Consider corporations like the BBC, the NHS, Google, Amazon, Biontech. No one worries about them. It would not be the end of the world if they were to wither away. But there are several corporate institutions which we do worry about. The state is one. The church is another. Perhaps the third great one is the university.
Even though schools are ancient, and universities are medieval, we only began worrying about the university in the 19th Century. This is when the church began to wane and the state began to wax in the eye of the university. The most famous writer in England about the university was Cardinal Newman. He gave a series of lectures in the 19th Century published under the title of The Idea of a University. Newman was a worrier. He worried about the state. Then he worried about the church. Finally he worried about the university.
Newman’s argument, in short, was that the university had become a superimposition of several ideas: one was religious, one was what he called liberal and one was utilitarian. A few years ago I wrote an academic article explaining that the university is a composite entity: a superimposition of an ‘eternal’ institution, an ‘immortal’ institution and an ‘immediate’ institution. Fancy words: but I wanted to make Newman’s conceptions clearer than I think they have been to even those people influenced by his ‘idea’ – all those Leavises and Scrutons. The university is built on three contradictory ideas:
• Eternal. The university has always been, in part, a community which enables the learned to offer thanks to God or the gods for the blessings of life through learning: and to pursue truth without care for fame or even contributing to the sum of human knowledge. Here the academic is closest to an ancient philosopher or a monk.
• Immortal. The university has always been concerned with learning for its own sake: and this is where we contribute to our civilisation and to the state of truth as we see it in our own time. Here the academic is the scientist or historian or modern philosopher: writing books and articles.
• Immediate. The university, in addition, has always been concerned with serving society in some fairly comprehensible respect: either by generating lawyers, medics and, in the last century or so, engineers, or by generating bits of academic learning which are incidentally useful: whether for building bombs, cyclotrons and microchips, or for consoling the afflicted.
The shortest way of explaining what is wrong with the university is that it is no longer ‘eternal’, it is ‘immortal’ now by accident or only in order to claim prestige, and it is otherwise almost entirely ‘immediate’. But this is not the whole story. The problems have to be seen in full, and in sequence.
So here is a list.
- The university has been SECULARISED. Formerly at the service of the church, or a religious state (which was, anyhow, extremely small in scale), it is now at the service of a God-is-dead state. This is Hobbes’s ‘mortal god’ of the Leviathan: the powerful technologised military-industrial corporate-capitalist-bureaucratic state. No longer unified by religion, or dignified by aristocracy, it is only civilised by its own traditions, in so far as they survive the unification which comes from the imperatives of the state. Hence ‘impact’, ‘relevance’, ‘models’, ‘settled science’ and other sad words.
- The university has been made UTILITARIAN. A ‘utility’ is simply something useful. And a useful thing is a thing which enables us to get another thing. The language of utilitarianism is the language of instrumentality: of using things—for instance, mathematics, logic, ethics, physics – to get other things – such as status, funding, computer models, a Nobel Prize, influence and power. The old idea of knowledge-for-its-own-sake has been, if not entirely replaced, then supplemented by and to some extent subordinated to the new idea of knowledge-for-use. By this standard, the whole purpose of the university is to better something: at the minimum, to better the lives of the people who study there, at the maximum, to better the entire life of the society. No longer is the university an end in itself: it has to justify its existence by its results, outputs, impacts—by its making us feel safer or better.
- The university has been CENTRALISED. A century ago, or earlier, the academics could study whatever they wanted, for its own sake, or for God’s sake. But now academics have to satisfy universal protocols and conventions. Everyone writes and teaches within a sharp haze of criteria, classifications and requirements couched in what has become our standard composite language of market, monopoly and bureaucracy (that is, in terms of what sells, in terms of what we are forced to buy, and in terms of what rules we buy and sell by). The grand incentives in the modern university are wholly centrally controlled. There are enormous funding agencies, some public, some private, which offer vast sums for research if it can successfully appear to tick the appropriate commercial-corporate-bureaucratic boxes. If one can ape the received pronunciation of one’s established academic overlords then one can prosper. But one has to bow and scrape, and work for a machine.
