As our leaders bicker over how fast Britain should get to Net Zero, you’ll hear politicians, eco-zealots and media pundits claiming that Britain is leading the world in reducing our country’s CO2 emissions. This is one of the few statements about climate made by our ruling elites which does actually appear to be true. Since 1990, Britain’s CO2 emissions have almost halved from 604 million metric tons to just under 350 million tons by 2022. That equates to a drop from 10 metric tons per capita in 1990 to below five tons per capita:
While celebrating this great supposed ‘success’, our politicians, media and eco-activists often seem less keen to explain how this reduction in CO2 emissions was achieved.
Here’s another chart. It shows the share of the U.K.’s GDP made up by manufacturing:
Since 1990, the year U.K. CO2 emissions started falling, the percentage of U.K. GDP from manufacturing has also halved from just over 16% to around 8%.
Moreover, during the same period, the number of people employed in U.K. manufacturing has dropped from 4,963,000 to just 2,601,000. A cynic mighty be tempted to wonder what happened to all those hundreds of thousands of highly-skilled, highly-paid green jobs that our rulers promised us would be created in Britain by the energy transition away from fossil fuels to renewables.
For years the U.K. has had some of the world’s highest energy prices due to our replacement of cheap, reliable fossil fuels with expensive, unreliable and intermittent supposed ‘renewables’. In 2022, in the U.K., which gets only 42% of its electricity from fossil fuels, household energy cost $0.41/kWh. In France, where 70% of its electricity comes from cheap, reliable nuclear, electricity costs were just $0.21/kWh – almost half the U.K. price. In the U.S., which generates about 60% of its energy from fossil fuels, the price was $0.18/kWh – less than half the U.K.’s cost. In China, where 55% of electricity comes from coal and a total of 83% comes from fossil fuels, household electricity costs are only $0.08/kWh – a quarter of the U.K.’s cost. There is a similar picture in India, where over 75% of electricity generation is from fossil fuels, of which three quarters comes from cheap, energy-rich coal, household energy costs only $0.07/kWh – a sixth of the U.K. cost.
So, just to put all of this into context, we can look at how much of the U.K.’s GDP comes from manufacturing – making real things that people in Britain and abroad want to buy – compared to our major competitors. In 2022, 8% of the U.K.’s GDP came from manufacturing compared to 9% for France, 12% for the U.S.A., 13% for India, 14% for Italy, 18% for Germany and a massive 28% for China.
A picture is emerging which suggests that the more a country relies on renewables for its electricity, the higher are its energy costs and the lower is the percentage of its GDP made up by manufacturing.
Economist Richard Salsman wrote: “The science of economics is clear: the production of money and debt is not equivalent to the production of real wealth. To claim otherwise is to follow fantasy, not reality – or science.”
As we in Britain enthusiastically print money and increase national debt in pursuit of our Net Zero goals, we seem to be wrecking U.K. manufacturing with high energy prices thus committing economic suicide as U.K. manufacturing moves to countries with lower energy costs. It’s more than astonishing that not a single one of our politicians and media supposed ‘experts’ seem to understand or are willing to admit what is actually happening and how the U.K. is committing an extraordinary act of self-mutilation by cutting the country’s CO2 emissions.
If there really was a climate crisis, the U.K.’s economic suicide to supposedly save the planet might be justified. But as I try to explain in my most recent book There is No Climate Crisis, there is no emergency that warrants such extreme actions. Yes, the Earth has probably warmed up a little since the freezing 1960s and 1970s when many experts were panicking about global cooling and the advent of a new ice age, which experts predicted would cause crop failures, mass starvation, the migration of millions from the cooling North towards warmer countries and wars over scarce food supplies. But this warming is just part of a natural cycle of warming and cooling driven mainly by the Earth’s rotation, solar activity and cloud cover. Moreover, the ice caps aren’t melting, in spite of the Guardian and the New York Times regularly predicting their demise. The polar bears are doing fine. In fact there may be so many of them that they may have difficulty finding sufficient food. The Great Barrier Reef has record levels of coral. Around five times as much U.S. forest burned each year in the scorching hot 1920s and 1930s as is burnt now. Even the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) admits that there has been no acceleration in sea level rise for the last 100 years. And the number of people killed by extreme weather events has fallen by over 95% in the last 120 or so years in spite of the world’s population quadrupling from under two billion in 1900 to almost eight billion now.
It’s a pity that those dragging us towards their Net Zero nirvana aren’t a bit more forthcoming about the economic devastation that their deluded policies are inflicting upon us.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
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“If there really was a climate crisis, the U.K.’s economic suicide to supposedly save the planet might be justified”
No it wouldn’t, because we haven’t really reduced our carbon emissions, just exported them to other countries and then re-imported whatever product they have made. So it wouldn’t make any difference either way.
