The insane Net Zero revolution is starting to devour its own children. The latest technology to fall foul of the zealots passionate hatred of all things hydrocarbon is carbon capture, a process that consumes billions of dollars, often fails to meet expectations and, horror of horrors, justifies the continuing activities of oil and gas companies. Green Blob-funded Oil Change International (OCI) has released a report entitled ‘Funding Failure: Carbon capture and fossil hydrogen subsidies exposed’. In an article circulated by Blob-funded Covering Climate Now and published by DeSmog – recently given £400,000 by the Rowntree Trust to continue running a grubby ‘blacklist’ of so-called climate deniers – carbon capture is said to be a “colossal waste” with the United States leading the way in public spending on “false climate solutions”. Perhaps not such good news for the Mad Miliband’s £8 billion GB Energy operation which will act as a state-run subsidy fund for numerous wacky green projects including carbon capture and hydrogen.
The zealots are correct about carbon capture and hydrogen. They both use vast amounts of energy to little effect. But there are few ‘green’ solutions in town to back up intermittent wind and solar power, so to date it is any port in a storm. But capturing carbon dioxide from combusted material or the atmosphere and compressing it to store underground for eternity is crazy. The old saying, ‘fools and their money are easily parted’ springs to mind. As an alternative to natural gas and a solution to electricity grid-scale storage, hydrogen – expensive, dangerous and lacking in kinetic energy – has almost nothing to offer.
Other major disadvantages of hydrogen have recently been discussed. The Daily Sceptic reported on a science paper that noted the higher combustion temperature of hydrogen can produce more polluting nitrogen dioxide. If runaway global ‘heating’ is your fear, the paper calculated that, pound for pound, escaping hydrogen causes 37 times more warming than CO2 since it produces ozone in the troposphere and water vapour in the stratosphere. All the past observational evidence points to the conclusion that the warming properties of gases ‘saturate’ at certain atmospheric levels, but for alarmists it seems that backing hydrogen is an increasingly bad look.
If the figures presented by OCI are correct, the scale of the waste is truly colossal. Since the 1990s an estimated $83 billion has been “invested” in carbon capture, but it has failed to make a dent in carbon emissions. “Carbon capture projects consistently fail, overspend or underperform,” the report claims. Over 80% of projects in the U.S. are said to fail due to technical issues, over-investment and a lack of financial returns. Even if the projects functioned as planned they would only capture 0.1% of emissions.
No doubt OCI is worried about taxpayer money being hosed away on useless projects, although greens usually take a relaxed view of such matters. But the real hatred for capturing CO2 is that it is used to enhance oil and gas production. The gas is sometimes pumped underground to extract the last barrels of oil from an exhausted field. Carbon capture subsidies are said to enhance fossil fuel extraction and boost oil industry profits.
The money wasted to date on carbon capture and hydrogen is appalling, but it is a fraction of the amount of public money made available to spend in the near future. OCI claims that policies announced since 2020 could amount to over $230 billion. The table below shows the range of potential government expenditures with uncertainties due to potential tax credit claims.
One obvious take-away from the table is the ludicrous amounts of money committed by the United Kingdom, a legacy of Buffo Boris and recent Net Zero-obsessed Conservative governments. For hapless British taxpayers, Mad Miliband is just the latest in a long line of politician removing cash from the wallets of working people and putting it in the hands of subsidy hunting, planet-saving spivs where it is thought to most properly belong.
In the U.K., as elsewhere, the Net Zero madness has exploded as a political issue with citizens slowly realising what is being planned. None of this will come as a surprise to regular readers of the Daily Sceptic. We have aimed to report on what the zealots have been writing and planning. Government-funded U.K. FIRES takes a realistic look at a future without hydrocarbons and envisages a 2050 world without meat, personal travel and buildings made of compacted earth. Britain could lose 75% of its energy supply by 2050 and the “whole excitement” of U.K. FIRES’s work has been to recognise that such a shortfall “is close to a certain reality”.
Meanwhile, the green billionaire-funded C40 group, chaired by Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, raises the possibility of heavy reductions of personal transport and the imposition of Second World War-style rations with 44 grams of meat a day. This “pioneering piece of thought leadership” was said to seek a “radical, and rapid, shift in consumption patterns”. Needless to say, none of this stuff gets a mention in mainstream media, but it is always a good idea to discover what the true zealot is actually planning. Few clues as to their plans are available while they are seeking political power, as we saw in the recent British General Election. In the current U.S. Presidential campaign, Vice President Giggles is following a similar path, secure in the knowledge that carefully selected poodle journalists will not ask inconvenient questions.
The OCI report and its coverage via well-funded activist networks gives a valuable insight into the mindset of the true Net Zero zealot. There is no back-up to intermittent wind and solar and medicines, fertilisers and plastics will all disappear in an absolutist Net Zero world. But they don’t care. Their new religion is saving the planet from an invented climate crisis and their work for the new god pays little heed to the colossal damage that will be caused.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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It wouldn’t matter if it relied on viewership to fund itself. It would just die off quite quickly as people stopped watching and listening to their garbage.
The problem is that the state takes money from all of us to produce all the propaganda.
it’s like being forced to fund your enemy.
I don’t pay it, Starmer will just make the TV licence an internet tax. Mark my words.
