already here in the UK as a lesson to the world.
This article (Net Zero threatens the UK’s future.) was created and published by Tom Ed and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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The global shift forcing Britain to change course on net zero
Donald Trump’s return to the White House is driving a climate policy divide in the Labour Party
Drill, baby, drill. With three words and the stroke of a pen, Donald Trump wrenched the world’s biggest economy away from net zero.
The president’s executive orders – signed in a flurry of activity last week – withdrew the US from the Paris climate accords and scrapped Joe Biden’s green deal “scam”, as well as the “insanely costly” electric vehicle mandate.
“We’re going to let people buy the car they want to buy,” Trump told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Trump has vowed to tap the “liquid gold under our feet”, declaring a “national energy emergency” that he will use to support a new wave of oil and gas drilling in America.
As far as he is concerned, the environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda embraced by Wall Street is now in the rear-view mirror. Green energy, diversity and red tape have been consigned to history.
Yet on the other side of the Atlantic, not everyone has received the memo.
In London, Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, was unbowed. He declared that net zero was “unstoppable” despite the president’s actions.
The UK is bound by myriad targets including a legal requirement to virtually eliminate all carbon emissions by 2050. Scotland’s Government – keen as ever to outdo Westminster – has pledged to get there five years earlier.
Britain’s carbon emissions must fall by two thirds by 2030 under the rules, with Miliband also racing to make the country’s power grid completely “clean” by then.
Yet the global tide is turning against both Miliband and net zero. Targets are being torn up in the US and calls for a rethink elsewhere are growing.
Adding to pressure on the Government is the fact that businesses are still reeling from Rachel Reeves’s record tax raid. The Chancellor is running out of both political capital and the cold hard cash to back her ambitions.
With her back against the wall, Reeves has re-pledged to put economic growth before all other considerations, including net zero.
But is Labour really serious about growing the economy? How far can the Chancellor and her allies realistically go? And will the clash between net zero and growth ultimately tear the party apart?
‘Ideology is always a bad idea’
For all the fuss about Britain’s carbon emissions, the UK barely accounts for 1pc of the global total, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
China is by far the biggest emitter, accounting for roughly a third of the share, with the US in second place and India in third.
The UK sits in 18th position behind much smaller economies like Korea and Mexico.
Despite relatively small carbon footprints, Europe and the UK have set some of the most aggressive targets on slashing emissions.
Europe’s lead on net zero has left some countries in trouble. Germany, a country punished by over-reliance on Russian oil and gas, is sticking to targets that have resulted in electric cars that are unloved and a backlash against heat pumps.
There, calls to go slower are growing louder. Joe Kaeser, the chairman of industrial giant Siemens Energy, says “ideology” must be balanced against economic reality.
“The pendulum has been swinging into a totally ideological direction in terms of: no matter what the costs are, just get it done,” he says. “This was not a good idea. Ideology is always a bad idea.
“Now the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction, saying everything that is renewable is woke and we don’t want woke stuff.
“So the question will be where does the pendulum finally come to rest?”
Kaeser says Germany should keep in mind its “relative emissions” compared to other nations like the US and China. He points out that China doesn’t plan to reach net zero until 2060, compared with 2045 in Germany.
“There’s no point in trying to be the first one to arrive there if the big nations say we are going to be 10 years later.”
Moving too fast could “screw up the whole export industrial model in Germany”, which accounts for a quarter of all the country’s output.
Kaeser has been in contact about the issue with opposition leader Friedrich Merz, who is considered to be the frontrunner to be Germany’s next chancellor.
“For an economy like Germany, you always need to balance the risk and the opportunity,” Kaeser says.
“Relative emissions in Germany are less than 2pc of global emissions. Now if you set a target where you want to cut your emissions in half by 2030 no matter what, and assuming that nobody else in the world is going to grow emissions, it’s a target that will be long forgotten by the time you reach it.
“So what’s the point?”
Global outlier
A similar argument is being made in Britain.
Dieter Helm, professor of economic policy at the University of Oxford, recently warned that Miliband’s plan for a clean power system by 2030 risked pushing up bills for consumers, because the UK would be forced to pay “whatever it costs” to meet the target.
This would “reduce the competitiveness of the economy”, he said, as countries like the US exploit their massive supplies of fossil fuels with abandon.
“Trying to unilaterally lead in a world that is not following its playbook is necessarily very expensive,” he wrote.
“This does not mean that the UK should not unilaterally push forward, but it does mean being honest with its voters and consumers.”