It would make a bit of a difference, as it must have consumed some heavy fuel oil for the ships! The results could be negative, if honest sums were done.
Well yes that did occur to me, would be interesting to know how negative it was if so, but fat chance of anything like that being admitted.
The point is that the UK wants all the other countries to follow our example and the idiots promoting this still believe that we can have all the products by using renewable energy. We therefore have to do more to encourage the others. It is economic suicide.
We became prosperous by using fossil fuels which are a finite resource. It has been decided at UN level that we and other western prosperous countries have used up more than our fair share of these fuels and we are to de-fossilize. We are to fob our citizens off with inferior more expensive technologies and the excuse for that is “climate change”. —-It sounds like a plausible excuse and most people who get their news on the TV at 6 pm on climate activist channels like BBC and SKY will probably think we really do have to save the planet and there actually is a “climate crisis”. —-But there isn’t. There is no science that supports that idea. Which only shows that the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it if it is repeated often enough, and climate change lies are repeated on a daily basis as if they were all ultimate truth. ——Most of these ordinary people busy with work and family life though will never think to themselves “who funds all of this settled science”? The answer is that government with an agenda funds it all. Then if they say to themselves “But If don’t believe a word my government tells me on other issues why I do I believe them on the issue of climate”, they might actually emerge from their slumber. A slumber that is going to cost them that prosperity they thought they had and all of their freedoms.
https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/european-green-deal_en
A European Green Deal
Striving to be the first climate-neutral continent….
Worryingly they left out the bit about how they will achieve this by wrecking the lives of and killing millions…..
Unilateral Economic Disarmament.
The Big Lie: Fossil Fuels. Rocks don’t create energy. HC energy is abiotic self regenerating, natural, not toxic and plentiful. As the article states destroying HC energy platforms means de-industrialisation and massive energy costs. A cynic might suggest it is all part of a plan and not a ‘cockup’. No HC, no modern world for the peasants.
And this fall is despite the proliferation of power consuming equipment that has infiltrated into every day life. In 1990, despite working in science and technology, we didn’t have computers on every desk. Classrooms only had an overhead projector which was only used occasionally. No powered classroom boards, mobile phones, phone towers etc etc. Now, just about every area of human endeavour requires some sort of power consuming gadget. I assume the massive per capita decrease is therefore due to loss of manufacturing capacity, rather than individual use. Another nail in the coffin of the UK.
The cost per unit of electricity is now so high that the couple of units a day used by a freezer, adding £15 per month to the bill, means it is not economically viable to keep frozen food any more, so I turned the freezer off.
The UK is committing slow economic suicide, and I am really hacked off with the stupidity of the governing class.
Bits of dead animal are considerably cheaper when bough in large quantities – In my case certainly enough to cover 15 quid a month
It’s also difficult to buy them in sufficiently small quantities for pure on-demand consumption and the time needed to buy stuff isn’t free, either.
Time is something that I can always find for a decent cut of meat.
I was trying to point out another reason why the original calculation is wrong: Buying stuff takes time. And time isn’t free.
It takes less time that hunting and butchering it myself – but everything is relative, isn’t it?
Yes I find this very interesting: most homes now have multiple electrical devices – tellies in every room, Alexas, smart meters, enormous American style fridges, numerous mobile phones, everything done online etc etc. Perhaps many things have become more efficient in their electricity usage as well? If climate change was really a crisis, and the National Grid struggling, why are we still be being encouraged to electrify things that work perfectly well without?
They are not “stupid”. They are complicit in the lowering of your living standard for political purposes called “Sustainable Development”
The governing class don’t work for us though. They work for the One World Government people at the UN and WEF.
And at 425ppm it’s worth noting that we live in one of the lowest periods of CO2 in the Earth’s history, with the UK’s anthropogenic portion of that a massive 0.00001%.
But this was never about CO2 or the environment. This either a greenwash covered looting spree by our new global aristocracy or a fully funded and quietly agreed Chinese take over of the West. Jeremy Hunt’s wife would know…
CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas that may cause a little bit of warming. I don’t want to get into that argument right here as it misses the point. But CO2 is also something else. It is the one gas that can be directly tied to Industrial Capitalism, and that is what climate change is. A tool of the progressive left to end capitalism and replace it with global communism.————Arguing about science all day is pointless. It isn’t about science and never was.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-bojo-academy-the-headmaster-needs-to-lie-down-in-a-darkened-room/
A comical look at Fishy’s interpretation of net zero.
