The former Brexit minister Lord Frost delivered a damning indictment of the politics and economics that surround the collectivist Net Zero project. Giving the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s annual lecture on Thursday, he noted that governments are generally made up of clever people, and clever people tend to think they know best how to run things. But Frost argued that with Net Zero they were “making people poorer, reducing opportunity, and as a result limiting our economic, political, foreign policy and defence capacity”.
Lord Frost noted that ‘clever’ politicians believe their narrow specialisms, often painfully achieved, qualify them to predict the future accurately “and certainly often make them disdainful of people who question them”. We can be confident, he continued, that this approach will be economically inefficient, regulators will be captured, rents will be sought, and poor decisions will not only be taken but will be persisted with long after it has become clear they are irrational. When implementing inefficient and unreliable energy policies, politicians hope something will turn up to help out, while at the same time imposing, or promising, restrictions on lifestyles to deal with the consequences.
He went on to give examples including making people buy inferior and more expensive boilers and take a punt on electric cars. House designs are being constrained and energy efficiency requirements are squeezing the whole housing market. “Most egregiously, we are forcing investment in windmills, a technological breakthrough first mentioned when Henry II was on the throne [1154-1189], but less obviously suited to provide power on demand today, given that we have so far found no solution to the intermittency problems other than maintaining a back-up network of gas and coal-fired power stations,” he said.
In his view, many western governments prefer to live in “complete cognitive dissonance rather than confront what they know in their hearts, that they are pursuing unfeasible and internally contradictory policies”.
There is no doubt that the sheer impracticability of Net Zero – removing a fuel within less than 30 years that powers 80% of the world’s energy supply – is starting to ring alarm bells in right-of-centre political circles. But there is a debate being waged over the best way forward. Lord Frost thinks that building a coalition within a major political party by emphasising the economic disadvantages of Net Zero is our best hope – disadvantages that will become painfully obvious to a majority of the population during the next cold winter.
During the Q&A, he emphasised that trying to undermine Net Zero by attacking the ‘settled’ science narrative was unlikely to work, although he did note Steve Koonin’s recent assertion in Unsettled that the science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades. But the feeling of many in the audience was that critiquing the science must play an important role. Green activists are already preparing the ground for a large reduction in living standards on the grounds that humans face an existential threat. As many cults in the past have discovered, the existential threat can be used to justify all manner of draconian interferences in our liberty, while science provides one of the best inoculations.
Lord Frost’s lecture is an excellent contribution to the widening debate on Net Zero and, with his permission, we have published it in full below.
Chris Morrison
I want to begin this lecture by paying tribute to Lord Lawson, Nigel Lawson, who sadly died last month. It is a striking, and in many ways rather depressing, illustration of how much politics has changed since his time in government that his great memoir, The View from No.11, contains no index entry for ‘global warming’, ‘climate change’, or even ‘environment’. That changed very soon after he stepped down and he got involved in the debate with gusto, set up this Global Warming Policy Foundation, and was one of the few politicians – most of the others are in this audience – who were willing to subject the consensus political response to climate change to real debate. To the extent we are still able to debate these issues rationally, it is very much thanks to Lord Lawson’s efforts over the last 30 years. He is very much missed by all of us.
It is an honour to deliver the GWPF Annual Lecture this evening. I do so in the footsteps of very many distinguished predecessors and true experts, Steven Koonin just last year, Richard Lindzen, Matt Ridley, and many more. Mentioning these names shows why, well before I became a trustee of the Foundation myself, I was an avid reader of these lectures, as a beacon of rationality and reliable fact in a world which seemed so devoid of them. So it is with trepidation that I now put a foot into this debate myself. I am encouraged, however, by the fact that it is not only scientists who have spoken here. There is a wider perspective which we need to hear and which, for example, Cardinal George Pell – another sad loss this year – brought in his lecture in 2011. The climate change issue cannot be left to scientists. How it is handled affects the whole of society. That is where I come in.
I came into politics late, and through Brexit not climate. But 30 years dealing with the EU gives you a very good nose for bad economics, for lobbying, rent-seeking, for la pensée unique, for corporatism, and indeed for a suspicion of capitalism and markets more broadly. All those things seem to me to be also highly characteristic of the way we – by which I mean this Government, but also the West and its allies more broadly – are handling the challenge of climate change. That is why I care so much about this issue. I care about the risk that we are legislating ourselves into economic decline. It is therefore on that aspect, the economics, that I will focus primarily tonight.
Hence the title of my lecture: “Not Dark Yet, but it’s getting there”. This is of course a lyric from the eponymous Bob Dylan track – a song which is a reflection on his own mortality and his declining powers as a human being. I invite us tonight to make the same reflection about our society. It is not just about whether we literally go dark, as we can no longer keep the lights on – but also whether we in the West can sustain the confidence to face our challenges and to succeed as the world’s leading economies and societies, or whether we alternatively sink into miserabilism, degrowth, and economic decline.
