Costless and Clueless Conservative MP Chris Skidmore has laid out the gruesome actions needed to force British industry, finance and the wider public to live under the Net Zero political hegemony.
Presenting an “independent” review of Net Zero, Skidmore said it would deliver a “thriving modern green economy”. For starters, Clueless Chris wants to ban all gas boilers two year earlier in 2033, and make it impossible to sell a house without potentially ruinous extra insulation costs. To ease the pain, he suggests publishing a plan for England this year “to ramp up public engagement on Net Zero”.
Skidmore is a long-time green activist. In 2019 he passed into law the parting gift from doomed Theresa May that mandated Britain achieve Net Zero by 2050. A here-today, gone-tomorrow middling minister, Skidmore initially moved from an Oxford history degree through spad and political think tank appointments, to become an MP in 2010. Actual costing of virtuous proposals does not seem to be his strong point. His report is long and assumes a radical, and many would argue disastrous, transformation of society. It is devoid of any costing, despite claiming Net Zero is the “economic opportunity of the 21st century”.
Any figures tend to be of a macro nature, as in the suggestion that in “some estimates” the UK would see 2% extra GDP growth with Net Zero. These estimates came from the government’s own in-house green activist unit, the Climate Change Committee, whose members Lord Deben and Chris Stark are singled out for thanks in helping prepare the report. The word ‘subsidy’ is rarely used in green circles, rather Skidmore notes that “economic opportunities are being missed because of weaknesses in the U.K.’s investment environment”. He quotes research that is said to show that transitioning to a decarbonised energy system based on green technologies by 2050, “can save the world at least $12 trillion”.
Those with keener financial skills might ask why windmills supply what is said to be cheap power, but still require subsidies of £12 billion every year to produce barely 5% of the U.K.’s total energy needs. “Moving quickly must include spending money”, says Skidmore, a suggestion that might lead the more cautious to start counting the spoons.
What is surprising about the Skidmore report is that it appears to have been written without any consideration of the mounting evidence that most green technologies, from windmills to electric cars and heat pumps, are inferior to those products they seek to replace. It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that when you ‘believe’ the planet is in a climate emergency, despite no convincing evidence, and it is your job to save it, no opposition or alternative views can be heard, let alone prevail.
The proposal to ban new and replacement gas boilers within ten years is a real shocker. Heat pumps are a poor substitute, and require almost airtight insulation to provide adequate winter warmth in a typical U.K. house. The CCC estimates a cost of £10,000 to insulate a house and install a heat pump, but these costings have been challenged by Michael Kelly, a past professor of technology at the University of Cambridge. Based on actual experience retrofitting social housing, Kelly recently estimated that the true cost of insulation and heat pump installation is nearer £65,000 per house. For all U.K. houses and non-domestic premises, Kelly arrives at a total figure of £3 trillion, equivalent to the annual GDP of the U.K. In Skidmore’s world, this expenditure will soon be required before a house can be sold.
Heat pumps and electric cars will all require a massive expansion of the electrical grid. Onshore wind farms are a noted ecological disaster area. They are noisy, unsightly, last only a few years and are lethal for wildlife populations. New evidence from German scientists has indicated that millions of bats are being slaughtered every year by giant wind turbines. In addition, large birds that rely on wind currents for flight such as golden eagles, hawks and kittiwakes frequently fight losing battles with fast whirling blades. Skidmore looks to pave the way for widespread onshore turbine deployment, “working closely with communities to deliver local benefits”.
Powering the grid with intermittent wind and solar is a disaster waiting to happen. Without reliable back up, many thousands will die when the wind stops blowing during cold winter spells. Battery storage is one option touted, but moving to all electric cars in short order will use up all the lithium and cobalt in the world. Not that it matters that none will be left for storing grid power, since the cost of this exercise is very silly to start with. A recent report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation noted that Net Zero promoters “have no idea what they are doing” over multi-trillion dollar battery costs. The report found realistic costs for protecting against wind and solar blackouts could reach 15 times a country’s GDP.
The author noted a “heads in the sand” approach from politicians, adding, “One would have to conclude that the entire effort is either wholly unserious or breathtakingly incompetent.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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As the scheme is drawn up by politicians, with a clear track record, the entire effort can only be breathtakingly incompetent.