- The university has EXPANDED. Our societies are extremely wealthy: wealthier than ever. But our universities are colossal in scale and extent. We educate a greater proportion of the population in universities than ever before. There are more students, more universities and more academics than ever before. The result is mediocrity. If there are too many towers, they cannot all be made of ivory. ‘Educate, Educate, Educate’ said Tony Blair in the 1990s. “More will mean Worse,” said Kingsley Amis in the 1960s. Across the world now, societies are divided more or less neatly between a higher educated class that has been educated out of its common sense and a class that lacking such an education is entirely dependent on common sense. Higher education on such a scale has created an establishment which exhibits a remarkable new phenomenon, the arrogance of informed mediocrity, the creation of a mediocre elite. Entitled without being enlightened.
- The university has been broken into SPECIALISATIONS. Faculties, departments, fields, subfields. Everyone contributes to one of a thousand separate literatures. To some extent, specialisation is a countervailing force to centralisation, but only to some extent. Unfortunately, specialisation has in the long run tended to reinforce rather than subvert the uniformity of modern public culture: since it has undermined the claim of the university to say anything of general significance to society. Instead there are many special subjects and special theories, all clamouring for attention: some of which have success in claiming attention – if they can relate themselves to a crisis – while most of the others have to find some way of signalling their conformity to the uniformity imposed by all the features of the modern university described above. The university no longer believes in ‘universality’. It is wholly opposed to anything like a broad sensibility, a sense of proportion, learning, general knowledge or wisdom.
- The university has been rendered IRRELEVANT. As the universities have been assimilated to the state, and asked to be more relevant, they have become less relevant. Specialisation is the likely cause. No one reads enough to be able to frame a general argument. Older figures such as Ernest Gellner and Alasdair MacIntyre, who came through in the 1950s, were still able to write about more or less everything. But the figures who came through in the 1960s were victims of rising specialisation. Academic literature is now Byzantine, vacuous, woodenly professional, technical to a fault, and committed to proclaiming a relevance it cannot possess. Paradoxically, the only two ways for a modern academic to become well known, and still remain intellectual, are 1. to become a simplifying and agreeably soporific figurehead of the new establishment like Brian Cox, David Olusuga or Devi Sridhar: or 2. to be ‘cancelled’ like Bret Weinstein and Kathleen Stock (or, if not exactly cancelled, then certainly to be considered suspect for going off piste, like Nigel Biggar and Jordan Peterson). Most other figures who remain within the pale of respectability are without characteristics. The university is becoming a vast certification system for those who want to rise within a centralised system. Its literatures have been subinfeudated to a fault. The fields are small. No one claims to know anything about another field. Criticism of any other field is forbidden. Everything has to be tolerated and cannot be criticised. One’s academic allies are the guardians of truth. But academic truth has become so miniaturised that a common culture can only be achieved amongst academics if they all subscribe to the same moral and political ideology.
- The university has been subjected to strange new IDEOLOGIES. The university has adopted administrative habits of mind which are alien to scholarship. It has become dominated by liberal platitudes, by ‘diversity, equity, inclusion’ rigmaroles, by ‘decolonisation’ protocols, by ‘pandemic’ tittle-tattle, by ‘climate’ flim-flam and now by the ‘AI’ voodoo. All this is because centralisation requires a focus: and the focus is more stimulating to the grey bureaucratic paymasters if it is something to do with care and crisis on a great scale. The more immediate the crisis the better, for the modern immediate university. So academics, if they want to be successful, sculpt their subjects to make them ‘relevant’ to fashionable concerns. Fatuity is no objection. (In this regard, let me say that after Toby Young drew our attention to his father and Edward Shils’s piece on ‘The Meaning of the Coronation’ from the Sociological Review of 1953, I checked to see what the Sociological Review was up to 70 years later. The first piece I saw had, as its first sentence, “Toilets are political spaces.”) It is hard to get serious thought off the ground. Not only does all work have to be written in the same rigor-mortising English-as-a-second-language style, it also has to be adorned with the same politically correct marginal decorations. In the sciences, it has to proclaim support for the pharmaceutical or climate conspiracies. Religious opinions, unless of a ‘minority’ religion, are out. All academics are on the left: either in a first, neutral, sense in which they more or less adopt the politics of the interventionist state (the state which supports the modern university), or in a second, more political, sense in which they are actively leftist in their politics: making a moral virtue out of the relevance of their study to the deliverance of contemporary humanity, or nature or, indeed, the planet.
