Net Zero. It sounded a noble objective. As Chris Skidmore, the Government Minister who introduced the bill to the House of Commons in 2019, observed, it would mean Britain becoming the first major economy in the world to make a legally binding commitment to eliminate greenhouse emissions. But what did it really mean, what was it going to cost, and did any of the MPs who had just nodded it through actually understand the implications?
The Government’s case was based around a claim made some months earlier by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) – which advises the Government on climate policy – that achieving net zero emissions by 2050 would cost between 1-2% of GDP per annum by 2050 – roughly equating to an eventual bill of £1 trillion by that date. But this, said the Minister, was before you took into account the many benefits, such as increased air quality and what he called “green-collar jobs”. Moreover, he implied that falling costs would reduce the bill further. Forget the bill, in other words; it will be a modest fee given what we will gain.
Not one MP pointed out the folly: how can you possibly estimate the cost of doing something when you have no idea how it can be done? By 2019, Britain was well on its way to phasing out coal power and generating around 15% of its electricity from wind farms and solar farms. A small proportion of electric cars were already on the road. But fossil fuel-free aviation? Decarbonisation of the steel and cement industries? Satisfying an enormous hike in demand for power as cars and domestic heating were switched from oil and gas to electricity? Energy storage to cope with the intermittent nature of wind and solar energy? These were among the many technological problems with which the country had hardly begun to grapple. While in some cases solutions might exist in theory or have been demonstrated on a laboratory-scale, no one knew whether they could successfully be scaled up and at what cost. As John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy, was later to say, half the technology which will be required to achieve Net Zero has yet to be invented. The U.K. Parliament, however, had just approved a law obligating the country to Net Zero with no idea of how, when or whether that technology would be developed – and not the faintest idea of what it would really cost.
When National Grid ESO – the company which runs the electricity grid in Britain – attempted to calculate its own estimate of the cost of reaching Net Zero by 2050 it came up with an answer dramatically different to that of the CCC. In 2020 it presented four different scenarios of how Britain might attempt the transition, involving different blends of renewable energy, changes in consumer behaviour and so on. Its estimated costings in each case came out at around £160 billion a year of investment, eventually reaching a total of around £3 trillion. That was three times the figure which the CCC had touted just a year earlier – and National Grid was only trying to price up the decarbonisation of the energy sector, not agriculture and difficult-to-decarbonise sectors such as steel and cement. To MPs who had treated the CCC’s figure as gospel, and nodded through the 2050 target, it was a sharp reminder that they had committed the country to an open-ended bill, the eventual size of which no one could reasonably guess – other than to say it was going to be huge. Those MPs knew full well the Government’s lousy record on estimating costs of things we do know how to do – such as building a high-speed railway in the shape of HS2 from London to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, whose estimated costs nearly trebled from £37.5 billion in 2009 to £107 billion in 2019. Yet they had swallowed whole an attempt to put a price on doing something which had vastly more unknowns and which involved technologies yet to be invented or proved on a commercial scale.
It took two years for the Government itself to come up with some kind of plan of how it would reach Net Zero. Britain could do it “without so much as a hair shirt in sight”, wrote Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the foreword to his Net Zero Strategy, published in October 2021. “No one will be required to rip out their existing boiler or scrap their current car.” By 2035, the document went on to say, the U.K. would be powered entirely by clean electricity “subject to security of supply”. To this end it was going to invest in floating wind farms and, by 2024, make a decision as to how to fund a large nuclear plant (yes, just one, and it was only the decision that would be made by 2024; it would take another decade or so to build). There would be investment in hydrogen, so that hopefully by 2035 we might have a public hydrogen supply to replace the gas supply (although a decision on whether to pursue this was delayed until 2026). Also by 2035, the price of electric heat pumps might have come down – might – to make them a practical replacement for new gas boilers which would by then be banned. New petrol and diesel cars would be banned from 2030, hybrids from 2035. There would be £750 million of investment to plant new woodlands and restore peat bogs.
