Time to Rethink Net Zero Madness? Miliband et al are Bankrupting UK?

[HK04]

Reports suggest the UK Net Zero bill will be upwards of £4.5 trillion… if HS2 is anything to go by it’s likely to be much higher and only need to see the subsidies to big energy and the like to realise this is not affordable. Also who asked voters? Much better things to spend at least some of that on.

+So much for there being no magic money tree! We now see via covid, any £s spent on national credit card = cuts or higher taxes down the line so this is not good for ordinary families.

The UK total contribution if IPCC reports are accepted is only 1% of the global emissions total. 99% is elsewhere.

If a house was on fire and your water container only had 1% of the water needed to put it out and those with the bigger receptacles weren’t on board, would you still be minded chuck it on at this time!? Ed says yes in the hope of inspiring others to do the same… he was never the brightest.

Add in that 4th Industrial Revolution tech (AI etc) is countering (rebound) even modest gains… what’s green about data centres (!?) for example, and note every Net Zero ‘solution’ is designed to also achieve 4IR (link not inevitable) ala if it’s not electrified/digital it’s not deemed ‘green’ these days… do wonder if the drive more to get us all under smart tech panopticon.

Good example is Ed’s energy… wood burners/gas ‘bad for the environment’… heat pumps or smart meters (which can be controlled by AI) = ‘good’…

+Given vast majority of emissions are corporate/wealthy elite…Q is should the UK taxpayers be footing this bill, and is it time to shelve Net Zero!?

If so how do you stop Ed et al who seem wholly aligned with the hysterical drive to ‘achieve’ an unachievable global zeitgeist!? Likely driven as always by the lobbying of corporate interests/1%…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15452411/The-staggering-cost-Ed-Milibands-Net-Zero-drive-finally-revealed.html

Denialism is only a small part of the problem. A bigger issue is environmentalists that prioritise purity over carbon reduction and politicians who prioritise virtue over carbon reduction.

What I mean:

1-3% of Brits think there is no climate change and only 10% think it’s mainly natural (ie not human-caused). The large majority of people support action on climate change. That is an open door for good climate change policy. People have legitimate other priorities too though, so the link between the pain they are asked to bear and the benefit to the planet needs to be clear. I think that’s where the opposition is coming in now.

Environmentalists prioritising purity: spending decades opposing nuclear (the lowest-carbon energy source, lower than solar), and often opposing carbon capture and storage research too (how we actually remove carbon) because, it seems, the goal is less important than doing it their way.

Politicians prioritising virtue: announcing projects that make little difference but make headlines. Preferring to reduce carbon a little via UK projects they can be seen to be doing, rather than a lot by investing in the most cost-effective solutions globally.

Because environmentalists and politicians are the two main groups who preach net zero, these damage credibility and goodwill amongst the people who need to pay for it.

I think climate change is a major and urgent challenge. But I don’t see our net zero leaders behaving as if they agree. Not when it conflicts with their other goals. I think in that circumstance it’s fair for the public to ask for their other goals to be prioritised now.

eg Caroline Lucas arguing for the last twenty years that nuclear is not an option because ‘it will take 20 years’ to come online.

Now that’s destructive short-termism.

Did she spend her time arguing to expedite nuclear? She did not. Because while net zero is important, nuclear is seen as impure and purity is more important than anything.

Ditto what the Green Party spends its time arguing about. Either climate change is a world-ending crisis or it’s just one issue, ranking somewhere between Gaza and trans.

I’d be looking for better sources than the Daily Mail to prove my point.

@twinkletoesimnot I was joking I didn't intend to actually go and buy a herd of cows.

Hate everyone going on about UK only emitting 1% of global emissions, this is because we outsource all our emissions to China etc who produce all our carbon intensive goods and ship over them to us! We are creating the demand, doing it out of sight means we are still doing it but are conveniently ignoring the fact

It’s a fair point, re 1%… territorial 1%, consumption (including imports needs added but still in context extremely small vs China, USA etc) etc also a factor.

https://www.escoe.ac.uk/the-uks-hidden-carbon-footprint/#:~:text=Figure%201%20shows%20that%20both,to%20fully%20estimate%20traded%20emissions.

Circular economy for example wants us to reduce/reuse, not even recycle, but do wonder as just one example what’s the point in cycling short journeys and recycling to do our our bit (which do support/do) if at the same time, individually or en-masse we then just buy cheap goods from likes of Temu that have travelled round the globe from China… makes no sense. There are lots of examples. Everything we do impactful but don’t see the billionaires leading.

Until the big emitters commit we are greenwashing and bankrupting the country in the process. There must be a better way and one which families and ordinary people don’t again bear the brunt.

Most of us can’t afford any higher taxes, longer working lives, reduced services and further standard of living drops. It’s been grim AF since 2008 (economy has never really recovered) and who wants a make do and mend society for the many as is current trajectory if the 1%, big nations and corporations don’t step up also!?