No, not “only”.
Richly laced with malice on one hand and corruption on the other.
Skidmark report.
‘Green’ is not green, not Gaia friendly, inefficient, impractical and far worse for the eco-system than hydrocarbon usage.
It serves another purpose however. That is why it is pushed.
Skidmore is the kind who’d have assisted Stalin meeting purge targets. To produce a report like this net zero one he can have no moral compass at all. His only motivation is steal off the normies and fill his fat chops in the swill. If green energy were so marvellous the price mechanism would have made it the energy production of choice. Note Skidmore etc have abolished the price mechanism in the energy market for any useless windmills to exist.
“Where there is no market, there is no price system and where there is no price system there can be no economic calculation”
Ludwig von Mises
A heat pump that produces water at 80 degrees Celsius should not require the extra insulation and larger radiators needed by the current puny examples.
Do come back and tell us when they have a practical system that is commercially viable, but in the meantime I am not holding my breath.
Put into other words: What Skidmore would like to mandate is demonstrably useless but experimental, new technology might eventually change that. That’s obviously always a possibilty. But until this possibilty has actually manifested itself, mandating the use of the technology is misguided. Let’s do this now and hope a miracle (ie, an unexpected technical breakthrough) will make it work in future! is not a sound policy.
Got one have you?
Heat pump technology is no where near your mentioned 80°c, more like 30° to 35°c .
It’s got a colossal way to go before those efficiencies are reached, maybe never!
I’d be interested to know how you install a heat pump in a flat; where the water tank will go in a small property which wasn’t designed to have one; and how much footage the much larger radiators will require?
I look forward to your response.
GDP is a poor measure of the economic impact of this strategy.
The UK could subsidise huge numbers to dig holes and then fill in holes and it would have a positive impact on GDP.
Not that doing something is necessarily negative — some strategic investment could be positive for the UK — it is just that whenever governments ‘prove benefit’ by mentioning GDP I get suspicious.
Agreed, GDP basically stands for G*d D*mn Profits, and is really not the best metric for wellbeing.
Heading back to serfdom like in the olden days only the ‘elite’ will be doing any travelling so don’t worry too much amount the availability of rare earth metals.
Watch out for the climate lockdown protests happening in various cities and towns.
Animal living space (that includes all humans) require adequate ventilation and air movement otherwise you get mould growth both on your walls and in your airways. So insulation has to be balanced with ventilation and the required heating for creature comfort. As with all things in life there is balance, it is a shame that there is so little with the net zero debate.
Why are these people not honest about the fact that a heat pump is not a simple swap-over with a gas boiler. The low temperatures produced generally require replacement of conventional radiator systems with ones with larger surface areas, or ideally underfloor heating. Their heat-up and response times are poor and their performance decreases at sub zero temperatures.
So give up any hope of a comfortably warm house without costly subsidiary heating.
I agree. I am one of the very many who will not be able to have a heat pump or any real alternative to Propane or Natural Gas heating. For me there is not enough land available around my home to install the necessary heat sink. The local electric supply is not enough to service the requirements of electric heating, heat pumps and or cooker, and this is without the fact, I cannot in anyway, afford the installation costs of heat pumps if I had the room and the electrical supply in the first place.
As for solar panels, there are as much use as a hand brake on a canoe when it comes to electrical supply, and as with wind turbines, after nearly 150 years of development from the first concepts, they are still in the development stage, and still constrained with the limitations in there effectiveness.
The proposals and laws regarding the private housing stock, including the much earlier ban of LPG boilers and the rental prohibition of D/E properties, is just theft, expropriation and communism.
No wonder then, that they are also technically impossible or ridiculous.
And all because of a hoax as their cover story.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/net-zero-will-lead-end-modern-civilisation-says-top-scientist
Communism collided with reality. So will net zero. .
How much suffering will be inflicted in the process remains to be seen.
In both a few organise the world for everybody else and consider any cost and suffering (of others, of course) a price worth paying to achieve their utopian society.
Net Zero and Covid are one in the same scam, go to Joel Smalley substack new article “Why do so few of the general public smell a rat?”
Exactly. Two strands of the same thread. There was never a “pandemic” and there can be no such thing as a “climate emergency,” whatever that might be.