So tonight I’ll speak mainly about how we are handling the consequences of the scientific view of climate, rather than whether that view is well founded in the first place. Still, every speaker on this subject must nevertheless make their view clear, if only as inoculation against some of the wilder accusations that inevitably come one’s way. So: it seems to me that the physics of the greenhouse effect is extremely well established. The ability to predict what that means for the climate is less so, but it seems overwhelmingly likely that there has been human agency in the global temperature rises of the last century or more. That said, as Steve Koonin, distinguished physicist and under-secretary for science in the Obama administration, notes in his book Unsettled, “the science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it”. He later describes “over-the-top statements” about the ‘climate emergency’ and ‘climate crisis’ as “increasingly divorced from the science” – a view which seems very reasonable to me. Overall I take it as a desirable goal to reduce the amount of carbon we emit, but in a way which is proportionate to the threat, if threat there is, and which sustains economic prosperity and growth. Climate change is a problem, one of the many we face: it is not existential and it doesn’t mean extinction is coming.
The science is, in my view, distinct from the political goal of ‘Net Zero 2050’. That is an arbitrary target conceived to meet another arbitrary target, i.e., to keep temperature rises to 1.5 degrees. The causal connection between those things is very much open to debate, so are the necessary trade-offs, and so is the methodology by which we get to the target. I refuse to accept that questioning the specific target of Net Zero 2050 can be or should be off-limits. Indeed, only propositions which subject themselves to debate are worthy of being taken seriously in the first place. So we must keep asking: is Net Zero 2050 an achievable goal at an acceptable cost? And are we going about it in the right way?
My answer, perhaps not surprisingly, is no. I am going to argue that the route we have chosen to deliver Net Zero is inevitably wasteful and damaging; that it is totally implausible that it will boost growth and much more likely that it will reduce it; that as a result governments are pursuing completely incompatible political and economic objectives, but will not be able to do so for ever; that when the crunch comes they may well double down on further economically damaging measures in order to meet the goal; and, therefore, finally, that people like me must prepare for that moment when we will need to try to get onto a more rational path with a rethink of Net Zero methods and, almost certainly, timetable.
The route we have chosen to deliver Net Zero is inevitably wasteful and damaging
Much Net Zero policy is about how we predict the future. That is difficult. As we have seen from the OBR’s and the IMF’s efforts in the last year, even short-run economic predictions within well understood economies are subject to huge and damaging errors. Yet the uncertainties that we face on Net Zero go massively beyond this. A huge number of factors are at play – not just the inherent unpredictability of any modern economy, but uncertainty about technologies: hydrogen, SMRs, CCS, and much more; the effect of decisions made by the government and by regulators and their interaction domestically and internationally; the impact of the different mixes of electricity generation, the effect of renewables on the grid, and much more. On top of that comes massive international uncertainty and extremely dangerous geopolitics. This means that predictions are almost certainly going to be wrong.
One can test this by looking backwards and checking predictions actually made, something that policy makers rarely do. Look at the predictions made in the Labour Government’s 2003 Energy White Paper. This is in fact quite a sober document, in many ways much more economically rational than more recent outputs from government – which I will come on to. The political environment was relatively calmer. Still they got a lot wrong. They obviously did not foresee shale gas and the dramatic up-ending of assumptions about future prices. They envisaged much more extensive wave and tidal power. They thought there would be much more local generation from these sources but also from biomass and waste. They believed there would be much more backup capacity to handle renewables’ intermittency and they thought nuclear power would be on the way out. As a result, they took us down a route that, today, is clearly problematic.
Governments nowadays have exactly the same difficulties in making predictions, and for the same reasons. It is of course well-known since Hayek that knowledge about an economy is dispersed and cannot even in principle be known by planners. The inherent uncertainties in the current situation mean that today’s confident predictions about energy prices, technologies, their economic and scientific effect, and their interaction with the climate are essentially just guesswork.
You might think, therefore, that the right thing for governments to do would be to invest in basic scientific research and experimentation, to establish a simple regime for taxing the externality of carbon emissions, to put in place a supportive regime for planning and infrastructure, and otherwise stand back and let the market sort out how best to meet the policy goal, however it is defined and however demanding it is.
Of course, governments have done no such thing. They have all, instead, chosen a highly dirigiste route to Net Zero. Despite all the evidence, they believe they know best and are confident in the technologies that will get us to the goal. We have targets for almost everything: cars, boilers, hydrogen, offshore wind, solar. They have designed highly complex policy regimes to take us there which assume they are capable of calibrating exactly correctly the right amount of tax and subsidy. As a result, they have created systems which are so complex that nobody can understand them. There is nothing like a free market yet there is no clear government direction or centralisation either. The consequences of this system, it being unpredictable, are themselves unpredictable, and the unwelcome consequences themselves then have to be corrected for – as we see at the moment with the proposed hydrogen levy.
As Dieter Helm wrote of the U.K. energy market in his 2017 energy review:
The sheer number of interventions in the U.K. energy market is so great that few if any participants in the markets, few regulators, ministers or civil servants can have grasped them all. The inability of the market participants to grasp all these interventions is in itself likely to increase the cost of energy. … The result is that it is not possible to make a cost-effectiveness assessment of almost any of the specific policies.
This has happened for the same reason it always does: because governments are generally made up of clever people, and clever people tend to think they know best how to run things. This is true generally – look at the calls from all sides of the political spectrum at the moment for a new industrial strategy – but it is perhaps particularly true in the specific area of energy and climate, which is full of highly educated people who believe that their narrow specialisms, often painfully achieved, qualify them to predict the future accurately, and certainly often make them disdainful of people who question them.