On a production basis we are about 0.8% and on a consumption basis (ie including the things we import) we are about 1.4%.

So it does make a difference but: I. it’s still a small slice of the globe, II it’s not too far out of line with our population share (1%) and III. significantly below our GDP share (3.5%).

In other words, we produce economic output far less carbon-intensively than the global average even after accounting for the carbon cost of our imports.

As we are a small share of total carbon and a relatively expensive place to improve further (high costs of doing stuff, not much sun, already good efficiency), our efforts would be much better spent supporting good quality global initiatives, like projects that focus on the cheapest-to-replace carbon, and carbon capture and storage technology that needs expensive fundamental or speculative research.

Paying to replace boilers with heat pumps in the UK, or installing solar farms is the kind of thing that politicians like because it’s tangible but it’s the kind of thing you do if you care more about being seen to be doing something than the results.

Now that being seen to do net zero is not even much of a vote winner I hope we change course. We can have greater growth and greater carbon-reduction if we pay others to reduce carbon where they can do it much cheaper than ourselves.

So much for a consensus! These are the words of the first 16 scientists of 46 that have left the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) due to the corruption of science within the organisation.

Dr Robert Balling: The IPCC notes that “No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected.” This did not appear in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers.

Dr Lucka Bogataj: “Rising levels of airborne carbon dioxide don’t cause global temperatures to rise…. temperature changed first and some 700 years later a change in aerial content of carbon dioxide followed.”

Dr John Christy: “Little known to the public is the fact that most of the scientists involved with the IPCC do not agree that global warming is occurring. Its findings have been consistently misrepresented and/or politicized with each succeeding report.”

Dr Rosa Compagnucci: “Humans have only contributed a few tenths of a degree to warming on Earth. Solar activity is a key driver of climate.”

Dr Richard Courtney: “The empirical evidence strongly indicates that the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is wrong.”

Dr Judith Curry: “I’m not going to just spout off and endorse the IPCC because I don’t have confidence in the process.”

Dr Robert Davis: “Global temperatures have not been changing as state of the art climate models predicted they would. Not a single mention of satellite temperature observations appears in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers.”

Dr Willem de Lange: “In 1996 the IPCC listed me as one of approximately 3000 “scientists” who agreed that there was a discernible human influence on climate. I didn’t. There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that runaway catastrophic climate change is due to human activities.”

Dr Chris de Freitas: “Government decision-makers should have heard by now that the basis for the long-standing claim that carbon dioxide is a major driver of global climate is being questioned; along with it the hitherto assumed need for costly measures to restrict carbon dioxide emissions. If they have not heard, it is because of the din of global warming hysteria that relies on the logical fallacy of ‘argument from ignorance’ and predictions of computer models.”

Dr Oliver Frauenfeld: “Much more progress is necessary regarding our current understanding of climate and our abilities to model it.”

Dr Peter Dietze: “Using a flawed eddy diffusion model, the IPCC has grossly underestimated the future oceanic carbon dioxide uptake.”

Dr John Everett: “It is time for a reality check. The oceans and coastal zones have been far warmer and colder than is projected in the present scenarios of climate change. I have reviewed the IPCC and more recent scientific literature and believe that there is not a problem with increased acidification, even up to the unlikely levels in the most-used IPCC scenarios.”

Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen: “The IPCC refused to consider the sun’s effect on the Earth’s climate as a topic worthy of investigation. The IPCC conceived its task only as investigating potential human causes of climate change.”

Dr Lee Gerhard: “I never fully accepted or denied the anthropogenic global warming concept until the furore started after NASA’s James Hansen’s wild claims in the late 1980s. I went to the [scientific] literature to study the basis of the claim, starting with first principles. My studies then led me to believe that the claims were false.”

Dr Indur Goklany: “Climate change is unlikely to be the world’s most important environmental problem of the 21st century. There is no signal in the mortality data to indicate increases in the overall frequencies or severities of extreme weather events, despite large increases in the population at risk.”

Dr Vincent Gray: “The [IPCC] climate change statement is an orchestrated litany of lies.”

We need net zero, we have no choice due to messing up for too many years. Madness is doing nothing

Madness is destroying the economy and prosperity of the UK, while offshoring our CO2 emissions to other countries who now manufacture stuff for us using coal to provide energy, and ship it back to us on ships burning huge quantities of heavy oil, especially so when the UK attempting to achieve an un-achievable net-zero would make F* All difference to the global climate.

If we are serious about net zero globally we should abandon it domestically.

The UK is one of the most expensive places to remove carbon from our lifestyles.

It is utter selfishness and folly to spend any money replacing UK boilers with UK heat pumps rather than on replacing biomass heating in SE Asia and other overseas interventions that remove many times more carbon for the same money. Ditto for wind farms here, almost all other domestic interventions.

Kathryn Porter, one of UK's most senior energy consultants explains why net-zero and current UK eb=eergy policy is utter madness: