Andrew Orlowski has written an excellent piece in the Telegraph laying into the Net Zero ideologues running the U.K., who have introduced a mass of unrealistic, contradictory policies around electrification and renewable energy that will only ruin Britain. Here’s an excerpt.
Take climate change targets. How good it must have felt for politicians to set those lofty goals, knowing that someone else must deal with the cost and the implementation? But now the bills are now arriving, and they’re bringing a world of hurt.
To sum up: Western policy elites have embarked on the electrification of society, replacing hydrocarbons in housing and transport, but without the technology to replace it well.
The laptop elites of Davos who back this transition are not technologically savvy people – they’re fundamentally frivolous people, anecdotalists who yawned their way through their science GCSEs. A squiggle on the back of an envelope will impress them.
They must be astonished how easy the “energy transition” project has been so far, with Maoist cadres of activist investors ensuring the most valuable stuff our economy depends on is left in the ground.
Electrification is a profound change, however, and in practice, means two things. The public is being required to surrender a superior product for an inferior one. And secondly, the infrastructure to transition to these inferior products cheaply and reliably does not exist.
To make an additional rod for our backs, Governments have decreed that a proportion of the replacement energy for hydrocarbons must come from methods that we wisely abandoned in the Middle Ages: the sun and the wind.
Even if we could acquire superior equivalents to a combination gas boiler or a 38-tonne diesel truck, in reality they’d go unused. The capacity required to generate the required level of supply, even expensively, will be absent for a very long time.
So it’s fairly safe to predict that Net Zero will fail – those targets will be missed. But for now, the policy throws up massive contradictions, while resolving them is nobody’s department.
For example, ministers say we need a multiple of the electricity generation capacity we have today. The National Grid says we’ll all have to get by with a lot less. In fact, so many contradictory measures have been passed, that “it is now beyond any minister or civil servant to name them all, let alone understand how they interact with each other,” Professor Dieter Helm warns in his latest bulletin on the U.K. energy industry, published this month.
“The resulting complexity is the prime route to enabling lobbying by vested interests, and the consequent capture of each of the technology-specific interventions,” Helm adds.
Worth reading in full.
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