But the Net Zero Strategy left more questions unanswered than it answered. How are we to establish security of electricity supply if we come to rely even more on intermittent renewables? How is one nuclear power station going to solve our problems when it – along with the one currently under construction at Hinkley in Somerset – won’t even replace Britain’s seven existing nuclear power stations, all of which are due to reach the end of their working lives by 2035? Does the Government really have confidence that it will turn out to be economical to produce hydrogen by zero-carbon means – as opposed to manufacturing it from coal and gas, as almost all the world’s hydrogen is currently produced? You can order us all to buy electric cars, but how are you going to make sure that the cars are themselves zero carbon, given that a hefty proportion of a vehicle’s lifetime’s emissions are tied up in its manufacture? If we are going to cover the countryside with woodland, where does that leave food production? Are we going to be even more reliant on importing it from overseas, with the consequence that our food might end up with a higher carbon footprint than now?
On top of that was left dangling the biggest question of all: what is it all going to cost us, and who is going to end up paying the bill? On the same day that the Net Zero Strategy was published, the Treasury produced its own assessment of the costs of Net Zero. Did the Treasury agree with the Climate Change Committee’s assessment that it would cost no more than £1 trillion, or National Grid’s estimate of £3 trillion for the energy sector alone? It couldn’t say. It offered no estimate of the cost of Net Zero; arguing, rather, that it wasn’t possible to make such an estimate at this stage. As for who will pay, that was at least becoming clear. We were all going to be paying, either through our taxes or through supplements on our energy bills.
Britain, in short, is to embark on an experiment unique in human history, in which it voluntarily rejects whole areas of established technology which currently make society and the economy function, and tries to replace them with novel technologies, some of which do not currently exist and others of which may exist on a demonstration level but have not yet been scaled up. And the whole project has to be completed in just 27 years, no allowances, no wriggle room. It will be an industrial revolution to put all previous periods of human progress in the shade – if it can be achieved. But there is a very, very big and expensive ‘if’ there. It is generally good to be ambitious and optimistic. There is a point, however, at which it becomes foolishness.
Is there even a Plan B in case technology disappoints and it proves not possible to decarbonise Britain without causing huge damage to the economy? I asked the Business Secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, this in October 2021 and he denied there was a need for such a plan.
No minister seems brave enough to say that the 2050 target may have to be revisited. Asked in July 2022 whether they were committed to the 2050 target, all five remaining Conservative leadership candidates confirmed that they were – although one, Kemi Badenoch, had previously suggested the target might have to be moved out to 2060 or 2070. All objection to the Net Zero Strategy has been brushed aside by Government ministers who insist there really is no alternative: so dire is the climate emergency that we simply have to decarbonise everything we do – fail to do so and we will be lashed by ever more dramatic weather: tossed, boiled, frozen and drowned. Behind it, though, lies a Little Englander fantasy: that somehow we can tackle climate change on our own, even if other countries do not follow our example. Yet Britain accounts for less than 1% of global emissions (or a bit more if you count them on a consumption basis rather than emissions basis).
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, China, which accounts for 33% of global emissions, is addressing climate change in its own way – one which isn’t going to put constraints on its industries or involve the impoverishment of its people. And many other countries are adopting the same attitude.
Not Zero: How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won’t Even Save the Planet) by Ross Clark – of which this article is an extract – is published by Forum on February 2nd.
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1) Never believe any statements from any Intelligence Service.
2) For info, the picture is of the Chinese hockey team at an airport going to an away game.
….the NWO game!
Btw, good show chaps, thanks for obliging with the hazmat suits
1) Especially when those statements concern WMD and contain the words ’45 minutes’.
2) Chineses hockey must be a very dangerous sport.
Really! You don’t say! Who would have thought that a virus appearing in a food market actually originated from the virology research laboratory which is literally next door, where they do all sorts on dangerous and unethical research in shoddy conditions, and not with a population of bats half way across China that also happened to be in hibernation at the time… I couldn’t have imagined such a turn of events!
/s
Where or how Covid originated is not really the issue for me. It is the insane worldwide REACTION to it that has been far and away the bigger problem.
I think it matters insofar as how much they planned for just this event. if it leaked (or was deliberately released) they would have known what it could do, since, by definition, that was what they were researching!