The “elites” are planning to take over the planet and everything in and on it, or at least the bits they want. To achieve this they need global control of the world population and any means to achieve this will suffice. Along the way population numbers have to be reduced, not because the planet cannot support the world population but because too many people will be a management issue so a rather large cull is required.
Net zero is a euphemism for depopulation.
Net zero = reduce carbon.
The carbon is US, the people.
The point of documents like this is to be the quoted reference for justifying action required in the future. What a total waste of money.
A green activist and a Tory MP cross – what new hellish hybrid is this? (There’s a lot more of them than you imagine.)
People like this hate human progress, they want to reverse the discovery of fire and the cooking of meat that led to the massive increase in brain size that itself enabled science, the industrial revolution and the transformation of human existence.
Their plan is to take most of us back to the Stone Age and ensure poverty and early death returns.
Don’t take your eye off the ball, be ready to fight.
“Climate emergency.”
It genuinely makes me laugh but can anyone explain what constitutes a ‘climate emergency?’
Perhaps it’s when some Aussie is tapping away at their keyboard of their old DOS computer and the computer breaks? CLI mate emergency?
That probably makes as much sense as any other explanation.
Hahaha! Very geeky joke mate.
“Battery storage is one option touted, but moving to all electric cars in short order will use up all the lithium and cobalt in the world. Not that it matters that none will be left for storing grid power, since the cost of this exercise is very silly to start with.”
Ever heard of sodium-sulfur batteries? Or even lithium-sulfur batteries? Or semi-solid flow batteries? It has ALWAYS been a bad bet to bet against human ingenuity.
https://www.freethink.com/entrepreneurship-innovation/flow-battery
In most of human history the technological developments come first, society then learns how to adapt change and benefit from that development. With covid and with climate change we have an invented political dogma and a petulant demand from the exponents of that dogma that technology will and must supply the answer. They are blind to any suggestion that the current technology on which their dogma depends cannot deliver or is actually damaging or dangerous.
For sure human technology could well come up with some innovative developments. But it has not yet come up with them yet and there is actually no climate emergency that requires us to sacrifice human society in advance of developing technological solutions that can deliver and work well for the whole of society.
A perfect description of the futility of the virtue signalling much loved by politicians and their lackeys.
So why are they relying on Middle Ages technology ….. ie windmills?
Skidmark producing an independent report?? About as independent as Witless and Unbalanced’s statistics on Rona
In what way is an Eco Zealot MP “independent?” This Report is an absolute farce.
Another brainwashed dreamer. There are 22 million gas boilers in the UK providing us with the best central heating system we ever had. Those old enough to remember nipping around to the shop to get a can of paraffin for our mothers know that all too well. I recall rolling up newspapers into a figure 8 and putting a bunch of kindling sticks on and then some coal from the bucket once the sticks were alight. ———I now sit in a cosy house with a thermostat that keeps us at about 20 degrees for the cold winter and then turn it off all summer. Yet these eco dimwits acting on their top down instructions about CO2, who would have difficulty explaining climate change dogma to five-year-olds are going to tell us all how to live and would leave us all back sitting in the cold at astronomical cost. Their stupid NET ZERO policies are estimated to be going to cost about one and half trillion and our impoverishment is just seen as collateral damage in this absurd war on CO2, which is even more absurd when you realise that this is not and never was about the climate. It is about the world’s wealth and resources and who gets to use them, and the silly west has decided it will go along with the idea that we have used up more than our fair share of the coal oil and gas in the ground and must STOP. This is ECO SOCIALISM. There is no climate emergency—–Wake up people
“One would have to conclude that the entire effort is either wholly unserious or breathtakingly incompetent.”
Reword as ‘One would have to conclude that the entire effort is wholly unserious, breathtakingly incompetent, or intentionally destructive of our energy system and way of life.’
As Neil Oliver has said, these plans are intended to prepare us not for green energy but for no energy.
An interview slot on the British Biased and Corrupt news channel is long overdue, Chris.
Skidmore has said he’ll stand down as an MP at the next GE. Good riddance. His undoubted extensive knowledge of windmill deployment in Plantagenet and Tudor times has served him well; no doubt he has already lined up a comfortable niche position where his qualifications in Modern History will be so useful.