What in God’s earth made anyone think that politicians and state bureaucrats would have any clue about how to create businesses and jobs? Central planning is a disaster. It’s been proven over and over and over.
Jobs are created by businesses and entrepreneurs. At least productive ones are. The jobs the state creates are almost without exception unproductive and only sustained by funds confiscated from productive people.
What in God’s earth made anyone think that politicians and state bureaucrats would have any clue about how to create businesses and jobs? Central planning is a disaster. It’s been proven over and over and over.
Actually, the opposite has been proven: A carefully managed economy can achieve anything the managers want. That’s how the German empire managed to hold out on its own while having to engage in warfare all over Europe and the Middle-East against pretty much all of the remaining world from 1914 to 1918. The war really only came to an end[*] when a bolshevist coup in Germany cut the supply lines of the army.
[*] It could have ended a lot earlier if anybody except the Germans had been willing to enter into peace negotiations at any time since about 1915.
I’m glad the best example of central planning you can give me is Germany from 1914-1918.
Terrible goals, brutal execution, horrific outcome.
I think it’s probably best when you don’t try to lecture me on history based on what you believe about the German past. Eg, despite the illegal English sea blockade, it’s estimated that only about 700,000 people starved to death in Germany between winter 1914 and June 1919 when the blockade was finally lifted. Out of the kindness of their generous hearts, the British continued to starve German civilians for another eight months after hostilities had formally ended in November 1918.
Arguing a point isn’t lecturing.
I thought we were against trying to silence others?
Label-dropping isn’t argueing and the particular labels you dropped strongly suggest that you don’t really know what you’re referring to yourself. But please feel free to prove me wrong by adding some content in place of them.
I’m not sure how WWI can be presented as a triumph of central planners.
It was started by them, executed by them and it resulted in the death and misery of millions. It is perhaps one of the best examples of the worst possible allocation of resources in the history of humanity, blockade or no blockade.
It would be impossible to compare how efficiently resources would be have been allocated during the war under a free market system because the free market would never produce that outcome in the first.place. The decision to dedicate enormous reaources to the destruction of millions of human lives could only be reached by central planners.
In other words: You really don’t have a clue.
You’re original claim was that central planning would naturally always lead to economic disaster. This is demonstrably not the case: Central planning of the German economy enabled the German empire to defend itself(!) against a world of enemies with access to all of the resources of the world in dire circumstances for four years and this defence really only ended because of a communist coup in Germany. This means your general claim is disproven as a single counter-example exists.
The decision to turn a local conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia into a general European conflagration was jointly made by Russia and France with English backing. Up to this time, all of Europe had been a commercially heavily interconnected set of free market economies and it was widely believed that any European war would have to be short because of this because the European economies couldn’t function without the free exchange of goods and capital.
Economic planning was an emergency measure introduced in Germany starting with 1915 because it was the only available option when it became clear that the war would instead draw out for years. Pretty much since 1915, the ‘central planners’ you’re accusing of being the only one who could possibly dedicate enormous reaources to the destruction of millions of human lives tried to end the war with a series of repeated offers to enter peace negotiations. But the enormous amount of resources the ‘free’ market in the USA put into ammunitions production because there was such an enormous amount of money to be made here wouldn’t suffer that: For as long as all of the combatants were still standing, continuing the fight was much more profitable than ending it.
“But the enormous amount of resources the ‘free’ market in the USA put into ammunitions production because there was such an enormous amount of money to be made here wouldn’t suffer that: For as long as all of the combatants were still standing, continuing the fight was much more profitable than ending it.”
Same thing happening currently in Ukraine
The German army was well beaten by Haig and his (and Churchill’s) tanks at Amiens before shouting, as the French army did at Waterloo, ‘Nous sommes trahis! Sauve qui peut!’
ROTFLMAO.
We already had that one in the past: The 8th of August 1918 saw another surprise tank attack against very much improvised German lines in a tactically bad position and manned by the exhausted and very much depleted troops which had been fighting through all of the German offensives since March 1918. The front-lines were overrun and the German command threw reserves hastily into the battle as they arrived but the allied advance was ultimatively halted without achieving anything but local sucesses of no immediate strategic significance.
The indirect effect was that the OHL had to commit the reserves it had still hoped to use for a final, decisive offensive in Flanders (Hagen) to stabilizing the front in France and that Ludendorff concluded that forcing a military decision in its favour was now well beyond the German powers and that a negotiated peace had to be sought instead.