We can be confident of one thing in assessing this dirigiste approach: that it will be highly economically inefficient. We can be sure that regulators will be captured, rents will be sought, and poor decisions will not only be taken but will be persisted with long after it is clear they are irrational. Moreover, we are investing in technologies which are certainly less efficient at producing energy than their predecessors and less reliable in delivering it when it’s needed, hoping that something will turn up to help out, and at the same time imposing, or promising, restrictions on lifestyle choices to deal with the consequences.
We all know the examples. In Britain we will soon be making people buy inferior and more expensive boiler technology and driving many out of the new car market if they aren’t prepared to take a punt on electric vehicles. House designs are increasingly constrained and indeed energy efficiency requirements are squeezing the whole housing market. Most egregiously, we are forcing investment in windmills, a technological breakthrough first mentioned when Henry II was on the throne, but less obviously suited to providing power on demand today, given that we have so far found no solution to the intermittency problem other than maintaining a back-up network of gas and coal-fired power stations. The battery storage technology does not exist, hydro storage can’t be developed on anything like the right scale, and hydrogen remains costly and unproven. Moreover, it is surely obvious that renewables plus back-up will be more expensive than just the back-up. Despite all these problems, many seem to believe that the solution to our problems is just to keep building windmills until we have ‘enough’.
In normal circumstances one might expect political parties advocating this vision of legal compulsion to adopt defective technology to be rapidly chucked out of office and replaced by those backing economic growth and higher living standards. That isn’t happening. That is in part because the intellectual climate has got highly collectivist. As we discovered from the Liz Truss interlude, there seems little real understanding of how a modern economy or a free market actually functions, indeed even of the concept of ‘growth’ as such. Hardly anyone thinks that desirable outcomes can be achieved by the market and almost everyone thinks that if the government is not doing something then it isn’t happening. The normal tendency of intellectuals to fail to understand economics has been reinforced, in Europe anyway, by the widespread belief that the purpose of policy making is to tame markets not liberate them, and by the view that the 2008 crash and bailouts was caused by free market capitalism rather than by bad regulation and poor central bank decision-making. There has been a general drift leftwards and of course the Left, including that substantial proportion of the Left which thinks it is on the Right, always like control and direction, an instinct which explains why they liked lockdown so much and which they find conveniently reinforced in Net Zero.
But there is another reason why normal political mechanisms aren’t working. It’s that governments are now claiming, with a straight face, that Net Zero policies are actually good for the economy. That is a relatively recent development. Let me refer again to the 2003 Energy Review. This suggested that dealing with climate change – on a much less demanding target of 60% reduction by 2050 – would cost up to 2% of GDP. That may have been an implausibly low figure, but it is at least a cost. By this year, in its March response to the Skidmore energy review, we find the Government saying “Net Zero is the growth opportunity of the 21st century and could offer major economic opportunities to the U.K.”. The Skidmore review itself said “In some estimates, the U.K. would see approximately 2% additional growth in GDP, through the benefits from new jobs, increased economic activity, reduced fossil fuel imports and cost savings (for example cheaper household bills).” That 2% figure goes back to just one rather thin report, dating from 2020, produced by Cambridge Econometrics, which claims extra growth of 2-3% by 2050 if the sixth carbon budget and its successors are fully implemented. It’s hardly comprehensive or robust.
In truth this whole area is riddled with economic fallacies. Not just the Cambridge Econometrics report, but report after report, comment after comment, makes the same mistakes. Let’s just single out a few.
● We see Bastiat’s famous broken windows fallacy, as expounded in his essay ‘Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas’, the view that capital destruction is actually good for the economy because of all the work generated in repairing it, rather than seeing that such activity does not increase the net stock of wealth and does not take into account the opportunity cost, that is how the resources could have been used on something more productive. In our case, much Net Zero investment simply replaces existing capital. It doesn’t improve it, and indeed arguably what we are left with is worse than what we have before, leaving us with an energy sector that is less productive and less useful than the one we had at the start. How does that make us a more productive economy?
● We see the persistent temptation to count benefits but not the costs. The Cambridge Econometrics report explicitly says that its modelling is based on the assumption that taxes will go up to fund the extra public investment required, which they claim is only 1% of GDP, though it is almost certainly a lot more – I come on to that. Will this not affect economic growth? Won’t the rickety renewable-heavy grid, or investment by private firms in the private generators they will need to ensure security of supply, or the general effect on the business environment, also affect growth?
● We see optimism bias. As Dieter Helm (again) wrote last month, “It is not good enough to simply assume that the costs for all the ‘good’ stuff will just follow a sharp line downwards, whilst fossil-fuel prices will remain volatile and ever higher.” Optimism bias is a particular feature of judgements about the direct costs of the transition to Net Zero, as opposed to the economic effect. Cambridge Econometrics say this will be 1% of GDP annually. Skidmore says 1-2% of GDP. Independent studies suggest it is going to be about three times that – well above any conceivable cost of adaptation to increasing temperatures.
● We see illusory certainty and misplaced confidence in prediction. Part of the justification for Cambridge Econometrics’ 2-3% extra growth figure is a belief that electricity prices will be lower by 2050. Good luck with that. The growth figure itself could of course be expressed alternatively as additional growth of 0.06% to 0.1% growth in each of the 30 years from 2020. That is essentially a rounding error. Nobody can make predictions of such precision and I say that such a prediction is not meaningful.
