We hear a lot about how we are supposedly in a climate crisis and how The Science™ tells us we are about to succumb to global boiling. Most climate activists claim that we must cut emissions by spending more money on windmills and solar panels or we will all burn to a crisp.
I would describe myself as a lukewarmer, by which I mean that I acknowledge the earth is warming and that human emissions of CO2 have made some contribution to that warming. However, it is also true that the climate has changed dramatically without human intervention; clearly, there are other causes of climate change too.
The strategy of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases to Net Zero is classified as a “mitigation strategy” in the parlance of the IPCC. The alternative strategy is adaptation which means taking measures to adjust to climate change such as building flood defences, irrigation systems or developing new strains of crops to cope better with changing weather patterns. Most spending effort in the West is geared towards mitigation. But, what if the Net Zero cure is worse than the disease? What if mitigation is less effective than adaptation?
Mitigation Drawbacks
The mitigation strategy has significant drawbacks. First, mitigation only works if CO2 is the main climate control knob. But we know this cannot be the case because we can clearly see that temperatures have changed significantly over past millennia, as illustrated in Figure 1 below sourced from Figure 7.1 of the IPCC’s First Assessment report. These changes cannot have been caused by humans or our CO2 emissions.
Second, mitigation can only work if everyone else slashes emissions too and we can see from Figure 2 (from Our World in Data) that this is not happening.
Moreover, there are plenty of potential climatic events that could occur that we ought to be prepared for, and which will require energy and ingenuity to deal with. For example, we could see another Mount Tambora-like eruption which ejected about 40km2 of material into the atmosphere and caused a reduction in global temperatures. This led to 1816 being termed the Year Without a Summer, where European summer temperatures were the lowest on record and led to an agricultural disaster with widespread food shortages and famine.
Adaptation Success
Adaptation has been a remarkable success. The rate of people dying from natural disasters has plummeted by a factor of more than 50 in the past century as shown in Figure 3 below, sourced from Our World in Data.
This improvement has come despite (more likely because of) the near 20-fold increase in CO2 emissions that we saw in Figure 2.
Cheap energy has led to big improvements in crop yields through mechanisation, irrigation and availability of fertiliser. Cheap energy has enabled flood defences to be built and homes to be more resilient to extreme weather.
Adaptation measures have many benefits. They require no international treaty and they can be applied locally where they produce results quickly. They also work to protect against changes in the climate that are not driven by CO2. Adaptation measures might also have additional benefits such as more efficient water use or more robust crop varieties. There is no reason why we cannot continue to adapt.
Risks of Net Zero
By contrast, the risks of Net Zero mitigation policies are manifest. First and most obvious, they cannot work against climatic changes that are driven by forces other than CO2. Second is the outright cost. In 2020, the National Grid ESO estimated the cost of the energy transition to be around £3 trillion. This is probably an underestimate because the cost of renewables has gone up since then (see AR6) as interest rates have gone up from almost zero to over 5%. To put this in context, U.K. GDP was £2.3 trillion in 2023, so the cost will be at least 1.3 times GDP. For further context, the budget for NHS England was £155bn in 2022-23, so the cost of Net Zero will be around 19 times the NHS budget.
The increased penetration of renewables has led to a massive increase in our electricity bills. This increase comes from renewables subsidies as well as grid balancing costs and the massive costs of expanding the grid out to remote offshore wind farms.
Expensive energy has led to creeping deindustrialisation as we have seen with the closure of Port Talbot and our last fertiliser plant. With geo-political tensions rising the closure of domestic steel, fertiliser and chemical industries means we are less able to defend ourselves and feed the nation in the event of a crisis.
Expensive energy also means we run the risk of missing out on the industries of the future such as AI. For instance, Amazon has recently bought a 960MW datacentre campus that is adjacent to and powered by a nuclear power station. Mark Zuckerberg has said the next generation of datacentres will be 1GW or above and Microsoft is considering building a $100bn datacentre campus that could consume 5GW for OpenAI by 2030. Clearly, AI is very energy hungry and suitable datacentres cannot be run on zephyrs and sunbeams, nor with expensive energy.
Our grid planning authority is planning to reduce total end user demand by about half to 600-800TWh per year by 2050, with just over 300TWh for industrial and commercial use, with the rest being used for heating homes and road and rail transport. However, just 10 of those 1GW datacentres would consume 87.6TWh in a year or about a quarter of the energy budget for the whole of industry and commerce. We are clearly heading towards a world of energy scarcity where we can no longer make the basic building blocks of a modern society, nor will we be able to compete in modern technologies. As Figure 4 below, again from Our World in Data, reminds us, there are no rich countries with low energy consumption.