‘As usual’, the Entente powers didn’t want to end the senseless mass slaughter and continued to seek a decisive victory on the battle field. The German army – despite its immense inferiority in both material and numbers – continued a fighting retreat which was ultimatively ended by the Communist uprising in Germany when it had reached the Maas.
A cynic mighty be tempted to wonder what happened to all those hundreds of thousands of highly-skilled, highly-paid green jobs that our rulers promised us would be created in Britain by the energy transition away from fossil fuels to renewables.
RighThink™ consultants where non-existent in the UK (or anywhere else) before this experiment was started. Transvestites also wouldn’t be paid to perform for elementary school children. The whole Pride!-industry didn’t exist yet. Etc. That’s perhaps not the kind of jobs people envisionend when the heard the slogan for the first time. But certainly the kind of jobs the people who came up with it wanted to create.
The Green jobs are mainly picking up dead birds and bats slaughtered by turbines. I am not sure what the rate of pay is. ——-Notice though that everytime you point out to silly green activists that what we do here in the UK will make no difference to climate (and even Tony Blair whose government gave us the climate change act has said so) they then quickly shift the argument away from climate to jobs and energy security. But wait a second, wasn’t it supposed to be about the climate?
Are the media and politicians conspiring to divert attention to a single sycamore in order to divert our attention from the policy of chopping down trees in Virginia to burn in North Yorkshire in order to achieve NetZero, to destroy the resilience of the National Grid and to assist economic suicide ? I have never seen such an outpouring of affected grief and calls to bring back the birch since the publication of (allegedly fake) video of hippies crying over a dead tree.
And yet….and yet….
‘The ONS’ revisions to UK GDP didn’t end in 2021. It has also revised economic growth in the first quarter of this year from 0.1 per cent growth to 0.3 per cent growth. This is very significant, given that this time last year the Bank of England was predicting that the UK would spend all of this year in recession and others such as the IMF forecast that the UK would be the worst-performing of any major economy this year’
Ross Clark, The Spectator
If the government would only just get out of the way (particularly by dropping nut zero) this country could once more attain unequalled prosperity, if only due to the even more overwhelming imbecility of our major competitors (and the IMF, OECD, EU).
The problem is that our politicians are in awe of the banking and finance industry,it’s London based, full of people like them, and it’s a nice clean industry where no one actually has to get their hands dirty. It is also well to remember that politicians when they move on will look to these businesses to provide their ongoing paycheques.
Industry and farming won’t do that, plus its dirty work, you need to actually do work
and they would have to move outside of London.
so no surprise they don’t support industry, they don’t understand it,and ultimately it serves no purpose for their personal ambitions
They are also massively in hock to them.
It is true I have family who used to live in this country for decades and now when they come to visit they say they can’t bear to be here more than a week. It isn’t just the poverty and austerity and shabbiness it it an irrationality which suggests a complete loss of self-confidence and that is always unattractive. You can’t carry on like that. Don’t get me wrong I like money as much as the next man but you can just ignore everyting else in the pursuit of more shekels.Eventually and pretty quickly you lose everything including the shekels.
Can’t you just take stock and stop applyjng the money worship for two minutes. Honestly your children have nothing to look forward to. Baby boomers are coming into their dotage. Do you really want to be the most despised generation in human history? Can you imagine what that is going to do to an already underpaid care worker? Please just for a week give up on money worship I say this for your health. I will always be alright but I can tell you homestly that you won’t be if you carry on like this.
Nah, I think Germany´s leading the world on that one.
It is the western world and there isn’t any stopping it. At least in Britain we have a working class that can easily be pushed to our side with a bit of propaganda and that is already happening. I don’t like that we are a nation of retards but it can be useful sometimes. Certainly very easy to manipulate .
Just another transfer of wealth like pandemics & wars. The central bankers don’t believe the climate is changing, they just focus on the money. Which is why they’ve been able to pull this off across centuries – because we, the great unwashed (no-one can afford to heat the water) remain unfocused, arguing about Brexit, gender, left and right, race and Russel Brand. Divide and rule. Their Achilles heel is money (aka power). Our way out is to leave their debt system and trade with anything else – from crypto, to local currencies, precious metals or tobacco. Anything other than fiat. We cut them off, everything bad (child trafficking etc) dies with them.
Isn’t the only hope that for the planet that industrial civilisations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about? ———–Maurice Strong. —–Politicians of all major parties in this country are taking their “responsibility” very seriously and are determined to bring about this collapse. Ah, but all for our “children and grandchildren” ofcourse.
I wrote to our soon to be outgoing MP Nicola Richards and enquired whether she’d voted to impoverish her constituents through the net zero hoax and………..crickets…..