● We see the view that resources are always available. Cambridge Econometrics base their growth figure in part on an assumption that there are unemployed resources which can be mobilised by public investment. In this world there is lots of capital waiting to be used, we always have enough workers, there are no timing complexities or linkages that must be properly sequenced, foreigners are always willing to fund the U.K., and U.K. consumers are always happy to save instead of consume. Massive projects such as insulating every home in the U.K. or doubling the capacity of the electricity grid can be undertaken without any resource constraints or effects in the wider economy. That is not a realistic depiction of the world we live in.
● And finally we see all the general fallacies always associated with industrial policy: that individual businesses’ prospects are the same as the economy’s prospects, that certain kinds of industry have accurately predictable spin-off effects on the wider economy and are therefore worth supporting with public money, that the overall prosperity of the country can be increased by pumping public money into industries in depressed parts of the country, that successful technologies can be reliably predicted ex ante, or – perhaps the most widely cited of all – that the large numbers of jobs created in green industries are a benefit to the economy rather than what they are, a cost of investing in technology that is less good than its predecessors.
It seems to me quite implausible, given this litany of fallacies and economic solecisms, that the current Net Zero programme is going to boost growth. Quite the opposite. Much of this investment will turn out to be wasted. To the extent it is not, it will deliver us a system of energy production, distribution, and consumption which is higher cost, lower output, less robust and less efficient, and indeed is already doing so. This will have effects that are entirely predictable and already visible. We are seeing supply disruption in parts of the US as strains on the grid grow. In Britain we are seeing lower productivity across the economy and disinvestment in relatively energy intensive industries. That is exactly what you would expect to see. It is for the Net Zero proponents to prove, not just say, that the basic principles of economics will be different in future. I don’t think they can.
Now it is important not to overstate the consequences and become catastrophists like some Net Zero advocates. The Net Zero plans are a significant drag anchor on the economy not a crisis. Market economies are highly flexible things, as we’ve learned in recent years. Europe has generally responded much better to last year’s energy crisis than many thought possible, though we also got lucky with a relatively warm winter. Even the much more extreme cases of sanctions against Qatar a few years ago, or against Russia this year, have in fact, after a period of adjustment, had remarkably little effect on the economies concerned. The South African economy too copes, somehow, with a seriously problematic energy sector. But, as that last example shows, the drag anchor does really matter and does make a difference. It matters especially if only certain countries, that is the West, are imposing it on themselves, and especially if the foreseeable measures seem likely to get tougher not softer.
Governments are pursuing contradictory objectives and beginning to get cold feet
I actually sense our own Government is beginning to realise that the economics are more doubtful than the Net Zero proponents argue. If, as some commentators say, our Prime Minister is beginning to get worried by the costs of Net Zero, we can only welcome that. There is evidently some debate within Government on the balance between security of supply, price, and decarbonisation. As the Climate Change Committee points out, U.K. Government policy is already not consistent with the declared policy of decarbonising the energy grid by 2035. I quote Dieter Helm for the last time: he comments: “There’s very little chance that the 2035 target will be met, and no chance on current policies.” So we must welcome the Government’s seeming willingness to push gently against the Net Zero ideology, – for example, with the proposed Cumbrian coal mine, the opening of new areas for exploration in the North Sea, and the renewed push behind nuclear – though of course in all these areas wider policy, for example on taxing the energy sector, has to be made properly consistent with that too.
We can also see it in the incipient questioning of Net Zero measures across Europe. The EU is getting cold feet about abolishing the internal combustion engine. Here in the U.K., the politics of heat pumps and electrification are beginning to make themselves felt. Ipsos Mori polling from last year shows that support for most specific Net Zero measures is falling. The most strongly supported measures are those which most people probably believe would not affect them – changes in pension fund investment rules and frequent flyer levies – while support for phasing out gas boilers has halved and support for EV subsidies is now only slightly positive.
Yet there remains a long way to go. The atmosphere of groupthink is extremely strong. Public opinion leans heavily one way, with huge majorities in favour in principle of Net Zero, and is easily maintained like that because of the practical limitations on free debate. The Net Zero opinion is a high status opinion, the crunch point is a long way off, and no doubt many people also think “all these clever people can’t be totally wrong.” Many even on the right of British politics, supposed advocates of free markets and of economic rationality, seem reluctant to think hard about Net zero. Overall there seems to be an active determination across politicians and opinion formers not to look too closely at the issues. That is worrying. As the great Alfred Sherman said, ““You can wake a man who’s asleep, but you can’t wake a man who’s pretending to be asleep.”
In fact, my sense is that members of Western governments actively prefer to live in complete cognitive dissonance rather than confront what they know in their hearts, that they are pursuing unfeasible and internally contradictory policies. To summarise the situation:
● Governments are pushing a set of economic policies which they say are essential to save the planet
● Yet even so those policies are not consistent with the declared goal and not tough enough to achieve it
● Nevertheless, those policies foreseeably make the economy worse
● Yet governments tell their voters the policies are good for them
● But nevertheless impose them by compulsion rather than allowing free choice
● And sustain and support a political debate in which it is very difficult for anyone, including themselves, to explore alternatives.
A crunch point is coming.