The fools occupied the hospice…
So, how about Fauci and Rick Bright camping it up at a conference on 29 October 2019 https://rumble.com/vnh8qk-fauci-hhs-officials-discuss-using-new-virus-from-china-to-enforce-universal.html?mref=7ju1&mrefc=2
Chinese Intelligence claim it came from a US lab.
Of course! No gain in lying.
P. Daszak and A. Fauci are pure Chinese. Even eat puppies with sticks.
Surely to God nobody gives a flying flamingo at this late stage where the hell this mysterious virus might came from, if anywhere. It’s all a gigantic nervous breakdown scenario promulgated by the ever-hyping media via rags conforming to the description “The Daily Twit” (that’s all of them).
Some enterprising, honest, polling outfit (are there any not already owned?) that wants to go down well in history should organise a national poll and ask respondents:
(a). How many people do you know who have been affected by the virus?
(b). How many people do you know have been seriously ill from it?
Properly aggregated, tabulated and widely disseminated the results would surely put an end to this bloody nonsense. Obviously the nightmare MSM wouldn’t cover it in a million years.
There is, however, the “Fool Me Once” Principle (which I just made up).
If they can fool us once and get away with it, then they are much more likely to keep fooling us again and again and again.
Anyway, on a completely unrelated note… 3rd booster shot, sir?
@OliveTrees, You may find it worthwhile to take a look at the Diderot Effect that advertisers are taught about.
Thanks. I’ll take a look.
a) Everyone I know.
b) Nobody I know.
Think about the condemnation (or mysterious disappearance) of some luvely people from the Bottom, Françh, I taly and other sympathetic regions…
I agree with much of what you say but vehemently disagree on where it came from. It is essential that it is proven exactly where it came from, who funded it, who was involved and that they are prosecuted for it. That is the only way the world can put in place measures to prevent it ever happening again. We all know it was gain of function research carried out by the Wuhan Institute with funding from America and the world needs to see indisputable evidence of this.
Well, you won’t get that, because we’ve burnt it all.
(signed) The Chinese Bureaucracy and Government.
In answer to the questions:
1) Nobody I know has been affected by the virus but everyone in the world has been adversely affect by the hysterical overreaction to the virus.
2) Nobody. Not one single person. Although there was a guy at work who thought he might have it and had one day off work.
As history has shown, if they’re telling you one thing, they’re hiding another thing. So i’m going with my gut instinct, to quote Bruce Springsteen – Born in the U.S.A. (Official Video)
It’s good to know the off-the-book funds are going somewhere productive.
Wake me up when they manage to tie in Event 201 (October 18, 2019), and the Military World Games (Wuhan, October 18 – 27), not to mention all the relevant patents to SARS-COV mentioned by David Martin in his Fauci Dossier, going back to the late 90’s and early 2000’s.
Touché!
Funny isn’t it how it was all patented but doesn’t exist, never existed, wasn’t even considered Guvnor?
…
That one cheered up a soggy Sunday afternoon.
Safety Goggles
Face Nappy
No Gloves
Ugg Boots
https://anti-empire.com/whatever-happened-to-dead-people-in-the-streets-that-images-from-wuhan-promised/
That guy looks like he had the bat soup
The 5th Doctor – Ep. 8: Dr. Paul Alexander & Dr. Mark Trozzi Condemn Childhood COVID “Vaccines”
Love the Torygraph reminding all that
“Former Republican President Donald Trump – who lost his bid for re-election”
But didn’t, he had it stolen from him.
Gaslighting media slime.
Not a bioweapon?
Like me building bombs in my house is just for research
.U.S. Intelligence Claims That Covid May Have Escaped from Chinese Lab
it’s just a statement of fact, it could have come back from the moon on Apolo 11 or lain undiscovered in tutankhamun’s tomb for thousands of years.
Not the article to add this comment to but does anyone else think that PM mr Johnson did not have COVID at all but it was a stunt created by the NUDGE unit in collaboration with SAGE in order to accelerate the narrative? Just a thought.
No politician is EVER ill. Examples: Stalin, Roosevelt, Fidel, Franco and more…
To be fair, Lenin still looks the part…
I thought exactly that at the time “We’re all in it together chaps bullshit” was pretty much what I was thinking.
