A growing number of journalists are casting doubt on the wisdom of the Net Zero political agenda. Writing in Wednesday’s Telegraph, Allison Pearson asks:
Who on Earth agrees with this experiment? Politicians talking hot air while families freeze. I reckon we need a referendum to establish whether the British people are happy to see their heat and light at the mercy of any passing breeze.
Noting that none of the back-ups brought in to help when Storm Eunice knocked out the electricity supply will be allowed under the Government’s Net Zero policy, she continued:
Their idea is to phase out sales of wet wood and house coal. (Bye bye, log burners!) Producing British gas is now deemed so environmentally unfriendly that we have to import it instead (which creates a giant’s carbon footprint, but at least it’s off our books). By 2025, all new homes will be banned from installing gas and oil burners, and will instead be heated by low-carbon alternatives such as… er, we’ll get back to you on that.
Pearson is right to be cynical about the green energy alternatives, which mostly revolve around hideously expensive attempts to convert the heat from sometimes sub-zero winter air and frozen ground. These specialist ‘heat’ pumps require houses to be more or less hermetically sealed (excellent conditions for winter viruses to spread), and radiators and pipework to be enlarged. Inhabitants will need to get used to lukewarm water and living in rooms struggling to reach 18°C. Oh, and they cost around £10,000, plus another substantial bill for all the building work.
Pearson then moves onto the cost of what she describes as “Nut Zero”:
Most people have no idea how crazy this stuff is. I was astonished to learn that when there is too much wind, and not enough electricity demand, wind generators are actually paid by the taxpayer to refrain from producing electricity. Three large wind farms in Scotland received a total of £24.5 million to fail to produce about half of their potential output. In one case, £7.7 million in ‘constraint’ payments handed to the operator of a 23-turbine scheme in Scotland in 2020 led to the wind farm deliberately failing to produce 51% of its potential output. Farcical, but not at all funny.
As the British people faint clean away upon opening their latest fuel bill, how wonderful to know that our energy costs are likely to go up and up because back-up power stations (gas-fired) have to be ready to roar into action when the wind is too low. Or we have to pay hundreds of millions to stop production when it’s too windy.
In Pearson’s view, our entire nation’s future electricity supply depends on a theory to be found in the Goldilocks fairytale: “Not too windy, not too still, just right.”
Pearson is drawing attention to some of the enormous costs involved in keeping the renewables show on the road. The total cost of environmental levies is £11.2 billion this year and this is forecast to soar to £14.1 billion in 2026. This cost is applied to U.K. electricity bills and covers the various financial mechanisms used to incentivise windmill operators. It also helps pay for the enormous extra costs involved in having efficient fossil fuel power stations on standby, to pick up the slack when windmills fail.
However, another major green energy cost recently introduced is often overlooked since it counts as a tax, not a levy. It is called the Emissions Trading Scheme and charges major energy users for their carbon outputs. The so-called cap and trade tax collected nearly a billion pounds this year, a figure that will increase five-fold in 2023 – all ultimately passed onto the consumer; the poorest, as always, paying the largest relative share.
Andrew Neil is another leading journalist casting serious doubt on the Net Zero political agenda. Commenting recently in the Daily Mail on the 50% hike in gas prices, Neil suggested we were reaping the bitter consequences of 25 years of increasingly costly, short-sighted and self-defeating energy policies promoted in unison by these very same politicians – Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat alike – who now bleat there’s nothing they can do about it.
The solution has been under our feet for more than a decade. Britain sits on some of the world’s richest reserves of shale gas. The Bowland Field in Lancashire harbours 37.6 trillion cubic metres of the stuff. Even if we were to extract only 10% of it – through a process called fracking – we’d have enough gas to be self- sufficient for 50 years. In reality we haven’t extracted a single cubic metre. Our politicians… simply don’t have the gumption to go for it. They are cowed into submission by the propaganda of the green lobby, which hugely exaggerated the environmental dangers.
The green lobby will do all it can to remove oil and gas from the U.K.’s energy mix. Whatever it takes and, seemingly, whatever the cost. None come greener than the Government’s own advisory body, the Climate Change Committee, which is committed to making renewables viable via higher energy costs. In its 2020 sixth carbon budget, it suggested a “strong carbon price” (i.e., tax) would push gas generation down the merit order, “such that it would play a more marginal role, particularly in meeting security of supply”.
What security of supply, the curious might ask.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic‘s Environment Editor.