I do not think this can be sustained indefinitely. Unless we are rescued by an unforeseen technological bonus, something, at some point, will crack.
There seem to me to be two possible directions of travel. The first possibility is that resistance to Net Zero measures grows and governments respond to that, by abandoning or (more likely) delaying the goal, or by going about it in an economically more rational way, as I set out earlier – though this will of course make the costs even more visible and obvious. This could happen as doubts about the nature of the ‘crisis’ grow, and as voters in the West get frustrated by the persistent slow growth and increasing restrictions on their lifestyle while the rest of the world carries on as normal. The Dutch Farmers’ Party’s success is a straw in the wind here, but to make any real impact mainstream political parties here and across Europe need to pick up the issue, and it would require a persistent minority to push hard to change the debate. This is not impossible – we saw it in the U.S. and U.K. on lockdown policy during the pandemic. But at the moment the political conditions seem a long way from allowing this to happen.
The second possibility is one in which governments recognise they can no longer credibly sustain an economic justification for their measures, but the wider politics and the reluctance to admit error mean they cannot abandon the target and must try to reach it. At that point we should expect to see a ramping up of the catastrophic risk rhetoric in order to justify much tougher measures, the diversion of perhaps 5% of GDP annually, maybe more, and together with assertive measures to control consumption and demand. My worry is that the broader climate of economic and political debate tends to lead us in this direction. The huge focus on lifestyle change to save the planet, the politicisation of everyday lifestyle choices, the emphasis on living local and sustainability rather than being a burden on the earth, and the focus on reducing energy consumption rather than seeing cheap and abundant energy for what it is, a necessity to improve human lives: all this prepares the ground. Worse, policy during the pandemic showed how difficult it was for most governments to escape the climate of opinion they had created, to admit to errors, and to change course. All this is seriously alarming. If we don’t resist this miserabilist approach now, the approach that ends with lifestyle restrictions and rationing, we will risk seriously damaging levels of economic irrationality in the next decade. That outcome would risk us not just going dark through power supply shortages but could set the West seriously on the back foot in the geopolitical competition of the coming years.
We need to be ready for that moment and prepare to argue for a more rational path with a rethink of methods and, almost uncertainly, timetable
The job of those who are willing to question the rush to Net Zero is to see this crunch moment coming and to start to get the politics ready. We must show that pushing for Net Zero on the current timetable and with current methods involves unacceptable costs to the economy and to individuals. We must persistently question the view that voters must just live with those costs and adjust their lifestyles as a result. That doesn’t involve claiming that Net Zero, or something close to it, is an undesirable goal: carbon reduction is worth doing. It involves explaining that we have chosen a method which ensures vast waste, inefficiency, cronyism, and economic decline, the costs of which will be borne by the average voter. Accordingly, we need a rethink of the methods and, almost certainly, the timetable. And we must do this in ways which can be easily communicated and resonate with public opinion.
I suggest the following areas.
● First, we should keep underlining that there is not just a problem, there is a solution. That is gas to nuclear, backed with investment in fundamental research, and taking advantage of technological advances. This doesn’t require massive reinvestment in new energy production of doubtful value. The Government can stop guessing about future winners and support investment in technologies which exist now and offer the best, fastest, and most reliable way of getting emissions down quickly.
● Second, we may therefore need to be more dismissive of current renewable technology as an unnecessary complication. We need to find a much clearer way of explaining why renewables are inherently more expensive than the other options and communicating the obvious point that if you need renewables plus backup, why not just have the backup and avoid all other problems?
● Third, we must keep underlining the costs to the average voter – the mounting totals of renewables subsidies, both on bills and in tax, the extra costs of poor quality boilers and electric cars, the impact of compulsory insulation and energy efficiency, and much more. Moreover we can point out that, even at this level, we are off track to deliver Net Zero. All the pain is not even delivering the goal.
● Fourth, point out who is benefiting: the wealthy who can afford dubious carbon offsets, the green energy companies that are raking off taxpayer subsidies, and many more. They’re getting the benefits and meanwhile small businesses that produce useful products are being crushed by the burdens.
● Fifth, point to lockdown. In 2020 the banning of most human contact and travel resulted in a fall in U.K. emissions of just 9%. Imagine what it would take to get that figure down significantly further. Are people prepared to live with very much tougher restrictions on their lives for ever?
● And finally, be positive. We have allowed Net Zero advocates to become associated with positivity, with the clean green future, when in fact what they offer is a future of rationing, of restrictions, and of miserabilism. We need to keep underlining that we believe in the future, it is we who have a solution for the problem of cost-effective energy at scale, and it is we who believe human ingenuity will solve the climate change issue in a way that makes us all better off.
To conclude. We aren’t dark yet, but we do risk getting there. At the moment we are heading in the wrong direction. We are hamstringing ourselves, making our people poorer, reducing opportunity, and as a result limiting our economic, political, foreign policy, and defence capacity – our ability to get what we want in the world and make ourselves richer. But at the same time there are the first signs of consumer resistance to the practical consequences of the Net Zero ideology. A crunch is coming. We must do everything we can to change the debate and be ready for the moment when we can hope to push things in a different direction. The future of our societies rests on it.
Stop Press: Bob Ward, the veteran opponent of climate contrarianism, has done his best to rebut Lord Frost’s argument with his usual intellectual acuity.
