When more than 10,000 signatures are received on a petition on the Government’s petition website, the Government automatically replies. When that petition reaches 100,000 signatures, it triggers a debate in Parliament. A recent response from the Government to a petition calling for the repeal of the Climate Act 2008 and the Net Zero targets reveals the bankruptcy of Westminster’s favourite policy agenda. But sceptics need to step it up a couple of gears if they want to expose the green agenda for what it is, and to topple green policy madness.
The petition rightly argued that allowing only “one side only of a two-sided scientific debate is not an acceptable basis for significant legislation that could have major impacts on the U.K.’s economy and citizens”. The Government’s reply is a boilerplate reassertion of green political dogma of the kind that got us to where we are. The problem with this response, however, is that unpacking and fisking such concatenations of ideological presuppositions, appeals to authority (“the Science”) and hopelessly vague claims is hard work, and invariably produces 10 words for each of theirs. Challenging the notion that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represents the work of “thousands of the world’s top climate scientists”, for instance, requires hundreds of words of rebuttal because the IPCC is a complex organisation and its work is a complex process, which is routinely misunderstood, but always presented as a ‘consensus’. In fact, it as often as not shows the opposite: a lack of agreement between scientists.
For those who prefer a longer-form debunking, I have attempted to address the Government’s reply on my Substack. Here I reproduce a handful of those rebuttals. I don’t say this merely to drive more traffic and subs – welcome though those would be – but to anticipate some green wag telling me that I’ve forgotten some key point, to devastating effect. That is how they roll. I haven’t forgotten… All of us, except climate trolls, have limited bandwidth.
If there is a theme to the Government’s reply, it is that, contrary to the petitioners’ claim, the IPCC and other scientific institutions and state agencies have settled any debate about climate change and its consequences. This is epitomised in the statement that “the Government’s policy to support ambitious action on climate change reflects the mainstream scientific consensus, and delaying action will only put future generations at risk”.
The main mistake here is that “future generations” are not an object of the “scientific consensus”. Science has nothing to say about “future generations” because (proper) science does not deal with things that do not exist, and things which are not material objects as such, such as society. If human society is a thing that can be understood as an object, then the problem for the green argument is that no metric of human welfare shows any sensitivity to climate change in the era of global warming, despite 2023 being the “warmest year on record” at “1.46°C above the pre-industrial baseline”. Put simply, far from making life more precarious, the industrial revolution, powered by the combustion of fossil fuels, has vastly increased human welfare, not least by reducing the life-threatening risks we’re exposed to. This diminishing of risks is quantifiable: reductions in infant mortality, increases in wealth and longevity, and a significant reduction in loss of life due to extreme weather and exposure to the elements.
Some climate researchers, who are categorically not on the climate sceptic side, such as Bjørn Lomborg and Ted Nordhaus, have tried to understand what the future will look like, given certain assumptions about economic, technological and social development, and under different future emissions and policy scenarios. Their simple argument is that if the past is prologue and society continues to enjoy economic growth, then human welfare will increase. The extent to which climate change is likely to limit this welfare can be estimated, and subtracted from the total. According to this analysis, a world which continues to power economic growth by using fossil fuels until the end of this century will be many times wealthier than today’s world – perhaps by 1,000% – but climate change in the form of nearly 4.86°C of warming will negate 5.7% of that growth. Similarly, a policy agenda in which growth is (we can hope) powered by a more ‘sustainable’ form of energy and resource use grows by a more modest 500% or so, will cause only 3.24°C of warming, and negate just 2.5% of that growth. In other words, policy has a far more devastating effect on the welfare of future generations than climate change can or will.
With or without climate change, future generations are going to be vastly better off than we are, according to this analysis. They will be healthier, wealthier and safer. So, governments and scientists who claim to speak on their behalf, to put policies in place to protect them, at our expense, must, at the very least, face public scrutiny and answer this criticism. It doesn’t come from ‘deniers’. It doesn’t take issue with global warming or climate change ‘science’. It isn’t funded by oil and gas companies. The Government is wrong: there is a debate.