- The university has been GLOBALISED. This is not a British problem, or a problem about universities operating in the English language. It is ubiquitous. Universities are still places where good scholarly work can be done, usually interstitially. But much work is dross, morally inflected or politically infected, built on the shallow sands of crisis, or specialised to a fault, or second-rate by design. It all contributes to the collapse of any general intellectual culture within any particular state. The centralisation I mentioned above is doubtless encouraged by the state, but it gestures beyond the state. The problem is on a world scale. Universities, tolerated within every state, are discovering unity in a set of ideological precepts which commit them to the dissolution of the civilisations of their own states, for the sake of a generalised capitalist-corporatist system which is a grand public-private conspiracy of elite nowhereness against somewhereness. This system is feeding centre-left authoritarianism. The centralisation of funding has created a system of capture and criterion control which perpetuates not only a strange abstract and universalising rhetoric but also distorts the minds of the rising scholars who are doing what scholars have always done and copy their immediate predecessors, assuming that they are masters.
That was a short list but worth repeating.
The university has been SECULARISED, INSTRUMENTALISED, CENTRALISED, EXPANDED, its subjects broken into many SPECIALISATIONS, consequently rendered ironically IRRELEVANT, so that its culture can be unified only by IDEOLOGY, and now all this is happening on a GLOBAL scale.
It is very hard to imagine how we can reverse engineer the modern state-ideologised corporate-administrative hyper-specialised unconsciously-leftist university with its mass of state and global functionaries. It would be pleasant to witness the breaking of peer review and the established incentive structures. It would be good if publication was somehow separated from certification. Everyone ought to write less and read more. Honest nepotism would be far preferable to the imposition of gatekeeping protocols. Schools should feed off their own roots. Too many appointments are international. The entire culture has too much transparency flowing through it, courtesy of the world wide web. The inability of the university to say anything critical about COVID-19 was a stunning exhibition of how broken it is.
As long as the university remains as it is, there is nothing to be done but continue to work in our corners. The university is a modern Babel, in which everyone talks about impact, and in which no one has impact, because the system has suffered from unregulated growth and has been retro-regulated by those who do not understand it or operate under the wrong imperatives, and now shape it with their shekels.
I doubt that even most academics would agree with all of this. There are too many internal barriers to seeing the problem clearly. Some good work is still being done. The young are exposed to bits of proper learning alongside the insinuations and incentives of a utilitarian and moralitarian culture. But the system only tolerates independence of mind within certain strict limits. Academics are at the moment not much more than the worker ants and bottom feeders of the global elite.
In the 19th and 20th Centuries the state and society corrupted the university. Now, the university is taking its revenge and corrupting state and society.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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The tide seems to be turning in the Trans debate. Who will be the JK Rowling equivalent in the Net Zero con?
The tide seemed to be turning at the time of the Climategate debate, but that was in 2009, when much of the weather station temperature fraud was exposed and the modelling was discredited. In the event, nothing much changed, because, metaphorically, all the dissidents were rounded up and shot, their images erased from the historical record, and the UK politicians re-affirmed their subservience to the UN. NetZero is now a global multi-trillion dollar industry and means of political control: it won’t die easily. One might start by eliminating the NetZero ideological propaganda in teacher-training colleges and schools[1].
[1] “Why Doncaster might be a coastal resort by 2050”.