No reason to think it wasn’t a stunt, these people lie for a living.
It wasn’t a bioweapon. How can they be so sure?
There seems little doubt that China, along with their stooges in the WHO, manipulated the facts in Dec. 2019-Feb 2020 in order to make the virus seem like a bigger threat than it was thus making it more likely that Western governments would impose lockdowns and trash their economies so that China could benefit. Therefore if China had the virus and felt it was possible to gain economically by releasing it along with masses of misinformation I think it’s at least plausible that they would do so. Bioweapons don’t need to kill a large percentage of the population in order to be effective, other types of damage e.g. to a countries economy can be equally effective if one country stands to benefit.
I’m sure it wasn’t developed as a bioweapon, it’s more a case of the Chinese realising after it had been created that it could be used as one.
Any sort of lab leak theory used to be regarded as a conspiracy theory, but is now being taken seriously therefore it’s possible that the deliberate release theory could also eventually go from mad conspiracy theory to being taken seriously.
Having said that I still think that accidental release is slightly more likely, but I’m hedging my bets somewhat.
Every capable military power in the world has known for many years that variants of SARS could serve as bioweapons whether it says so in today’s edition of the SIS house rag the Telegraph or not.
Why assume SARSCoV2 got to the West from the Wuhan lab? In any case, the Wuhan research was partly US-funded.
I’d say fully funded. And a lot of Lab techies went from France.
Weaponised and patented coronaviruses have been around for many years, as Dr David Martin has proved. People need to ask themselves which country is it, that has spent most of the 21st century doing all it can to bully and subdue China.
Highest Covid numbers in hospital since March despite 91%+ jabbed
Ireland now has the highest number of patients in hospital with Covid-19 since March, despite over 91% of the population over-12 being vaccinated – the highest jab rate in the EU.
Notably, Waterford city, which has the State’s highest rate of Covid-19 infection, has an adult population which is 99.7% fully-vaccinated, making it one of the most vaccinated regions in the entire world.
https://gript.ie/highest-covid-numbers-in-hospital-since-march-despite-91-jabbed/
How is inter-community feeling in Waterford between those with traveller backgrounds and those without, I wonder?
Hospitalised with covid or ADE?
wondering any thing about their health , overweight? other health problems?
Clearly a lack of critical thinking in Ireland as a whole and there must an extra large helping of fluoride coming through Waterford taps.
Blaming China is a false flag. The CV bioweapon was created with US taxpayers money, the work was funded by the NIH, and because gain-of-function research is illegal in US law, was outsourced to the Wuhan lab (also built with funding from multiple sources, including the US and France.)
There is a long paper trail of patent applications on SARS coronaviruses going back to the 1990’s. None of them jumped naturally into humans but were engineered to be able to use human cellular receptors. SARS-CoV-2 is just the latest in line.
Virologists are very keen to patent the methods they invent to insert new genetic features into viruses. There is a lot of money to be made, and because these patents must be filed to preserve your intellectual property (and financial returns) there is plenty of evidence over the years for how this was done.
https://www.roxytube.com/watch/nih-have-already-developed-the-next-bioweapon_UpmFJsb4WWAXf9q.html
Dr Fleming’s discussion with Mike Adams is a good introduction to this. I do not know what to make of Dr Fleming, he is not easy to warm to, but he is certainly brave.
As far as I can judge, his information on the history of all this is accurate. “Gain of function” is just a euphemism for bioweapons research. I looked into this ten years ago, and realised how dangerous the research was then. It purports to be protective, but the virologists know they are weaponising viruses, and there are unlimited funds for this kind of work
Yes, nobody seems to ask the simple question: WHY would you want to make a virus more infectious to humans (if it isn’t a bioweapon)?
Very pertinent question.
The first time that any coronavirus was isolated was at the “Common Cold Unit”, a front for British biowarfare research. They even boast about it at the Science Museum.
Click here for some British government propaganda relating to “common cold research”, 1947.
The Nuremburg trials had ended the previous year.
The Khabarovsk trials, which far fewer British people have ever heard of, hadn’t started yet. Held in 1949, they considered biowar charges made against leading figures in the Japanese military.