Impact of Net Zero Policies
Net Zero is driving us to penury. Significant damage has already been done with productive industries shrinking compared to the whole economy since 1997. The trouble is, these industries are far more productive in terms of Gross Value Added (GVA) per hour worked than most service industries, and they consume more energy. This is why Sir Jim Ratcliffe has warned that the “chemicals industry in the U.K. is finished” and the main reason is that energy costs are five times those of the U.S. and there are carbon taxes levied on such products. This explains why we have lost six times as many jobs in energy intensive industries than have been gained in our green energy sector (see Figure 5).
The job losses have not finished either, with Stellantis (owner of Vauxhall) warning that Labour’s plan to ban new petrol cars by 2030 will lead to plant closures.
Of course, Net Zero policies have also pushed up our electricity bills with the myriad of subsidy schemes costing about £11bn each year, with extra grid balancing and extension costs on top. Plus all of the climate doom-mongering is taking a toll on the mental health of children.
Even though this economic destruction is being carried out in the name of the environment, it is far from clear that wind and solar power are environmentally friendly. I showed in this article, using data mostly from the UNECE, that renewables rank poorly overall on a range of sustainability measures including land use and mineral intensity, see Figure 6.
Other studies using US DOE data into the material intensity of wind and solar power have shown a similar result, see Figure 7.
All we get in return for all this effort is expensive, intermittent energy that needs even more minerals to be mined to make the storage required.
Conclusions
It is my belief that the economic, social and national security risks of Net Zero policies are far greater than those posed by climate change.
The risks of climate change can be averted by continuing to adapt, just as we have for millennia. It is certain that unilateral action by the U.K., or indeed multilateral action by much of the West, will do nothing to change the weather while the countries of the developing world continue to increase their consumption of hydrocarbons to make themselves richer. Indeed, even if mitigation measures were adopted globally, it is naïve to believe that bad weather will cease and we will suddenly get the “stable climate” demanded by more than 170 lawyers.
Yet we continue down the path of Net Zero, wreaking havoc on industry, jobs and the environment, pushing up energy bills and damaging the mental health of our children. The Net Zero ‘cure’ is worse than the supposed climate change disease.
David Turver writes the Eigen Values Substack page, where this article first appeared.
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Beautifully written article
Nails all the issue’s that need to be highlighted within the net zero BS!
The OWID ‘Annual CO2 Emissions’ is disingenuous because the title implies that this is all of the CO2 that is emitted into the atmosphere and it’s man made. Natural CO2 ’emissions’ are completely omitted and it is difficult to find this data in any of the plethora of organisations that are funded to publish material on how bad mankind is.
Absolutely. Man adds about 3% of global CO2 levels. Essentially a rounding error.
And it doesn’t show reabsorption. The atmosphere isn’t a ballon being pumped up. CO2 is part of a cycle between plants and atmosphere and oceans and atmosphere.
And carbon is not being crated, it is being recycled. The CO2 being released from fossil fuels, is what was captured and sequestered in earlier times, by plants and ocean.
Focusing on CO2 emissions alone, is like measuring water evaporation but not rainfall. Catastrophe! Soon all the oceans will be in the air…we’ll all drown
I’m sure you also know that when life started to come out of the oceans the atmosphere was somewhere around 25% CO2 with minimal Oxygen and the oceans weren’t boiling or acid, and there was no runaway ‘greenhouse’ effect.
Nice article and the headline is the best summary of this fiasco I have so far seen. Let’s hope it becomes a meme!
The graph of deaths due to natyral disasters is definitely a keeper. What climate catastrophe?
I acknowledge the earth is warming and that human emissions of CO2 have made some contribution to that warming.
There is no evidence for that. CO2 has been much higher in the past, in cooler times. CO2 appears to rise after warming, and reduces after cooling. It increases as life expands, decreases as life dies off.
The cycles of the Sun, and space weather from the Sun, have more influence on climate that we do.
It is generally accepted science that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Using the Stefan-Boltzman Law you can conclude that each doubling leads to about 1.2C of warming. What is less clear is at what point the CO2 absorption frequencies become saturated, and adding more makes no difference. We may well be at that point now.
The argument against Net Zero is more powerful if even acknowledging the impact of CO2, Net Zero is still a bonkers strategy.
If you follow Prof W Happer he clearly states we are around saturation point already. He felt the benefits to plant growth at around 800ppm far outweighed any possible temperature rise. In fact he felt the rise would not even be noticeable.