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Why not nuclear?
BILLIONS HAVE DIED FROM NUCLEAR, THAT’S WHY! RACIST!
Would you care to add any facts to that?
HOW DARE YOU! LITERALLY HITLER!
You do realise that everybody who dies has nuclear material throughout their bodies? It ought to be banned.
SCIENCE DENIER!
Because Nuclear is not suitable as a back up. gas is perfect because it can be fired up and down quickly. —— We do need Nuclear energy. But not a s a back up for renewables.
Indeed. But if you need a backup that at given points needs to supply most of your generating needs, and you have no mass storage of significant volume (both of which are the case), then your backup might as well be always on and ditch the “renewables”.
You mean… go back to the way it was?
Report for a flogging.
Yes I agree——-I would never have renewables at all. I would use coal gas and Nuclear. They are all concentrated energy sources that do what it says on the tin. France gets about 70% of its electricity from Nuclear. But the problem is that we have forced ourselves in law to be rid of fossil fuels and I am certain there will be many more U turns as reality begins to hit home that you cannot run Industrial Society on wind and sun. ——-No matter what any so called environmentalist says.
Excuse me but we were not forced. It was voluntary by the Uniparty.
No——–The Net Zero amendment was simply waved through with no debate and no vote. ——-I call that FORCED, by a political establishment determined no discussion was to had in their desire to pander to the UN and its Sustainable Development politics rather than to their own voters.
Theresa May forced it upon us. Bad laws can be repealed but the trouble is you need MPs capable of critical thinking…
And balls.
There is no “Critical Thinking”. There is only “Group Think”
Why do we ‘need’ nuclear energy. We didn’t when we had 50% plus coming from coal
What we need is some sanity.
Coal was providing a large chunk of the electricity before we decided to pretend to save the planet. Wind and sun cannot do what coal and gas does ie provide electricity 24 hours a day everyday. —–So if we are going to de-carbonise which ofcourse is absurd, then we need the only other reliable way to produce electricity and that is Nuclear. But gas is still required for back up to wind and sun when all the Nuclear is being used up.
There just might be a few more people and a lot more energy usage per capita since the great smogs.
In my childfhood home we had one 5A socket per room and Mum plugged her iron into the light socket.
I think SMRs will offer greater versatility. How do nuclear ships and subs operate if they cannot modulate output?
Great—–I am for all reliable cost effective energy sources.
Why not coal?
Nuclear is vastly more expensive than gas, takes years to build, requires more land. When costing a nuclear power station, the cost of decommissioning must be factored in. That is a significant future liability, which affects decisions of investors and the rate of return required to justify the risk.
That means, among other things, nuclear plant operators must be guaranteed a minimum price per GW irrespective of market conditions.
And that means we the consumer pay over the odds for electricity forever.
So… why not coal? The most efficient electricity production, that means lower consumer… clean too.
Rather than finding the ‘best way’ to solve a non-problem, stop accepting there is a problem that needs solving.
I have no objection to coal. I don’t know how much coal we have under UK ground. Some people might say it’s finite, some might say it’s not. If it’s finite or gets really expensive to extract then we need to buy from others. Energy independence appeals to me. Then again I don’t know where we get our uranium from and how much we need. Just thinking about the very long term.
Uk coal supplies in the ’60’s were estimated at 300 – 400 years and at that time consumption was enormous.
Ah thanks for that. Coal, gas and nuclear should see us through until fusion is developed…
Whut? 30 years?
(It’s always 30 years.)
hp says we’ve got 300-400 years, hopefully the boffins can deliver
Nuclear plants can last 60 years though so the expense is spread out over a longer time making the price acceptable. The only way governments are able to get away with saying renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels is because they have put huge environmental costs and carbon taxes on coal and gas. —-But on a level playing field without all the subsidies that wind gets then coal and gas is by far the cheapest way to produce electricity.
The UK and the rest of Europe supporting the neo-Nazis in Ukraine in the US proxy war against Russia is the main reason UK bills have gone up.
Not true. Domestic fuel bills have increased in this country because we are being forced to provide money with which to subsidise the whole of the renewables industry.
It is that simple.
Yes it is true.
The “main” increase is due to the Ukraine war.
It is also true that renewables subsidies have increased the price.
No, the main reason is the morons in Government blew up our coal-fired power stations. They spend a fortune importing LPG because they closed down our Rough gas storage facility. They spend a further fortune importing chipped trees from the USA. And they pay our continental “friends” for mega-expensive energy because they completely failed to consider energy security when they decided to virtue-signal to the world.
The Fat Oaf said we’d become “the Saudi Arabia” of wind. Well I don’t recall the Saudi’s paying other countries for their energy supply. Instead they exploit their own supply and, as a result, are incredibly wealthy.
We aren’t …. because the Eco Nutters in the Establishment have wrecked any chance of prosperity we had.
correct
UK gets very little energy from Russia; neither directly nor indirectly.
The wholesale price increased dramatically because of the Ukraine war regardless of the UK using very little Russian gas.
MSM propoganda.
Gas prices are at their lowest for around 10 years. It’s not Ukraine. It’s the huge subsidies paid to wind farms, Drax, takeovers of failed Energy companies like Bulb and also covering the bills of people who don’t pay.
This chart shows that the Ukraine war had a HUGE impact on the price of gas.