Very good comment. Climategate was indeed swept under the carpet and the pseudo scientific fraud continues as the mainstream media led from the front by the BBC brainwash an unsuspecting public who are having the real state of the climate kept away from them for political purposes. There is no tyranny worse than the one that terrorises you for your own good, and that is exactly what climate change politics in a symbiotic relationship with the government funded data adjusters (often referred to as scientists) is doing.
But this time Roy the policy is having to face up to harsh reality. As Ayn Rand said: ‘we can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.’ Well, we’ve been evading realty for a long time and now the consequences are upon us.
Jeremy Clarkson
It’s unachievable if we want to maintain our current lifestyles, but you have to wonder whether that’s part of the plan. There are plenty of countries in the world where the leadership and establishment have for many years pursued their own financial advancement over the advancement of the nations they are supposed to be leading – and this fact is well recognised. Why do we assume that our own leaders would not behave in a similarly despotic fashion?
“but you have to wonder whether that is part of the plan”———–Are you kidding? Ofcourse it is part of the plan. It is called Agenda 2030, previously Agenda 21. According to the UN and WEF the lifestyles of people in the affluent western world are “unsustainable”. In other words our standard of living is TOO HIGH. To their way of thinking it will be impossible for the developing world to achieve the same as us this will use up all of the world’s coal oil and gas. ——-Climate Policies like Net Zero are therefore economic and political policies that seek to redistribute and control the worlds wealth and resources, and for that you need a very plausible excuse. ——That excuse is climate change and the policies like Net Zero that seek to lower living standards, starting with the wealthy west who are deemed to have used up more than our fair share of the coal oil and gas in gaining the prosperity we now have.
Water vapour credits don’t sound so catchy I guess!
Yes the fake greenhouse gases – 90% is water…..shouldn’t water therefore be banned?
Yes, replace it all with dihydrogen monoxide!
That’s hydrogen done with then, all it produces is steam! looks like we’ll be swapping one greenhouse gas for a worse one
How about instead of carbon net zero, government spending net zero. There’s something I could really get behind.
We are all capable of not spending more than we have in our private lives. Why can’t government?
The only Net 0 i agree with is 0 immigration for 5 to 10 years so we can try and find out just how many people we have in the UK. To quote Trump…..”Find out what the hell is going on”!
Fiat currency, and more specifically and recently, low interest rates and quantitative easing.
This also benefits private individuals who are in a position to borrow to invest, i.e in property.
Wind is the most effective source of renewable electricity in the U.K.
Nonsense. The construction of a simple, 65m wind turbine requires 100 tonnes of steel and 260 tonnes of concrete. Huge amounts of energy are required to produce the steel and concrete, not to mention the 7 tonne carbon fibre blades, the copper wiring, rare earth element magnets and light metal components. These substances all require mining, crushing, transport, melting, transport, processing, assembly, further transport and erection. Estimates show that a wind turbine requires 15 to 20 years of operation solely to recover these energy outlays!
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is 0.04% (currently 418ppm, I believe) and it is generally agreed that 97% of the CO2 is of natural origin (mainly tectonics). The UK contribution to global, anthropogenic CO2 is 1% (1.01% in 2019). In other words, if UK were to zero its CO2 output, the global CO2 reduction would be 1% of the 3% of the 0.04%, i.e. 0.000012%, equivalent to removing 1 molecule of CO2 from among 8.3 million other atmospheric molecules.
There will clearly be no noticeable change with such a reduction and it is certainly not worth upending British society and doubtlessly bankrupting the country further to serve such an end.
Also, long-term carbon cycle data going back 600 million years show a wide variation in CO2 levels from as high as 8,000ppm down to current levels, returning to around 3,000ppm during the Jurassic period, followed by a steady decrease in CO2 from 2,500ppm down to 182ppm prior to the current interglacial. This latter value can be considered dangerously low since most terrestrial plant life cannot exist below a concentration of 150ppm. Our combustion of fossil fuels, increasing CO2 concentration to current day levels, is hopefully averting an actual CO2-related climate apocalypse. One must also mention that the warming effect of CO2 is known to logarithmically decline with increase in concentration, and recent research has revealed that CO2 at higher atmospheric altitudes actually has a cooling function.
