Influential elites are either in denial about the horrifying costs and consequences of Net Zero – witness last Wednesday’s substantial vote against fracking British gas in the House of Commons – or busy scooping up the almost unlimited amounts of money currently on offer for promoting pseudoscience climate scares and investing in impracticable green technologies. Until the lights start to go out and heating fails, they are unlikely to pay much attention to a recent 1,000 page alternative energy investigation undertaken for a Finnish Government agency by Associate Professor Simon Michaux. Referring to the U.K.’s 2050 Net Zero target, Michaux states there is “simply not enough time, nor resources to do this by the current target”.
To cite just one example of how un-costed Net Zero is, Michaux notes that “in theory” there are enough global reserves of nickel and lithium if they are exclusively used to produce batteries for electric vehicles. But there is not enough cobalt, and more will need to be discovered. It gets much worse. All the new batteries have a useful working life of only 8-10 years, so replacements will need to be regularly produced. “This is unlikely to be practical, which suggests the whole EV battery solution may need to be re-thought and a new solution is developed that is not so mineral intensive,” he says.
All of these problems occur in finding a mass of lithium for ion batteries weighting 286.6 million tonnes. But a “power buffer” of another 2.5 billion tonnes of batteries is also required to provide a four-week back-up for intermittent wind and solar electricity power. Of course, this is simply not available from global mineral reserves, but, states Michaux, it is not clear how the buffer could be delivered with an alternative system.
Michaux sounds a clear warning message. Current expectations are that global industrial businesses will replace a complex industrial energy ecosystem that took more than a century to build. It was built with the support of the highest calorifically dense source of energy the world has ever known (oil), in cheap abundant quantities, with easily available credit and seemingly unlimited mineral resources. The replacement, he notes, needs to be done when there is comparatively very expensive energy, a fragile finance system saturated in debt and not enough minerals. Most challenging of all, it has to be done within a few decades. Based on his copious calculations, the author is of the opinion that it will not go fully “as planned”.
Last Sunday, Sir David Attenborough concluded six episodes of pseudoscientific green agitprop Frozen Planet II by demanding that the world embrace Net Zero, “no matter how challenging it may be”. Net Zero is a political command-and-control project, the full horror of which is yet to be inflicted on the general population. Michaux is quite clear what it entails: “What may be required, therefore, is a significant reduction of societal demand for all resources, of all kinds. This implies a very different social contract and a radically different system of governance to what is in place today.”
Of course, a radically different system of government is available in the People’s Republic of China, but here the position on Net Zero is a tad more nuanced. Having lifted about a billion people out of starving poverty in the last 40 years and become the workshop for an increasingly complacent western world – all powered by fossil fuel – the cause does not seem so pressing. Speaking to the Communist Party Congress earlier this week, President Xi Jinping sounded a note of caution and said “prudence” would govern China’s efforts to peak and eventually zero-out carbon emissions. All of this would be in line with the principle of “getting the new before discarding the old”.
Meanwhile, China’s coal production is reported to have reached record levels, while the Congress was told that oil and gas exploration will be expanded as part of measures to ensure “energy security”.
Michaux points out that nearly 85% of world energy comes from fossil fuel. By his calculations, the annual global capacity of non-fossil electrical power will need to quadruple to 37,670.6 TWh. In a recent report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), Professor Michael Kelly estimates that the U.K. electricity grid would have to expand by 2.7 times. This will involve adding capacity at eight times the rate it has been added over the last 30 years. If calculations are made for the need to rewire homes, streets, local substations and powerlines to carry the new capacity, the extra cost will be nearly £1 trillion.
In another recent GWPF paper, the energy writer John Constable warned that the European Green Deal seems all but certain to break Europe’s economic and socio-political power, “rendering it a trivial and incapable backwater, reliant on – and subservient to – superior powers”.
History provides us with many examples of weak, or weakened, tribes being overrun by stronger tribes. In the animal kingdom it is known as natural evolution. A 96-year old ‘national treasure’ preaches we have to pay any price to satisfy the new cult of the green god. Better costed and more rational views are available.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Excellent, thanks. Here’s something to be going on with to address the immediate crisis.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/10/04/what-the-uk-should-but-will-not-do-to-address-the-energy-crisis/
Thanks for the link. Alt media is the only place to go for common sense these days.
Net zero by 2050 but what does this mean? Is this really about a gas without which all life would die or is there more to this fuss?
Certainly here on DS I suspect we all agree that net zero is a fantasy, in the terms we are expected to think about i.e. reducing Co2 emissions. However, what if net zero is really a cover?
We all know that the Davos Deviants (DD’s) like to have their plans ‘hiding in plain sight,’ well here is another. Net zero is not directly about reducing Co2, it is actually about population reduction.