Well, when you can kidnap people from anywhere in the world and stick them in Gitmo, where torture isn’t torture because the Prez says so, then what harm could a bit of GoF experimentation ‘off-campus’ do?
They keep going over the same old things but nobody ever mentions why China released videos of supposed citizens apparently dropping dead in the streets.
By accident or design they’re up to their necks in it.
Something a little stronger was likely released in China. This is Dr Lee Merritt’s theory.
Don’t forget Italy, where SARSCoV2 may have been spreading before it “emerged from Wuhan”.
Nor for that matter, Korea.
I thought this was supposed to be a website for “sceptics”
Look too at the early spread – or at least the early spread of something, possibly several somethings, including in Italy, Iran, and South Korea.
“More than half of South Korea’s novel coronavirus cases are linked to a branch of a controversial religious group in the southern city of Daegu”. (Article from 22 Feb 2020.)
Some of these sceptics have 77th Brigade accreditation.
The report is here if anyone wants to read it.
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declassified-Assessment-on-COVID-19-Origins.pdf
Absolutely rubbish report.
But…
They did not categorically state that “the disease was never intended to be a biological weapon.” They said under the sub-heading ‘Probably Not a Biological Weapon’ “We remain skeptical of allegations that SARS-CoV-2 was a biological weapon”.
Being sceptical is not the same as denial.
And when we go to Appendix B, we find that the basis if their scepticism rests merely on some people’s views of the articles of a single virologist:
Oh, so SOME rejected the claims and others refused to do peer review. So that nails it, does it?
Really, this report is pathetic, and very much a whitewash and attempt to kick the whole thing into the long grass.
This is a worse intelligence standard than the ‘dodgy dossier’ compiled before the second Gulf War, even if not ‘sexed up’.
Why do so many pussyfoot around with this? The evidence is absolutely clear as are the “coincidences”. The Chinese admit it started in Wuhan right next to a viral laboratory that is known to be working on enhancement of coronavirus to infect humans. Said laboratory was funded via Peter Dascak and the money was supplied by none other than Anthony Fauci. The records are all out there.
The Chinese admit the outbreak started at Wuhan market which happens to be right next to a viral laboratory for heavens sake. A laboratory that actively captured bats from thousands of miles away. Does anyone seriously believe the Chinese explanation that some bat flew thousands of miles from a cave that the Wuahn Laboratory is known to have collected bats from and infected some poor trader at Wuhan market? The other one has bells and assorted tinsel!
We can’t blame China because then they might be nasty and call in their debts. And then stop exporting all their plastic tat which we buy up so eagerly because it’s ‘cheap’.
Look around your homes and see how many items you have Made in China.
Batteries (for torches, etc.) are sold in one of our local shops – yes, they are coloured green (Climate Change innit?!) and Made in China. They will last 5 minutes in a torch before being tossed in a bin – environmentally friendly? Cheap?
Lingonberry jam is also sold in one of our shops – these jams contain berries from China.
Blue face masks – Made in China – litter our streets – they have been thrown on the ground just about everywhere.
Things are seldom what the security sevices would want us to believe. China was likely always being set up from the time it stupidly agreed to do dodgy research for US interests.
In other news, I noticed a duck swimming today.
I am fascinated how the pharmaceutical companies were able to design an experimental biological, when they had absolutely no idea what they were treating. I guess we now know, after billions spent and wasted, they had absolutely no idea what they were “vaccinating” against. This is almost laughable, if it were not so serious. Hundreds of thousands now injured by Big Pharmas blunder, and thousands dead. Efficacy, zero.
I’m equally fascinated by the requirement for blanket indemnity for the pharmas making the vaccines, which we’re told are ‘safe’ even though in use under emergency measures.
I don’t think that ANYONE ever believed that the virus was a bioweapon. Just killing the elderly is hardly a war-winning strategy. That was just a bit of exaggeration thrown into the mix to encourage conspiracy theories which could then be used to smear any concerns.
HOWEVER, seeing the ready spread of a respiratory coronavirus, I suspect that bioweapons researchers are currently looking at how to make an effective weapon out of them…