Finally, we are all individual CO2 generators because we exhale 100 times as much CO2 as we inhale (we inhale 0.04% CO2 and exhale 4% CO2). Anyone who promotes Net Zero needs to realize they must stop breathing!
The point is well made of the relationship between carbon dioxide concentration being kind of logarithmic, but is it not also true that there is an effective limit on account of saturation being achieved? They don’t explain that. In the meantime, there are those who know that increased levels are beneficial to plants, and deliberately ramp it up in greenhouses.
Steel: The tower of a wind turbine is primarily made of steel. On average, a modern onshore wind turbine tower may require approximately 300-400 metric tonnes of steel.
Aluminium: Used in various components, such as the nacelle and hub. The weight of aluminium in an onshore wind turbine can be in the range of 10 to 20 metric tons.
Fibreglass and Composites: The blades of a wind turbine are often made of fiberglass and composite materials. The weight of the blades can vary, but each blade may weigh several tonnes.
Copper: Several tonnes of copper are found in various components, such as the generator, electrical wiring, and other electrical systems.
Concrete or Cement: Emplacements use concrete or cement which can only be manufactured with hydrocarbons. Cement is manufactured through a controlled chemical combination of calcium, silicon, aluminium, iron and other ingredients. High temperatures, kilns and mixing apparatuses are needed.
Rare Earth Minerals: Neodymium and Dysprosium are elements used in the production of permanent magnets for the generators in wind turbines (very limited supplies). The amount of rare earth elements used in a wind turbine depends on the specific design and type of generator but will comprise many kgs of material.
To source 1 kg of neodymium means removing more than 1 tonne of tender Gaia’s skin and underlying bodily structure. Drilling for rare earth minerals generates 2000 tonnes of toxic waste. We don’t have enough rare metals to produce endless arrays of the Bird-Choppers (China is the world’s top supplier).
“To provide most of our power through renewables would take hundreds of times the amount of rare earth metals that we are mining today,” said Thomas Graedel, Clifton R. Musser Professor of Industrial Ecology and professor of geology and geophysics at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
“Wind is the most effective source of renewable electricity in the U.K.
Nonsense.”
Indeed. It’s stretching the definition of “effective”. The wind doesn’t blow all the time. Sometimes we go quite a while without much wind, at least where the bird choppers are installed, so the backup to wind has to be able to produce close to 100% of our requirements for periods of hours or maybe days, so we have to build and maintain a huge amount of redundant capacity. How can that be “effective”?
I think what the article is saying is that of all of the unreliable ineffective renewables there are, that wind is the most effective of those. It is a bit like saying that of all the useless things in the world, some are the best. But I don’t think the author of the article is trying to give praise to wind energy. Quite the opposite.
Thanks varmint, that’s precisely my point.
Yes that’s a fair point
“if UK were to zero its CO2 output, the global CO2 reduction would be 1% of the 3% of the 0.04%, i.e. 0.000012%”
Great comment overall, but I think this calculation is flawed. Since nature is both an emitter and an absorber of CO2, whereas man is just an emitter, we need to compare our emissions with nature’s net emissions. If we are 3% of gross emissions, we must logically be a higher % in terms of net emissions. Some might also argue that nature’s emissions and absorptions may net off over an extended period, such that increases in atmospheric CO2 over that same period would then be substantially all man-made.
Yet there have been times when natural emissions were 10 and even 20 times higher, with no runaway warming taking place. There is no evidence that human emissions of CO2 are causing or will cause dangerous changes to climate. The idea that we will comes from models all full of assumption speculation and guesses. This is NOT science.
Can you show that the increase in CO2 caused by human activity is not absorbed readily by increased plant growth? If not, your point is invalid.
No CGW it’s not nonsense. Read the relevant part of the article (better still all the article) and then varmint’s comment below.
