The Futility of Net Zero

Written by Doug Brodie on August 27, 2021. Posted in Current News

Letter sent to: Prime Minister Boris Johnson; Mr Alok Sharma MP, President of COP26; Ms Nicola Sturgeon MSP, Scottish First Minister.

Dear leading proponents of Net Zero, 

I assume that you disagree with my assertion that our national Net Zero undertaking is futile so I respectfully request that you explain why you think my carefully researched contrarian conclusions laid out below are all wrong, if you can. 

Just over a year ago I published two papers explaining the futility of the western establishment’s obsession with “climate change”. The first, UK temperature analysis from 1659 to 2019, uses public Met Office data to show that there is nothing in recent temperature trends to warrant panic measures over alleged man-made global warming. The provenly-untrue Covid propaganda put out by the establishment over the last 18 months (see below) warns that the apocalyptic climate change propaganda put out over many years by broadly the same set of people is not to be trusted. 

The second paper, Fossil fuel dependency shows Net Zero is impossible, uses public statistics on UK and global energy trends to show that, whether or not climate alarmists are correct in their global warming scaremongering, getting to Net Zero by 2050 or by any time in the foreseeable future beyond that date is totally impossible on multiple grounds – technical, logistical, financial, diplomatic and democratic.  

Both of these papers were ignored at the time but they are still fully relevant, in fact even more so after the events of the last 18 months. They should be read in conjunction with this updating commentary. 

Firstly, it is now more obvious than ever that the world’s developing countries, collectively by far the biggest global consumers of fossil fuels, have no intention of following suit on the west’s forlorn ambition to reach Net Zero. For example, while we in the UK are rashly shutting down the last of our coal-fired power stations without which we will struggle to keep the lights on during the next prolonged windless midwinter anticyclone, as in 2010-11, China is building hundreds of new ones at home and abroad which will still be running in sixty or more years from now.

The developing countries pay lip service to the west’s climate obsession. They play along to extract as much “reparation” from the self-harming west as possible or simply to win economic ascendency. Attempting unilateral Net Zero is pointless given that the UK accounts for less than 1% of global CO2 emissions. Unfortunately, the more certain it becomes that the developing countries are not going to play ball, the more our climate cult politicians double-down on their pointless climate obsession. 

As for global temperatures, whereas there may have been a slight cause for concern about global warming back in the long-ago 1990s, these concerns have been blown away by the benign trends of the last 20 or so years. Unfortunately, the establishment has been so fixated on the quasi-religious certainties of their “climate change” narrative based on obviously-flawed scaremongering climate computer models (strikingly analogous to the provenly-wrong Covid computer models of the serially-wrong Professor Neil Ferguson), that it has failed to pay attention to inconvenient climate realities 

Following the extended “pause“ from around the turn of the century to 2014, global temperatures have been on a cooling trend since the natural El Nino warming spike of 2016 and have recently been testing the lows of 20 years ago. UK temperatures stopped rising in 2006 and 2021 is heading to be one of the coolest UK years in decades.

The 1980s and 90s have been the only two decades of steadily rising global temperatures in the last 70 years and that brief warming spell was almost certainly due to a series of natural El Ninos which had nothing to do with man-made CO2. Before that we had 30 years of global cooling from the 1950s to the 1970s despite steadily rising man-made CO2 emissions.  

The global temperature trend of the past 20 or so years is looking increasingly like the waning warm phase of the never-mentioned Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation which, if it follows its regular pattern, will soon usher in a 30-year spell of global cooling like that experienced from the 1950s to the 1970s which led to alarm calls from climate scientists of a pending new Ice Age. 

So much for the fantasy politician-declared “climate emergency”.

Next, the fantasy “solution” to the non-problem of alleged man-made global warming. My second paper explores how Net Zero is impossible because of the world’s heavy dependency on fossil fuels (83% in 2020 along with 7 percent difficult-to-expand hydro, 6 percent renewables and 4 percent unloved nuclear) and the technical unsuitability of renewables like wind and solar power.

Establishment climate activists show themselves to be as inept as untutored school children when “designing” their supposedly emissions-free national energy infrastructure. They are foolishly ambivalent about emissions-free nuclear which is the best long-term energy option coupled with natural gas.

Having already despoiled much of the country with heavily-subsidised, unclean, unsustainable wind farms and solar parks, they studiously ignore the laws of engineering which dictate that in practice wind and solar cannot be scaled up to the very high levels of electricity supply needed to power their wished-for green utopia.

Many years ago they foolishly chose to ignore the expert advice given by their chief scientific advisor on the limitations of such technologies. 

They now claim that grid-scale battery storage will rescue them from the separate problem of prolonged intermittency, e.g. negligible wind and sun for days or even weeks on end in cold midwinter, but a simple calculation shows that this is totally infeasible. 

They also studiously ignore any calculations, such as this and this, which indicate that their flagship decarbonisation plans of electric cars for transport and heat pumps (or hydrogen) for home heating might in practice make no significant difference to system-wide lifecycle net CO2 emissions, and could even be counter-productive.  

They claim that unproven at scale, “bonkers” carbon capture and storage will abate the CO2 emissions from industrial processes like gas fired power stations and the mooted production of “blue” hydrogen from natural gas for use in home boilers. This involves piping inefficiently and expensively captured CO2 across the country into deep underground reservoirs, supposedly leak-proof for posterity. They then ignore the hugely inflated end-product energy costs that would result from these processes. 