We also know that the DD’s take great delight in telling us what they are doing, so we know their “Great Reset” is officially on and we know that their first target date is 2030. Funnily enough this is the date on which sales of new petrol and diesel cars are to end in the UK. I wonder why? Economically this is absolute madness as we all know. However, if the population has been so impoverished and reduced by this date there will be little demand anyway. And penury for many looks to be the immediate aim and is to be achieved initially via the wholly manufactured energy crisis and grotesque levels of public debt.
TPTB quickly realised that simply jacking prices at the fuel pumps wasn’t very effective if people could still get to work so another solution had to be found – stealing the citizens money via exorbitant fuel bills. This provides the added bonus that many businesses will collapse under the weight of these bills and so further impoverishes the people – no work.
By next Summer the wholly designed food shortages will kick in as a result of fertilizer shortages this year. So, emerging from the Winter is a cold, probably poorly (eroded immune systems as a result of the injections) and poor (financially) population which will be hit with empty supermarkets, for those with any money. It looks like a recipe for increased mortality.
Now I have frequently made the point that the injections were brewed to a recipe and are designed to maim and kill in the short, medium and long term. The short term increased mortality is now occurring daily. The medium term is target date 2030. National leaders have population reduction targets to meet at 2030, 2035 and finally 2050. All achieved under the cover of saving the planet. Even better from the DD’s point of view they have many in the population, the eco nutters, wilfully participating in their own destruction. I am sure they are enjoying this sick joke.
Target date 2035 – no more gas boilers isn’t it and twenty grand in today’s money to install a useless heat pump. That will definitely see off a few more. Meanwhile the injections are taking a steady toll of the population.
Net zero by 2050 is really about reducing the population to a target set by the DD’s. Co2 will factor in only so much as the energy infrastructure can supply the remaining rump population. With no sign of new energy sources being opened – coal, oil, gas, fracking, nuclear it is clear that the energy infrastructure in 2050 will only be sufficient to support a massively reduced population.
As usual we are being allowed, even encouraged to bicker and argue about a topic which is nothing to do with what is planned. It’s just like the C1984 scam with “specialists” arguing about how deadly this current version of the ‘flu really is. Another sick joke.
‘Net zero’ has bugger all to do with Co2 – it is all about net zero pleb populations.
Apologies, I forgot to mention the injections in to babies – just to ensure population reduction targets are firmly met.
This is a perceptive analysis which very neatly summed up my more incoherent dark thoughts. I’ve copied it. I hope you don’t mind.
Thank you very much for your generous comment. If you wish to share I would be honoured.
Spot on. The other thing, of course, is that it allows totalitarian controls on behaviour and travel. People won’t be able to fly, drive cross-country, jump on a ferry abroad, or even easily hop on a bus into town, given how poor public transport is: they’ll be confined to their neighbourhoods.
My city lost all of its Park & Ride services recently, when the contractor ‘handed in the keys’. I did a bit of research and went through the shell companies that own the bus company, which was recently taken over. The ultimate owner now is Deutsche Bank…
Well, who would have thought that such a well reasoned plan would have such a gigantic hole in the middle.
Well-reasoned plan? Sir, surely you jest!
Parliament voted against fracking, did it? Must have missed that one. Shocking, not shocked.
They really are intent on wrecking the country, aren’t they?!
If you mean Labour’s attempt to impose a permanent ban, they failed thankfully
Net zero, or as I prefer to call it; “Operation Stone Age” never was based on planning, either economic or technical. It was fuelled by pseudo-science and egged on by eco cultists who presumed the superficial scientific “consensus” was proof of correctness. The rallying cry is that our current lifestyles will largely continue but fuelled by renewables as we protect the planet from climate disaster. The reality will be very different. Net zero means poverty for many. They will not just lack heating and transport, but will find many of life’s essentials unaffordable. We are effectively being forced back into serfdom. The climate will carry on in its usual way regardless, we will have saved nothing.
Witness the bottomless pit that is human stupidity.
AKA the Reset.
And once we are back in the Stoneage, the useful idiots will be running about telling us we are running out of stones
Europe is screwed either way. It has virtually no oil or gas. All the major reserves are elsewhere in places previously controlled by European powers but not any more.
History shows very clearly that the providers of energy make huge amounts of money and accrue enormous power. Our uber-class don’t control the best sources of energy (oil and gas) anymore. Renewables are their desperate attempt to cling on and continue to be our energy providers, because renewable technology is something they still own and control.
So they will force us to use their renewables even if it impoverishes us. They don’t care what suffering they cause ordinary people in their crusade to remove oil and gas from our lives and replace it with their crappy renewables. As long as they can hold on to their power, it’s worth it for them.
The global warming – sorry, climate change – story is the myth they’ve fabricated to get the idiotic, over-educated classes on board and doing all their bidding for them. The over-educated never get anything. They’re so f**king stupid. They’re so used to competing with each other to jump though the hoops placed in front of them and being so proud about how well they do it that they have no capacity to stop and think.