Earlier this month, petrochemicals billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe warned that the chemicals industry was having “the life squeezed out of it” by high energy costs.
This is potentially a calamity – including for net zero. The chemicals sector is needed to produce the building blocks for electric vehicles, green fuel for aircraft and batteries, among several other things.
Yet the chemicals sector – which supports more than 600,000 jobs overall – has shrunk by around 37pc since the start of 2021.
The manufacturing and oil and gas industries have also shrunk by 8pc and 44pc respectively.
Sir Jim, whose company Ineos recently shut down a synthetic ethanol centre in Grangemouth in Falkirk, Scotland, claimed rising energy costs were killing off domestic manufacturers and displacing their activity abroad – a phenomenon known by policy wonks as “carbon leakage”.
“De-industrialising Britain achieves nothing for the environment,” he warned, pointing out that emissions were simply being shifted elsewhere.
The tycoon has blamed the UK’s carbon emissions trading scheme for the high energy costs. Though rarely talked about, this is one of the most significant ways the Government has sought to bring down industrial emissions over the past 20 years.
First introduced in 2005 when Britain was part of the European Union, it gives manufacturers a set quota for the amount of carbon dioxide they are allowed to emit in a year and taxes them for breaching the cap.
In 2013, Britain introduced its own supplemental “floor” price, effectively gold-plating the EU scheme and taxing domestic producers more heavily. Since 2015 the “floor” has been fixed at £18 per tonne of CO2, added to a basic cost of £41.84 per tonne for the emissions scheme this year.
Against this backdrop IEA figures last year showed British firms faced the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world.
Worse, British producers often find themselves competing with companies outside Europe who do not face such constraints.
The Telegraph: continue reading
*****
Constraint Payments Could Hit £6 Billion In 2030
PAUL HOMEWOOD
h/t Philip Bratby
British households face costs of up to £3bn a year to pay windfarms and other electricity producers to stop generating when there is too much wind.
The Telegraph report:
British households face costs of up to £3bn a year to pay windfarms and other electricity producers to stop generating, according to the country’s grid operator.
The National Energy System Operator (Neso) has warned of the looming bill as the power grid struggles to keep pace with the expansion of renewables.
This means that when the wind blows more strongly, the power generated can overwhelm transmission lines and force Neso to intervene.
To ease pressures, Neso hands wind farm operators “constraint payments” to stop generating, which are aimed at compensating for lost revenue.
Such payments already hit £1bn last year, although a report from Neso has warned that this bill is poised to rise to £3bn by 2030.
Other industry experts fear that the real cost could end up much higher.
Octopus Energy, the nation’s leading power supplier, estimates that by 2030 constraint payments could be adding £6bn a year to consumer bills – roughly equating to £200 a household.
NESO’s assessment is based on these calculations, included in their Clean Power 2030 report:
https://www.neso.energy/publications/clean-power-2030
The cost of curtailment and exporting surplus power at a loss add up to £10/MWh, which based on their anticipated generation of 354 TWh in 2030 gives a total cost of £3.5 billion. (NESO’s Workbook gives cost of £3.68 billion).
Note that this figure is on top of the costs in 2023, which were already significant.
But as Octopus say, the real cost could end up being much greater.
According to NESO, in their 2030 projection, 22 TWh of surplus power will ne paid to switch off, but another 61 TWh will, they say, be exported at an average price of £40.MWh. (Total wind generation will be 245 TWh, meaning a third of this is surplus to requirements).
If there is no demand abroad for this power, then this will also have to be constrained off, thus losing the potential export income of £2.4 billion.
According to the Telegraph, DESNZ argue that cheaper generation costs will more than offset constraint payments.
However this is a falsehood, based on NESO’s claim that generation costs will fall by £15/MWh. But this saving is not real, it is sleight of hand.
As NESO themselves explain, their “cost of gas power” includes a spurious carbon tax of £60/MWh:
In other words, DESNZ will increase gas power generation costs by raising taxes, and then argue that renewables are cheaper, even though wholesale costs will be higher than now.
According to NESO’s Workbook, this tax is adding £19/MWh to overall electricity wholesale costs.
In reality, Miliband’s expansion of renewables will increase generation costs, not decrease them.
Add that increase to the other extra costs tabled by NESO, ie constraint, storage and grid upgrades, and we are looking at a total increase of around £30/MWh. This equates to about £10 billion a year.
Finally it is disappointing that previously reliable experts, Cornwall Insight, have also fallen for this con trick played on us by NESO and DESNZ, if the Telegraph article is accurate.
SOURCE: Not a Lot of People Know That
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