Greenhouse Gas

In case anybody is labouring under the delusion that their children’s future is in jeopardy because of climate change, let me administer a big slap to bring you to your senses. You don’t know, and I certainly don’t know, what the next 50 years will bring. The climate scientists are pretty sure about what will happen in general over the next few centuries, but even they are in the dark when it comes to 2030, or 40, or 50 because NOBODY knows.

Allowing your children to blackmail you into rash actions is as foolish as allowing our government to dash headlong into embracing supposed ‘green’ solutions, at a ruinous cost to the economy. The world is full of amazing, wonderful things. It will be equally full of such things when its average temperature is 2 or 3 or 5 degrees higher than today. The risk to our future is not climate change – that’s happening, and we’d better adapt to it. But a far bigger risk to our immediate future is the ridiculous and unachievable ‘net-zero’ gamble.

Opportunities are huge, right now, for any charlatan in the guise of a green evangelist, to milk the taxpayer for £billions through false promises to alleviate unknowable threats. Only this morning I heard on the BBC World Service programme ‘Tech Tent’ an entrepreneur telling the world how solar would soon be the cheapest energy available. He neglected to mention that it is also one of the least efficient and only very few homes are energy-lean enough to run on solar and battery alone. For most people their solar installations may break even financially over their lifetime, but they will have negligible effect on the climate. If anything, the focus should be on energy consumption, but that is already being rationed by the price mechanism.

But what about the wind you ask? Various news outlets have been excited by Ripple Energy and their scheme for people to buy shares in wind harvesting. It looks good, possibly too good. But behind the hype is the reality and a good primer into how we are all being conned by the green energy revolution is this article by Matt Ridley in the Spectator. I have taken the liberty of posting up most of it on my own blog site simply because the Spectator is a subscription service, but the original can be viewed here.

What is truly dispiriting is that almost everything you hear in the news, in the documentaries, in commentary and on social media is driven by opinion, or worse, zealotry. There is a Facebook group I follow in which delighted adopters post up universally good news about their solar installations. But when you do the numbers it turns out that a sort of pious hope is heavily tipping the scales. And none of this is any good for the people who need it the most, the energy-poor.

Locked into higher tariffs due to the uncertainties of the market, energy ignorant and helpless against the corporate machine, just as in every other area of life they are locked out of the Brave New World. And it will get worse, as schemes like Sadiq Khan’s plan to penalise the motorist anywhere inside the M25 are taken up by other cities in turn. Denied cost-effective heating in the future, such as gas, life is going to get a whole lot more expensive for those (as always) who can least afford it. And so on, and so on.

And when, in ten, twenty, thirty years’ time it is revealed that all of this pain was for nothing who will hold their hands up and take the blame? When not one step of progress has been made in limiting the increase in global temperature, who will admit they were wrong, and that the sacrifices people were forced to make were too large and too ineffective? You know who… nobody.