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/energy-data-and-research/data-portal/wholesale-market-indicators
But that is a temporary thing. The cost of energy was already rising and will continue to rise because of NET ZERO…….We are removing affordable reliable energy (coal and gas) and replacing it with unaffordable unreliable energy (wind and sun)
I agree with you BUT we can buy inexpensive gas from Russia if the political will was there.
We can do a lot of things with Political Will. ——-But the political will is all towards the UN’s world view that we need to save the planet and decarbonise. ——-But there is another world view, and that is that climate change is a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency for political purpose and that there is really no empirical evidence of a “climate crisis”. So we are impoverishing our own citizens with astronomical energy bills under false pretences.
Indeed.
Energy bills were rising way before the Ukraine situation. Because renewables are not cheap. The myth of the wind being free is just that —a myth. Our electricity prices had doubled since the Climate Change Act in 2008 long before Putin went into Ukraine. The Ukraine situation has camouflaged the energy absurdity that already existed and has given politicians and eco warriors the excuse to blame Putin rather than their own preposterous energy policies like Net Zero which is going to cost trillions and all paid for by you and I.
Spot on.
Seems to me the neo- or old fashioned Nazis are based in Moscow.
Your government and their presstitutes in the main stream media will be pleased you have believed all their lies, propaganda and omissions of the truth.
Just the narrative we are sold. It makes it easy to hike up prices by blaming it all on Russia. A manufactured crisis.
Gas is cheap and reliable and we have abundant reserves. The best energy generation mix, given current technology, is gas supplemented by nuclear. The capital cost of the latter is high but it is better not to be reliant on a single source of energy. Wind and solar are inherently inefficient and advocates for these sources of energy need to own the disastrous economic consequences of their energy preferences.
Hear, hear.
Coal is cheaper and prices less volatile.
The brainwashing is strong on the site today.
Get fracking until SMRs come online. China are opening two new coal mines a week and won’t reach peak CO2 (claimed) until 2030. Meanwhile UK is hobbling itself as it limps towards the unachievable Net Zero, whist freezing folk and driving them into penury en-route. Shameful!
The final paragraph on using gas and running down expensive intermittent renewables nails it. Alleged man-made global warming is a giant, horribly-entrenched scam. There is no need to reduced CO2 emissions at all. For proof, search for:
Ed Hoskins, Negligible future warming from CO2
A schoolfriend of mine is completely plugged in to all the dangerous nonsense. Sells electric car charging systems, now to UK councils for charging buses (this is the stage of the game where they’ve run out of private customers spending their own money so need to move on to asking other people to spend other people’s money).
As I say, he’s completely swallowed the narrative. Climate change, electrification, the lot. Hook, line and sinker. But the thing is, he’s a lovely chap. Honest as the day is long. Strong sense of justice. Why else would the company employ him as a sales manager? He believes in what he is selling!
How can I break it to him, Sceptics?
He’ll be fine whatever he does, but I would like to try to warn him. So far, the logic approach isn’t working. He just regurgitates the narrative.
How to do it?
I suppose I could just not care, but I like him…
And, hell – I might be wrong.
Ask him to check his electric bills since the Climate Change Act in 2008 and then ask him “Whatever happened to all the FREE WIND” ?
Good one. I’ll let you know.
Obviously we could all write REAMS AND REAMS to folks like this.
But it’s about finding the key to their souls… for the greater good, y’know
During “covid” I think I exhausted my lifetime supply of patience trying to debate with people I “liked”. I have given up now. Not seeing people helps!
True true. Completely changed my friends. But I do like this guy. He stood up for me in at least two school fights. A really good guy.
“He stood up for me in at least two school fights.”
That counts for a lot in my book.
Exactly. He just needs his wake-up moment. But I don’t think it has happened yet, despite ThePandemic™ …
It may never come. I am not optimistic.
I have considered my efforts so far as a complete waste of everyone’s time! Perhaps I should just accept him as he is. And talk about gardening.
But even gardening is fraught with politics. Nitrogenous waste, anyone?
Ask him to watch this presentation from Prof William Happer (it completely debunks that CO2 is bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2nhssPW77I
If he does watch it, ask him what he thought if it. If he doesn’t, then he is displaying his wilful ignorance and let the friendship whither. If people aren’t even going to listen to the other side then what’s the point?
If people aren’t even going to listen to the other side then what’s the point?
That’s where i am at currently.
99% of the people I know are state modified zombies. I do not push my views unless they offer the opening and when they do I make my case with simple facts and figures which usually ends the debate. Some associates are however at the wavering stage and try to argue back. With these I dump occasional WhatsApp messages of truth. A couple are now coming back for more information.
Many are a permanently lost cause and because they know they have been had simply refuse to take their head from the sand.
If you question nothing then you deserve all the impoverishment coming your way, because make no mistake that is what Net Zero is all about. —–The climate is simply the plausible excuse that the gullible fall for.
That is an excellent lecture. Thank you, Solentviews, for pointing it out to me.
Prof Happer does it extremely well. What a mind, and what humility.
I sent it to my friend, with some short introduction. Let’s see!
Glad you liked it. He appears genuine as they come and not looking for the next grant like most ‘academics’. He has nothing to prove and is just demonstrating the truth with evidence.