They are the bullying prefects of our society that push the population of ordinary people around. They parade in their ridiculous, over-priced electric cars that can’t go for more than a couple of hundred miles before requiring a long charge and are so stupid as to berate people for using the hugely more effective and efficient ordinary cars they themselves were riding around in only yesterday.
Really, these stupid drones, of which the morons in parliament are the cream of the crop, are too stupid for words.
I wonder if net-zero was only ever a way to increase taxation without getting a backlash from the people who are being taxed?
Net-zero or “Operation Stone Age” as Nigel rightly bills it is a lot more than taxation. Whatever it is it is deadly.
Eventually the pips that are being taxed will squeak, and it won’t be the sound of mice.
Now we’re talking. Been asking for some counter studies and research that questions how sustainable the sustainable agenda really is. You can’t cheat thermodynamics. We know their data is flawed, we know they’ve corrupted and bought out most the competition, we know it’s a grift. ‘Bout time those who’ve the expertise & knowledge to call out the fraud.
Doesn’t matter. It helps if people can get it into their heads that Net Zero means Net Zero energy, and the Green Deal means back to agrarian societies, subsistance farming toiling in the fields.
No sane, intelligent person can believe we can ‘transition’ from cheap abundant fossil fuels, to a viable alternative which does not exist. These crazies know what they are about. They want the Human Race culled, numbers kept permanently down to ‘save’ the Planet. They will then be planetary custodians living sumptuous lives.
This was always known. The ultimate plan is for the ruling elite to carry on as they are whilst serfdom is reimposed. The inspiration for this neo serfdom model of governance came from China whom the left now believe made communism work.
By imposing a form of neo-imperialism on parts of Africa, among other things. Decolonisation, anyone?
It still hasn’t been established unequivocally what the likelihood future catastrophe is, or even if there are just slight negative consequences of any warming will be.
At the moment the ability to shout loudest seems to be the way to win any argument.
As Captain Alberto Bertorelli in Allo Allo would have said “Oh, whadda surprisa”
But then, given the sheer bone headed stupidity of “the science” which the WHO and SAGE advised government to follow, which they duly did, is anyone here really surprised at the international community’s idiocy?
What I do find mind boggling is the unquestioning trust that so many people have in authority that they will complacently believe what they are told. Or maybe I’m just lucky that I’ve got my Dad’s self taught “question everything” genes and I’ve been married to an engineer with an interest in Geology for 50 years.
We engineers are frequently fully paid-up members of the awkward squad, mainly because we’re forever being asked to do the impossible for no cost by managers who are usually unable to find their backsides with both hands.
Time to RELEASE THE KRAKEN!
http://truespiritofamericaparty.blogspot.com/p/free-energy.html
https://youtu.be/0RnnH7vDbz4
The encouragement of ‘electric cars’ by various governments is weird.
They’ve essentially built a demand for cars with batteries that give them quite a large range compared with the average daily drive. These are expensive, and thus only make sense to two groups:
Hybrids actually make much more sense — a battery capable of covering the daily average miles, but with a fossil-fuel motor for the occasional longer journey.
Unfortunately, hybrids have a bad press because of one single factor — when they were introduced people chose them as their company car purely because of the tax advantage. These people didn’t care about the hybrid side and just drove like a conventional car, resulting in government research finding that ‘hybrids don’t work because people don’t charge them up’.
Yet another mess that’ll come back to bite us (just like the way that diesels were given tax advantages compared with the cleanish burning LPG option around 20 years ago).
My neighbour has a hybrid Mercedes SUV as a company car. He always uses it as an IC car, and has a hybrid solely because it is taxed less than a conventional vehicle. His wife actually does the mileage to work. He works from home most days when he is not travelling abroad.
When my wife, a middle rank manager, can pay £500 a month less tax by choosing an EV to replace her current company car why wouldn’t she?
Is part of this plan to remove nationalisms and love for one’s particular country and its customs and traditions by mixing up populations within and between continents as fast as possible, so that there is less resistance to world government by the great and the good?
I hear that some scientists are working on developing sodium batteries. If they are successful there will be no need for nickel, lithium or cobalt or at the very least a hugely reduced requirement. Electricity from sea water anyone?
I forgot to add that the idea could go hand-in-glove with desalination plants to fix fresh water shortages. Win-win.
In the UK Net Zero was simply waved through parliament. Not a single question from any politician of any party was asked. eg—— Is it possible? How much will it cost? What will be the benefit to the UK and to the global climate? If no one is prepared to ask those questions and get an answer to them how can they tell if it is a good idea? Well, they do say that people go mad in herds and only recover their senses slowly one by one. This has to be the biggest case ever of group think madness ever perpetrated on people. It is the latest manifestation of the pseudo-scientific fraud that is “Climate Change”