In my opinion, the author of the article makes a very good and detailed analysis of how disastrous Net Zero policies are, but without actually questioning Net Zero itself.
CO2 is not a problem gas, as proven by the huge variation in historic levels, which never caused the oceans to boil or the planet to go up in flames. More CO2 simply means more, and higher quality, vegetation, which is of enormous benefit to all animals living on this planet, including ourselves.
I am simply convinced that not that many years ago, a number of utterly dubious characters needed a culprit they could blame their brainchild ‘Global warming’ or ‘Climate change’ on, something credible which sounded sufficiently scientific but of which the public would be largely ignorant and would therefore not immediately challenge, if at all: they chose CO2 and sold it to our gullible western governments, with the result they (the utterly dubious characters) can promote their propaganda, rake in the millions and control large swathes of the world’s population.
One result is that poor nations remain poor and underdeveloped because our politicians promise them economic support only on the condition that they have ‘Sustainable’ or ‘Renewable’ energy sources. This means they cannot extract the coal, gas or oil under their feet and use it to provide cheap and reliable energy 24/7.
Not having electricity means millions of Africans, for example, do not have refrigerators to preserve food and medicine. Outside of wealthy parts of the big cities, people do not have lights, computers, modern hospitals and schools, air conditioning – or offices, factories and shops to make things and create good jobs.
Not having electricity means disease and death. It means millions die from lung infections, because they have to cook and heat with open fires; from intestinal diseases caused by spoiled food and unsafe drinking water; from malaria, TB, cholera, measles and other diseases that could be prevented or treated with proper medical facilities.
This is why the whole idea of ‘Net zero’ should be abolished.
‘... without actually questioning Net Zero itself.’
If by that you mean without questioning so-called ‘climate science’ I plead guilty. And that’s because the overriding objective must be to demonstrate to the public and to politicians why it’s necessary to abandon the unachievable, disastrous and pointless net zero policy. And that doesn’t require a reference to the science.
Indeed referring to the science would be a serious unforced error – getting you sucked into the ghastly and mind-numbing world of climate change orthodoxy where debate is not allowed and where you’d be dismissed as a ‘climate denier’ and therefore unworthy of serious attention however cogent your arguments. So no, a reference to the science isn’t the way to get the public the politicians to understand why it’s necessary to abandon this absurd and dangerous policy.
‘… the whole idea of ‘Net zero’ should be abolished.’
And so it should. And I believe I’ve spelled out above how that can be done.
I tried to explain to someone the other day, that what we were doing was pointless as net zero for the UK was concerned, by using money as a medium.
e.g. in money 400ppm = £400, of which ~4% (estimated human input) is £16. of which UK share of ~1% = 16p, China @ 27% of £16 = £4.32. China’s expected growth 2024 =4% of £4.32 = 17.28p. Therefore China’s growth alone is greater than our total contribution, a fools errand, urinating to windward..
Agreed, it does look ludicrous – and you’re only looking at the electrical side of it. E.g. the aim of abolishing the use of domestic gas supplies, presumably increasing the need for local electricity instead would make it worse. I know there are plans to move to mixed methane and hydrogen – but the efficiency of creating the latter will have it’s own problems.
In the real world, the firms that manage local distribution don’t look like they intend to ramp up their local distribution networks (DNO). Just a few years ago, one of them did a lot of work in my area, on a like for like cable replacement job. A few related comments towards the end of this: https://youtu.be/LS8VFhRMsYY from around 4 minutes. Look at the cable ratings and imagine what would happen if everyone wanted EV cars and electric heating at home.
ref cable rating. perhaps they are factoring in a ground heating matrix to keep the outside temperature up as the heat pump systems inside the houses don’t work. Just a thought.