I will keep an eye open to see how your friend reacts. Obviously if he agrees with the video then his whole outlook on life and job choice may have to change. Cognitive dissonance will also rear its head I’m sure.
There is plenty of this kind of thing in books and on the Internet. Unfortunately most people busy with work and family life don’t have the time to investigate every issues and they get their information on the 6 O’clock News and assume that those news Channels have thoroughly investigated the issue and are giving them a balanced view. ——-Nothing is further from the truth with mainstream News simply being climate activists channels.
But just as important if not more so is the fact that there are 21 million homes with gas central heating and we will need gas for that reason. There is no way on earth that all of those 21 million gas boilers can possibly be removed and heat pumps or hydrogen or whatever fanciful technology the eco socialists come away with will be able to be installed in the time frames that our daft politicians have imposed on us in law. It has taken about 10 years and we still don’t have little smart meters rolled out everywhere so the chances of new energy systems being in peoples homes with all that clutter and expense involved is NOT going to happen. As more and more of the real world comes and bites politicians (of all parties) the more of the NET ZERO nonsense will be kicked down the road. They will then be cursing their mothers for having given them birth that they were stupid enough to force the UK in law to move ahead with this absurdity and I believe OFGEM have up and questioned the cost of all of this. ——The time to question it was in Parliament where no debate was had and no questions were asked. It was simply waved through. ——-As someone once said “You couldn’t make it up”
It doesn’t matter what Fishy says or says he is going to do when the bottom line is that he is still mouthing off about being committed to Nut Zero.
Anybody committed to Nut Zero falls in to one of two camps:
1. the criminally stupid
2. they are working for an authority that does not have the best interests of this country at its core.
Now, allowing Fishy some latitude let’s assume his intelligence level is a little bit above stupid, that must mean that even if he relied on his own research he would quickly come to realise that a trace gas accounting for just 0.04% of our atmosphere, and without which life on earth would disappear cannot be causing climate issues.
If he got excited at his new found knowledge and decided to dig a little deeper he would also find that earth’s climate is constantly in flux ergo there is no need to chase the unicorn of Nut Zero and what we really need to do is get back to normal.
Normal is not what Fishy is about so the only conclusion is that he is a treasonous, lying, fraudulent coward pulling another gaslighting stunt on the British people.
A despicable oxygen thief.
You are correct, but this will not be the last U turn on energy policy….Starmer will have to back down from the pretend to save the planet stuff as well. ——It is called living in the real world.
But…
1) It will not increase generating capacity sufficient to meet the 2 to 3 times increase in demand from BEVs (stop laughing at the back), and switch from natural gas in domestic and industrial use.
2) Even if (1) were to be met, the grid infrastructure – generator to point of use – does not exist to carry and distribute the increased load… nor is work under way or planned.
And – since most of the World is joined in this madness – the materials particularly, copper and aluminium, cannot be produced (think raw materials mining as well as manufacture) on the fast, increasing scale to meet demand. Thus supply shortage will lean the cost of upgrading grids will sky-rocket and inevitably be impossible to complete.
The vexing question, asked about the fake pandemic too, remains, are they just bumbling, incompetent ignoramuses or deliberate, malicious, evil gits?
They are clearly anticipating a shortfall in the comparatively near future.
The choice of gas means that they don’t see energy storage as a feasible solution, that they realise nuclear cannot be provided in anything like the required timescale and that someone sees a nice little earner from fracking.
Fracking is the best way to get gas out of the ground quickly. I predict a sudden fracking epiphany.
The Yanks must be rubbing theirhands together with the prospect of flogging us LNG now they have cornered the European market by blowing up Nordstream and tripled the prices into the bargain..
I thought power stations were essentially private companies these days. Adding gas fired combined cycle gas turbine plant at a site that has an old coal plant can make economic sense. Didcot is a typical example, where once the old coal plant, along with it’s massive stack of coal was demolished, there was a bit of spare land to sell off as well. No need to do much to the national grid feed – it was already there.
You lot don’t actually believe him do you? It’s a pityful exercise at nicking some right wing policy in a vain attempt to win a few votes, pathetic!
I made it adamantly clear I don’t believe one word of Fishy’s nonsense.
Understood
Now they’ve wheel out Boris on a pallet truck! Whatever next, dig up Thatcher?
It is never a good idea when the state builds such plant but it will have to do so. Private investors will run a mile: they cannot get beck the capital cost in the time available.
we can predict these plants will take twice as long and cost twice as much as necessary. By the time they have checked the gender assignment of the site security officers and their dogs this decade will be over.
A very reasonable view of the next 5.5 years.
“It’s obviously good that the PM is investing in reliable sources of energy. But how exactly does building a whole supplementary power system to make up for the unreliability of renewables “keep bills down”?
———–
It doesn’t. It increases them. We are paying once, for a system which provides intermittent, unreliable energy so the Uni-Party can virtue-signal to the world.
And then for a system which provides reliable energy, on demand ….. which they proudly claim won’t be used much.
The policy of a moron. But a virtue-signalling, Globalist moron.
Build out gas and nuclear urgently and stop wasting taxpayers’ money on wind turbines and PV panels.
When there is sufficient nuclear ‘renewables’ become obsolete.
Scrapping, recycling and replacing renewables is a problem governments are storing up that will bite them in the near future as they have a limited effective lifespan.