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Something about the normalisation of these AI-generated images makes me nervous. We don’t need them as headline banners on Daily Sceptic. Let’s focus on the real, please.
Putin killed Navalny eventually then. Very sad to hear this.
P.S I like the picture above. Better than policemen in rainbow unitards. It’s eerie, atmospheric and has scary movie vibes about it.
”Russian Opposition leader Alexei Navalny has DIED in prison.
The 47 year old, who was reportedly subjected to torture whilst being imprisoned, 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle, was arguably Putin’s biggest critic.
In a video appearance last month he appeared gaunt and frail, with his head shaved.
The Russian prison where he died has claimed he “felt unwell after a walk and almost immediately lost consciousness”.
Several media outlets have been speculating that his death could well be an ‘assassination’ and a move by Putin to silence his main opposition once and for all.
In 2020, Nalavny fell into a coma with suspected novichok poisoning- carried out by Russias FSB.
His death comes as Putin is running his re-election campaign in a month to remain President.”
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1758478532823461932
This is terrible news for the Russian people. Tall, blond, courageous, Ethnic Russian Nalavny, with his wonderful sense of humour and his tall, blond Russian wife and family, represented everything that Tiny Tatar Putin hates.
The whole Russian-Ukrainian Fake War was set up by Tiny Tatar Putin & his secret ally Tiny Zionist Zelensky with one objective: to kill off as many Ethnic Russians and Ethnic Ukrainian men as possible. Putin could easily have crushed Ukraine at once, but that was never the purpose of the little genocidal ruse cooked up between the two leaders, whose aim is to drag it out as long as possible, and kill as many Ethnic European men as possible. Now Tiny Tatar Putin is conscripting even 70-year-old Russians to be sent to their deaths, so the state doesn’t have to pay their pensions.
As others have said, Nalavny should have directed opposition from abroad, instead of going back to Russia and certain imprisonment by the Fiend Putin, who reportedly enjoyed watching videos of Nalavny being beaten, starved and tortured in prison. I hope Brazilian Patriot Jair Bolsonaro, the true President of Brazil, will not suffer a similar fate, after Evil Communist Lula’s previous attempts to assassinate him.
“Tiny Tatar”
I certainly agree regarding Bolsonaro.
I wonder where Daily Sceptic found 15 people to tick in defence of almost certain murder of the principal opposition leader.
Anybody who thinks the Nalvany affair is about a simple principled opposition leader doesn’t belong on DS. Nothing is that simple when you see daily to what lengths the West is willing to go to weaken Putin and Russia.
WHAT?????
Anyone who disagrees with you “doesn’t belong on DS”?????
Ever heard of FREEDOM OF SPEECH and the
FREE SPEECH UNION? Who the blazes do you think you are?
I would say that with an attitude like yours it’s you who doesn’t belong on DS. Normal, rational people have the ability to tolerate others with a different viewpoint without inferring they should sling their hook. Apparently that description doesn’t apply to you!
I am sorry you took my comment personally, it was meant figuratively. DS is normally a site where people are skeptical of the official narrative. That is all. I welcome all comments and opinions and do not wish to bar anybody.
Are MP’s living standards affected or will they continue to award themselves pay increases and use expenses to try and maintain their lifestyle, changing legislation if needs be to be benefit themselves?
Then there’s helping out their friends to make sure they also do well and perhaps provide some work if being an MP doesn’t work out.
I can’t imagine Rishi Sunak is too concerned about living standards except as a negative headline.
Standard of living is directly tied to price and availability of energy. NET ZERO puts up the price and makes energy less available. ——Net Zero is therefore the opposite of prosperity and it lowers standard of living. —–It has been obvious for a very long time that our own politicians pander to the Marxist ideology of the UN and WEF. who freely admit that the lifestyles of the affluent middle classes in western society are “unsustainable”. —-They will never tell you that their plan is to remove prosperity because let’s face it, who is ever going to vote for that, so they give you weasel words instead, like “fairness, climate justice, living wage for all (even those who choose not to work), gender and racial equality, and every other Marxist goal all packed as “Sustainable Development”
Yes but I definitely think that a white man masquerading as a woman whilst trying to look official talking about how climate change is racist will likely change your mind;
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1758487108073685344
Whilst buying my last two houses I always sort the advice a trans admiral to avoid the old poverty/climate trap! Who doesn’t?
Makes me think of Aristotle’s claim that democracy would be a futile way of government because the multitude would sooner or later always fall for a demagogue.