They take the general public for fools by pretending that biomass is a “carbon-neutral” renewable when it adds to air pollution and increases CO2 emissions in the short term and possibly for centuries. The whole sorry process involves cutting down forests in North America to be transported across the Atlantic in diesel powered ships to burn inefficiently as wood pellets in expensively-converted power stations at huge public subsidy to create higher CO2 emissions than the coal they replace.

The eye-wateringly expensive lunacy of proposed EU “green steel” production is exposed here. 

So much for the climate establishment’s engineering competency, common sense and honesty. 

Since March 2020 we have all suffered draconian Covid lockdowns of the global economy. Some politicians seem to think that the Covid experience provides some sort of template for trying to achieve Net Zero but they are deluded. Global CO2 emissions fell by an exceptional 6.3% in 2020 but this had no discernible impact on the atmospheric CO2 levels measured at Loa Mauna.  

During the first lockdown the Met Office asserted that “To halt the CO2 rise and prevent further global warming, global CO2 emissions would initially need to halve, and reduce by even more in the long term”. If the alarmists’ unproven academic theory of dangerous but still indiscernible man-made CO2 global warming were actually correct, it would mean that reaching Net Zero would require the equivalent (and much worse) of a never-ending lockdown of the entire world economy.  

The 2020 Covid lockdowns actually made very little difference to the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. The BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2021 shows that in 2020, global fossil fuel dependency fell just 1 percent to 83 percent while the global supply of flagship renewables wind and solar power rose to a paltry 1.6 percent, boosted by the exceptional 5 percent drop in mostly fossil fuel global energy consumption. In the UK, fossil fuel dependency fell from 79 percent to 75 percent thanks to a 10 percent fall in GDP (closely matching the 11 percent fall in energy consumption), the biggest drop in 300 years. UK wind and solar supplied just 4.6 percent of 2020 domestic energy consumption.

The UK is more dependent on imports than most other countries after having sacrificed so many businesses on the altar of climate change policy in recent years. The 2020 75 percent fossil fuel dependency figure does not include the foreign fossil fuel consumption used to produce and deliver these imports, which include dangerously-insecure interconnector-supplied electricity. This means that in reality the UK is still as dependent on fossil fuels as the rest of the world despite 12 years of Climate Change Act striving.

These figures show that the world as a whole and the UK in its own are technically a million miles away from “Net Zero”. 

Finally, the true costs of fantasy Net Zero are starting to percolate out beyond the fantasy “easily affordable” costings of the climate establishment, e.g. here and here. The GWPF thinktank puts the cost at “£3 trillion and counting”. It is obvious that the UK Committee for Climate Change fudged the issue by guessing it would cost “about £50 billion a year in 2050”.

Nothing that these dangerous ideologues have to say can be trusted. Thankfully, they have been on the spot by the Information Tribunal to provide detailed costings by mid-September. They have already admitted that only authoritarian rule can deliver Net Zero. 

Why on earth is this pointless, self-flagellating, austerity-on-stilts Net Zero agenda being pushed so hard for COP26 by Boris Johnson and the entire political class, shamefully disenfranchising the unconsulted UK electorate?

It is obvious that the same technocratic establishment authoritarianism which has dominated the Covid agenda is also driving the Net Zero agenda. I observed in this ThinkScotland paper in April 2021 that our politicians have been less concerned with “tackling the virus” then with deliberately delaying the return to normality to give time for the entire population to be vaccinated.

I warned that the resulting vaccine passports would morph into social credit identity passes like those used in communist China to deny everyday rights such as travel to millions of people.

I surmised that they were pursuing this hidden agenda coercion system because they see the personal identity pass as an essential prerequisite to the undemocratic Davos/WEF/UN “Great Reset”, aka Agenda 21. 

So it is proving, despite the UK Coronavirus epidemic having been effectively over since June 2020 (audio only, original video censored by establishment-toady YouTube), with endless fearmongering and pointless lockdowns (c.f. minimal lockdown Sweden), shifting of goalposts and the obscene coercion to get everyone, including young people at negligible risk from the virus, to take the experimental, provenly-dangerous vaccine.  

Many independent doctors are saying that the vaccines are far too dangerous, e.g. here, here and here. The establishment-suppressed truth about the vaccines is that they have directly caused, and will continue to cause, illness and death among large numbers of people. The most dramatic manifestation was during the so-called UK “second wave” coinciding with the start of vaccine rollout, a phenomenon which was replicated across the world.

With due deference to all who have been afflicted, hopefully this will soon become widespread public knowledge and scupper the establishment’s dastardly plans of coercion. 

Just as the Covid agenda has been primarily about dictatorial coercion rather than public health, the only rational explanation for the madness of Net Zero is that it is primarily about authoritarian world governance rather than climate change. I postulated this in an email sent to various politicians in July 2021, posted online by PSI, but received no replies.  

We seem to be sinking rapidly into a post-truth Orwellian dystopia of unaccountable technocratic oppression, coercion, censorship and deceit. How long will it be before we are told to believe that two plus two makes five? 

Thankfully the establishment’s evil Covid machinations are faltering (8-minute truth bomb video), France is revolting, Denmark has broken ranks and evidence is mounting on Covid malfeasance and the shocking failings of the vaccines, e.g. here, here, here, here and here.

The despotic establishment will hopefully soon face a day of reckoning via class action legal process for the terrible, unjustified abuse they have inflicted on the people over the last 18 months.  

Hopefully this will also put paid to their climate change machinations.

Header image: ZeroCarbonWorld

PSI editor’s note: I won’t be holding my breath for any response from Johnson, Sharma or Sturgeon. This letter will almost certainly be filed under B for Bin.

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