Let's All Play the 'Growth vs Green' Game

Apparently our next Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has set out five missions for his Government:

Securing the “highest sustained growth” in the G7 group of rich nations, made up of the U.K., U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, by the end of Labour’s first term;
Making Britain a ‘”clean energy superpower”, removing fossil fuels from all of Britain’s electricity generation by 2030;
Improving the NHS;
Reforming the justice system;
Raising education standards.

But this is the same fatuous nonsense the fake ‘Conservative’ Party has also been promising for the last 12 years while delivering none of it. So, there’s really no difference between our two major political parties.

Part of the reason that no party has delivered or will deliver any of this is, of course, due to the incompetence and cowardice of our self-serving politicians.

But there may also be a deeper reason why our country is declining: the fact that the first two items on the list, “highest sustained growth” in the G7 and making Britain a ”clean energy superpower”, may be mutually exclusive.

So I’ve designed a new game that will give hours of fun for all the family. The game is called ‘Growth versus Green’.

To start the game, you go to the Our World in Data website and choose any advanced Western country where the politicians are trying to reduce CO₂ emissions by moving from cheap, reliable, efficient fossil fuels to expensive, unreliable supposed ‘renewables’ in order to save the planet from the imagined climate crisis.

Then you look for that country’s CO₂ emissions. Here are CO₂ emissions for the EU 27 countries:

Here’s the USA:

And here’s the U.K.:

Next step in the game is to go to Google Images and get the chart for your chosen country’s share of global GDP.

Here’s the chart for the EU 27 countries:

And here’s the USA:

And here’s the U.K.:

Now you choose a few developing countries and look at their CO₂emissions:

Here’s China:

And here’s India:

Then you look at their share of global GDP:

Here’s China:

And here’s India:

Once you’ve played the ‘Growth versus Green’ game, you’ll soon start to realise one very simple fact – countries with increasingly expensive and unreliable supposed ‘renewable’ energy are losing their share of global GDP and impoverishing themselves whereas countries with cheap, reliable fossil fuel energy are winning ever more of global GDP and becoming wealthier.

The basis for economic success is cheap, reliable electricity, and when Western countries have massively increased the cost their businesses and consumers pay for electricity to two to three times what businesses and households in countries like China and India pay, they are wrecking their own economies and immiserating their citizens.

As for claims by Western politicians that they’re successfully reducing their countries’ CO₂ emissions in the ‘race to Net Zero’, this is rubbish. All they’re doing is exporting CO₂ emissions and jobs and wealth creation to countries with lower energy costs.

Most dictionaries define the expression ‘mutually exclusive’ along the lines of: “related in such a way that each thing makes the other thing impossible: not able to be true at the same time or to exist together.” A clear example is the set of outcomes of a single coin toss, which can result in either heads or tails, but not both.

Anyone who’s played the ‘Growth versus Green’ game should realise that growth and green are mutually exclusive. Western politicians are deliberately, or at least foreseeably, impoverishing their own countries. But even more absurd is the fact that they are doing this to fight a supposed climate crisis that doesn’t even exist. We are in an interglacial period, the Earth is warming by about 1°C every hundred years, likely mainly due to Milankovitch Cycles, this is a totally natural phenomenon and nothing to do with levels of atmospheric CO₂ and absolutely nothing our King Canute politicians do will change this natural process.

Going green is economic suicide in an attempt to fight a non-existent monster which exists only in the deranged minds of the climate catastrophists and their cheerleaders in the mainstream media.

David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.