And wasn’t it Plato who said true democracy only works in a small, ethnically homogenous society?
Exactly.
Unfortunately Noah Carl appears to still believe in our electoral system when the reality is that it is a complete sham. Fishy was moved in to place in order to bring about precisely the collapse in living standards that are discussed in this article. It does not require the brightest brains to explain that massive hikes in fuel prices are going to impoverish the country. This means of course that even foppish Fishy knows what he is doing and therefore the conclusion must be that he is acting deliberately. In fact he is simply carrying out orders. So when Noah warns that matters will get worse under Labour he is absolutely correct but for the wrong reasons because Kneel has all but admitted he is a WEF stooge.
The Davos Deviants are wholly committed to the destruction of this country and they have people in place to ensure this happens – Fishy and Chunt, Kneel guided by Bliar and Davey who is so away with the faeries he can be safely left alone as a vaguely supporting actor and anyway he is so far away from power that hell really will freeze over before he gets sight of any keys to Downing St.
The degree of naivety displayed by some DS writers is at times awe inspiring.
Yep you got it in one. ——-I like the DS because we can all say what we are thinking pretty much unlike eg on Mailonline and other places, but I am mystified how you received 3 red thumbs down ——–I don’t expect everyone to agree with me but I get a lot of people doing a red thumbs down but they never seem to say why they disagree. They just do the thumbs down and vanish. —-What are they so scared of? ——-Hey you guys c’mon no one is going to bite your head off …Speak Freely.
varmint, I reckon I have about three regular trolls who always down vote. I couldn’t care less.
Yep. —–Often on the comments I make on climate there will be thumbs up and maybe one thumbs down. ——-I have no problem with any amount of thumbs down, but those people should say why they do the thumbs down. Or is it that they have no confidence in their argument?
It’s deliberate, they blew coal fired power stations and replaced with windmills. Who thought that would improve living standards?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GGdprwXXMAAkYDm?format=jpg&name=small
In a very short few decades we went from Thatcher being crucified for wanting to shut down mines to the entire political class wanting to do so and being praised from the rooftops for it.
Noah Carl’s article on the lowering of British living standards reminds me that this lowering has been going on since 1952, according to two eye-opening articles.
“From a historical point of view the idea that ‘diversity built Britain’, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, is bizarre. Until 1952 Britain was the richest country in Europe, after which we massively fell behind our continental rivals – so if diversity did ‘build’ the country, it didn’t do a great job.”
—from “The Windrush Myth” by Ed West
The Windrush myth | The Spectator
“1952 was the start of Elizabeth II’s reign. The Windrush Illegal Human Trafficking Operation was in 1948. The Commonwealth was created in 1949. From the original 8 members, it now has 56, mostly Third World countries receiving foreign aid from UK taxpayers.” [Bizarrely, former French African colonies Gabon & Togo were allowed to join the Commonwealth in 2022, and more Francophone African countries are expected to join later, all then demanding cash from UK Taxpayers]
—See “Elizabeth II’s Devotion to the Commonwealth” by Robert Hardman here:
Elizabeth II’s devotion to the Commonwealth | The Spectator
I think he’s placing that seriously too late. Until the first world war, Britain was the foremost money lender on the planet and everybody else was indebted to it, especially the mostly rural backwater country called USA. Then came Lloyd George’s mad rush to destroy Germany and Austria-Hungary (and Russia and Turkey in the process) at any cost which turned the USA, where plenty of workers were available as the country wasn’t actively participating in the war before 1917/18, into a huge ammunitions factory to enable Britain and France to buy the absolutely insane numbers of artillery shells spent during the futile mass slaughter & destruction happenings on the western front. And this, they did with money borrowed from American bankers, leading to a reverse of the original situation.
“British Living Standards Are Going Down”
Britain is going down! fast
It is not the Conservatives who should blame themselves. It is the British people who should blame the political class.
So who do I vote for?
My political leaning is slightly right of centre, and I am a firm believer of personal freedom and self determination.
The Conservative Party has been appalling, and Labour will likely be worse (if that is possible).
Unless there is some unison of disgruntled voters like me, Labour will be in power.
Is it possible to unite for change?
After the last 14 years, and particularly the last 4, you’d think the Not-a-Conservative-Party had deliberately set out to self-destruct.
Labour will take up the baton and run with it. ——–If there were an Impoverishment Olympics the UK would be well featured on the winners podium