The Government’s reply goes on to boast about the success of climate and energy policy: “The U.K. is the first major economy to halve its emissions – having cut them by around 53% between 1990 and 2023, while also growing its economy by around 80%.” But these figures are dodgy.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) records three metrics for emissions data. If we count our emissions based on what we consume, then U.K. emissions have fallen by just a third, and not since 1990, but since 2007. (See the top line in the graph below.)
Second, though it’s true that U.K. GDP has grown by 80% since 1990, the population has increased, and U.K. GDP per capita shows far more modest growth.
2007 is significant because it was the year before the financial crash and the year before the passing of the U.K.’s Climate Change Act. The reductions in emissions, therefore, beyond merely demolishing reliable forms of power generation, may well reflect little more than rising prices and economic stagnation. The climate policy agenda, far from creating a ‘green industrial revolution’, powering ‘green economic growth’ and ‘green jobs’ may have in fact prevented a recovery from the 2008 financial crash. On this claim from the Government, too, there is clearly a need for debate.
Third, the Government claims that it “understands the importance of affordable energy bills for households and businesses and is focussed on delivering for energy consumers”. It adds that it is “taking a comprehensive approach to bring down future bills”, which “includes reforming retail markets to be more effective for consumers through the Review of Electricity Market Arrangements (REMA) Programme” and “investing across the energy system and supporting the progress of new technologies”. But these claims are false.
Power prices in the U.K. are not expensive merely because of the shortcoming of the design of market regulations. Power prices are high because the Renewables Obligation and the successor Contracts for Difference subsidy schemes pumped (and continue to pump) vast amounts of cash from the consumer to green generators, and because emissions-reduction mandates closed existing and much cheaper forms of generation. Moreover, in terms of energy delivered, electricity is the smallest market compared to gas for heat and transport fuels. The “electrification of everything” required by Net Zero will thus increase the cost of heating homes and transport. And successive U.K. governments, with their European counterparts, have restricted exploitation of conventional energy resources and fracking, increasing dependence on imports, and thereby pushed prices up.
“Affordable energy bills” are manifestly not a priority for the Government because such concerns have been put second to the climate agenda. The green agenda requires the creation of scarcity, necessarily, and for consumption to be prohibited by price. That is the point of the smart meter rollout, which the Government claims will produce a “smarter energy system”, and that such “energy efficiency” will “reduce costs for all consumers”. That is false. “Energy efficiency” is not equivalent to lower cost. Efficiency with respect to use of a resource may mean that you use less of that resource. But if the capital cost of obtaining that resource per unit of energy is higher – as is manifestly the case with renewables – then the costs of using that resource will rise. The Government conflates ‘efficiency’ and ‘cost’ because there has been no debate about costs in Parliament to confront such mythology, and MPs and ministers have been resistant to people making such observations, who have been denigrated as ‘deniers’.
The Government and MPs, all political parties, and the agencies on which they depend, need to be told that there is a debate. They are not going to work it out for themselves without significant pressure.
Petitions work. The Welsh Government’s blanket speed limit has been rolled back thanks to 441,288 Welsh signatures – nearly 20% of the electorate – on a petition that demanded it “rescind and remove the disastrous 20mph law”. But not all petitions attract so many signatures. At the time of writing this, just 11,801 people have signed the Net Zero petition. Yet Net Zero will mean an effective 0mph ban on roads throughout the country for millions of people, who will be confined to homes they cannot afford to heat, even if they have a job, and even if their smart meter hasn’t disconnected them.
It is up to critics of the climate agenda – sceptics – to close that gap, and to put the case to the wider population. And there has never been, since the Climate Change Act became law in 2008, such an opportunity. The democratic torpor is lifting. In both houses of Parliament, a small number of peers and MPs, including former ministers, have begun challenging the Government on Net Zero costs. And ahead of a looming Labour Government, even unions are starting to find their voice. But it is not enough and not fast enough to stop the Net Zero agenda before it causes more harm. Sceptics should embrace the few remaining instruments of democracy left at our disposal. Meet your MPs at their surgeries. Send them letters. Sign petitions. And organise and support challenges to them when they fail to represent your views.
You can sign the Net Zero petition here.
Subscribe to Ben Pile’s The Net Zero Scandal Substack here.
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