I know mixed hydrogen/methane has been mentioned but are there any plans that you could supply a reference/link for please? I recall the shift from coal/town gas to natural gas. Quite a few explosions and fires IIRC. Hydrogen is far more dangerous and difficult to work with. I imagine there’ll be a few disasters with leaking hydrogen if they do it.
https://www.worcester-bosch.co.uk/hydrogen one of the manufacturers of domestic boilers. Apart from the compatibility of the customer end, the production of H as a fuel can be grossly inefficient, especially by electolysis; might as well use the electric power directly, unless it’s a surplus on windy, sunny days, perhaps. I think at present most of the H produced is a side product of other products, like pure oxygen for steel manufacture. The usual suspects have adopted terms like “blue hydrogen” and “green hydrogen”, while saying not much about the fact that H is not a source of energy. There has to be extraction from something else. I’m not advertising, but …. https://www.airproducts.com/energy-transition/clean-hydrogen-production
Many people and many on this website having been saying pretty much the same things that appear in this article for years about the impracticality and uncosted insanity of Net Zero, but this is what happens when ideology trumps common sense and silly governments are spending other people’s money on their phony pretend to save the planet eco socialist garbage, which an unsuspecting public mostly don’t realise has NOTHING to do with the climate.
Workers at the UK’s last coal-fired power plant prepare to say goodbye.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-68912006
Succinct, eloquent and informative. Many thanks Robin.
As Prof Judith Curry said in her excellent address this evening at the GWPF annual lecture in London, she can’t understand the logic of investing in renewable energy which is dependent on ‘weather’ to achieve some mythical free energy utopia. For example one of the worlds largest solar farms in Texas (?) was recently obliterated by a hail storm. If sanity is beginning to return to the NHS surrounding mixed wards and the recognition of two biological sexes (you would think doctors knew that already but apparently they don’t) perhaps common sense will become infectious and politicians will at last realise their dreams of net zero are just pie-in-the-sky, cloud cuckoo land nonsense. There’s always hope.
“There’s always hope”——–The only hope is that it gets slowed down a bit as reality bites. But you have to remember what the purpose of Net Zero is. ——It is NOT about the climate. It is about the worlds wealth and resources. There are now 8 billion people in the world. At global government level (UN, WEF etc) it is deemed we cannot all have the standard of living that the wealthy west has, as there will not be enough fossil fuels in the ground to power all of that. So the idea is for the wealthy west to slow down as quickly as possible their use of fossil fuels first while the developing world catches up. It is Eco Socialism, and the seemingly plausible excuse used is “Climate Change”
The face of Net Zero. ——-A silly old bat
A government’s goal should not be zero carbon emissions, the goal should be a level of emissions such that the cost of reducing them equals the damage that those emissions would cause. The solution, of course, is to implement a carbon tax at the social cost of carbon. In the UK various environmental taxes (fuel duty, Air Passenger Duty, etc.) already exceed this.
Mere details, as a politician would say.
What a brilliant article. One of the best I have read that succinctly covers most of the key aspects of this suicidal, evil agenda.
Of course all well said. Except the bit about “the UK is legally obliged to pursue” net zero. The UK itself cannot be “legally obliged” to do anything,because parliament is sovereign and the law can be changed.
Don’t let the politicians get away with pretending they are “forced” by law to do net zero. They need to be held fully accountable for attacking and undermining our country and our way of life.
Another law might be brought to bear here: treason is still illegal.
No Adam – the UK is indeed legally obliged to pursue the mad policy. Until of course the law is changed by the sovereign parliament. One problem: it’s hard to imagine any likely mix of MPs that would be willing (or even interested in) changing the law. So what will happen when ideology comes face-to-face with reality? The courts cannot make the impossible possible. Could be interesting.
Indeed. But if politicians choose not to change the law, then they must be held accountable for their failure to do that. They cannot evade that responsibility by claiming that a previous parliament made another course of action illegal.
Far from having a responsibility to change the law, MPs have a responsibility to uphold it. It’s failure to do that that could get them into trouble.
In any case it’s pointless.
For two reasons:
Make that three, and the most important: so-called Carbon (CO2) is simply not a problem, just an excuse to control and make money from us.