This has already been done in Germany. The system there is a little different. You don’t need to get license to watch TV but a license is required for owning a device which could be used to watch TV or receive radio transmissions of public broadcasters. Without anyone asking for that, the German public broadcasters all started to offer internet streaming services and hence, turned everyone with a device which could access anything on the internet into a forcibly recruited subscriber.
Yes, like the “Devshirme” tribute of Balkan Christian children demanded by the Ottoman Turks for 300 years, or the “Jizya Tax” demanded of all infidels.
So candidates who are “dismissive or derisory of diversity and inclusion” will be excluded, thus making the BBC less diverse!
Doublethink is strong with these people. Orwell knew what he was talking about.
Candidates should test the BBC on their commitment to equity by demanding the same salary as Gary Lineker.
That wouldn’t be fair – they would be doing ten times more work than the crisp salesman.
The short answer to this question (“explain what …”) is “Nothing”. Both are umbrella terms without any real meaning.
And that’s why you’re not BBC material. Which, in many ways, is not at all insulting. Quite the opposite.
Diversity = Less White People. ——–So you will be employed by the BBC if you approve of that. Do the BBC think that all white people are oppressors, and all black people are oppressed? Do they then believe that these people should receive preferential treatment? ——-Here are a couple of BBC headlines “Inside the mind of White America”—-“Elderly White men block change.”.——The Cultural Marxists at the BBC like to dive us up into different groups (1) Black or White (2) Muslim or Christian (3) Straight or LGBT (4) Oppressors and Oppressed. ——–The name of the game is “Intolerance” in the name of “Tolerance”———The “Dying Breed” white male has to go.
Stopping racism with racism. Keeping people out in the name of inclusion. Making sure everyone looks the same to ensure diversity. Giving people priority to ensure equality. Orwell wouldn’t know whether he should be horrified or proud that he called it.
As diverse intellectually as the Hitler youth leadership.
“explain what diversity and inclusion means to you …..’
So if you say something like – ‘it means no white people, especially no white men, plus the promotion of biologically inaccurate labelling instead of merit or ability for hiring purposes, to meet DEI criteria and ESG scores’ – will that get you the job?
“will that get you the job?”
No. Shortlist possibly.
This is why I call this a viral ideology. Once it infiltrates a company, it completely takes over. We hire people in good faith because we believe they are the best qualified candidates to do the job. And then they turn around and replace all the people around them with their own. And before you know it you’re being kicked out cause you’re no longer adequate. This is happening in organizations and governments across the board. And it is our fault that we allowed such a hateful and hostile ideology to take hold. Now there’s no purging it. The people that should do the purging have already been replaced. They’re now protected by law. I don’t see any way out of this other than convincing a majority of the population to fight back against this, to all demand of their employers to cleanse this virus from their HR departments. But we’re a decade away from that. By the time everyone catches on, it might be too late.
Other observation about diversity: The concept is inherently anti-democratic because it maintains that qualification for public offices and similar posts ought to depend on people’s pedigree.
Well here’s some people who are definitely dismissive of ”diversity”. Or at least in the Clown World context. I can’t believe they got fined 18,000 euros for stating a fact. There should be a law against this, but when the judiciary are epic woketards who act like they’d be better off banged up in a nut house due to being a liability to rational and sane folk then you’ve got no chance.
”Bayer Leverkusen has been fined €18,000 by the German Football Association’s (DFB) sports court after its supporters unfurled a banner that stated there are only two genders — a move deemed to be discriminatory against the LGBT community.
The Bundesliga club was indicted by the DFB for “discriminatory, unsportsmanlike behavior on the part of its supporters” for the incident that occurred during the team’s away match against Werder Bremen on Nov. 25 last year.
A huge banner unrolled by fans displayed the slogan, “There are many styles of music but only two genders.”
The financial penalty was imposed in a ruling by a single judge who ruled that €6,000 of the fine could be used to fund “preventative measures against discrimination.”
The club and the DFB have agreed to the judgment, which is now legally binding.
Julian Reichelt, the former editor of Germany’s largest tabloid Bild, slammed the judgment and claimed the banner “simply states the basic biological fact of our existence.”
“The spirit of our institutions is being eaten away by an ideological virus,” he added.
Conservative commentator Anabel Schunke said the judgment was indicative of Germany entering “peak madhouse.”
https://rmx.news/germany/there-are-only-two-genders-bayer-leverkusen-fined-e18000-for-discriminatory-supporters-banner/
There are actually three genders in German but Germans still have only two sexes (the German term for both gender and sex is Geschlecht, though).
Apart from that: Professional football is notoriously corrupt. And the corresponding institutions have long since been bought by the usual suspects. Hence, that’s not an indication of Germany entering peek mental asylum, it just confirms that the multinational companies sponsoring football via open advertising and hidden direct payments have the power to punish people for making public statements their executives consider disagreeable.
“The BBC is not a welcoming place for those with conservative opinions.”
That is very interesting, because I read somewhere years ago that US medical schools were quietly ensuring that no applicants with “conservative” views would ever be accepted, regardless of their abilities. Only applicants demonstrating left-wing views were allowed to become practicing physicians. I wonder if the same sinister vetting system is being used in UK and other western medical schools.