Or the double loft insulation effect, after a while you will not be trapping more heat.
Yes.
The Earth’s climate system has been warming for about 12 000 years, and during a period of much lower CO2 than now, all of which happened prior to any Human CO2 emissions, so there is NO evidence of anthropological influence, nor a causal effect from CO2.
It will likely continue warming for thousands of more years irrespective of Human activity.
Fact: the rate of warming is so slow, so slight it is too small to be measured directly, so it cannot be recorded and compared to give a rate.
This is why the Climate charlatans concocted ‘The Global Mean Temperature Anomaly’ which manipulates realtime, inaccurate, average temperatures from a relative handful of selected weather stations near heat producing Human activity mostly in North America and Europe, to produce numbers to an absurd, claimed accuracy of tenths and hundredths of a degree which they call they call global ‘temperatures’ and thus the base for global warming.
The truth is nobody knows the rate of global warming – it’s just too small and gradual to see.
So they lie about it.
The main problem though apart from astronomical cost and complete disregard for the fact that the technology like battery storage does not exist, is the fact that this is and never was about the climate. ——-The climate is simply the excuse for the eco socialism, control of the world’s wealth resources and people.
Climate Change Polices like Net Zero and Sustainable Development are anti human and anti capitalist policies designed to put technocrats in charge of the world and everything in it. If there isn’t a climate problem then the whole adventure of taking over the world collapses. So what we get is an endless stream of scaremongering and evidence free drivel that has the air of authority about it, but which is really just “official science”. In other words, the science that Politicians and Bureaucrats have decided is true. It is Post Normal Science where the needs of Political Agenda’s like Net Zero are serviced by speculative un-validated climate models full of assumptions and guesses and the public are repeatedly told that this is “Science”. Time and time again the official science is exposed as junk that an unsuspecting public think must all be true because “All scientists agree”, and who are they therefore to disagree. ——–Whenever you hear in science that everyone agrees then you are being played, and Climate change is the biggest pseudo scientific fraud ever perpetrated.
We must keep banging the drum about what “climate change” is code for.
Great post.
Sit Keir Stasi…..A stark warning from Starkey. He also mentions Agenda21/30 which some call Net 0 for some reason:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=291XBLyHQkE
“I mean that I acknowledge the earth is warming and that human emissions of CO2 have made some contribution to that warming.” I should be grateful if David would show us the evidence he is relying on to support his statement.
Look up the Stefan-Boltzman Law snd how thst can be used to demonstrate that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
The bigger question is at what point the CO2 absorption frequencies become saturated. We may have already passed it.
Doesn’t that simply show what the rate of outgoing radiation would be without CO2 in the atmosphere, compared with increased levels up to the point of saturation?
CO2 does not cause global warming, just like cavity insulation in a house doesn’t cause the house to get warmer, it just cools slower.
The Earth is not a greenhouse, it has no roof. The heat will return to Space. If the roof is taken off a greenhouse, there is no greenhouse effect. CO2 ‘greenhouse effect’ and ‘greenhouse gas’ are the most mendacious terms deliberately used to deceive and pervert science.
Nevertheless, there is no way to show the effect on outgoing radiation specific to Human CO2 emission distinct from and as a proportion of natural CO2 emissions.
Alleged man-made global warming is a massive hoax. My recent debunking of it is here: https://metatron.substack.com/p/debunking-the-climate-change-hoax.
“… human emissions of CO2 have made some contribution to that warming…”
Yes, in the same way that a single drop of my blood would make Loch Ness slightly less green-brown-blue.
The idea of Net Zero is for the birds. One of the risks of it that is not mentioned is the likely built in risk of appeasement to undesirable organisations so as to maintain supplies, either of physical energy, such as electric power, or access to data storage.
However, the concept of using more renewable power being generated locally has been around for longer than the concept of NZ, and it can reduce some risks, like external supplies being cut off, or import prices being jacked up.
Wednesday morning Observer Way & Eversley Rd
Arborfield Wokingham
The disease is misanthropic, psychopathic, neo-Pagan worship of all things non-Human with a vast following of grifters, fraudsters and charlatans.
Agree with all of this but … and I hate to be a pedant. However, if we are going to win people over we need to get the facts right. The graphs showing historic temperatures don’t match. The one showing the last thousand years should follow the same form as the one for 10 thousand years over the most recent thousand years: they don’t. Climate zealots will tear you apart for presenting “rubbish” (implies made up) data to prove your point, thereby trashing your whole case (however unreasonably). Sorry, but there is no margin for error in dealing with these people.