What leads a country to begin winding down domestic oil and gas production while promoting the use of imported wood for power generation?
What leads policymakers to shut down a nation’s last and still-functional coal generating power plant after almost 150 years of using coal and within months arrive at a situation where blackout prevention notices have to be issued to its power generators?
The U.K. is by no means the only Western country to go down this perverse path of deindustrialisation and national economic suicide. Why are energy policies of leading Western countries afflicted by magical thinking and irrationality?
The Western World is in a hypnotic trance from 30 years of relentless propaganda pushing climate alarmism.
Energy Policy Mayhem
Evidence abounds of the mayhem that passes for energy policy in the West. It is only appropriate to start with Germany, the epicentre of the green trance that policymakers there have been hypnotised into. This follows decades of worship in the ‘Church of Climate‘ by the media and intellectual chattering class.
Let’s start with the destruction of thousands of acres of ancient Teutonic forests – the setting for the folktales of the brothers Grimm — to make way for wind farms. The irony is lost on Germany’s green ideologues that their energy policies threaten endangered species of birds and bats in their sacrifice at the altar of Mother Gaia. Consecrating thousands of eco-crucifixes with arms of petroleum-based glass-fibre-reinforced polyester resins manufactured in Chinese furnaces fuelled by coal or natural gas may seem particularly absurd to those not steeped in that miasma of green ideology.
Other examples of Germany’s green lunacy include the shutting down of the country’s nuclear power plants, only to then approve putting dirty lignite-fired power plants back online for German households to keep warm in the winter of 2022-23.
Adding to the economic gloom afflicting the country for the past two years, Reuters reported in July that the economy is expected to contract by 0.2% in 2024 from a previous projection of an anaemic 0.3% growth. It strains credulity to call this an “unexpected” contraction as the news wire does.
Irina Slav puts it succinctly:
In case anyone’s wondering how the least surprising thing ever could be described as surprising, that’s because economists and analysts did not expect the contraction and as we all know economists — and analysts — can never be wrong, especially when they’re actively turning a blind eye on obvious developments such as the cause-and-effect relationship between cost of energy and economic growth.
Let’s turn to other absurdities. We recently learned that in the wisdom of Scandinavian planners, dairy farmers in Denmark face having to pay an annual tax of 672 krone ($96) per cow “for the planet-heating emissions they generate”. This policy proposal came in the wake of widespread farmers’ protests in Europe which escalated across the width and breadth of the continent, from Sweden to Spain, Poland to Portugal, since they first started in the Netherlands in October 2019.
The Great European Farmer Revolt led to the shocking win in March 2023 by the populist Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) in the Netherlands, putting it ahead of the governing party in the Senate. In a reaction to Left-wing green parties in Government, farmers became an important part of the equation in the country’s political future. As part of the EU Green Deal to make agriculture consistent with being “carbon-neutral” by 2050, Brussels’ bureaucrats assured citizens that their farms would be rendered more “sustainable”, “environmentally friendly” and “biodiverse”.
Perhaps the pride of place belongs to Ed Milliband (“Mad Ed”), the U.K.’s Secretary of State for the oxymoronically-named Department of Energy Security and Net Zero. U.K.’s “Net Zero” policies, pursued by both the Conservatives, in power for 14 years, and the new Labour Government, have compromised the country’s energy security like nothing else. In Mad Ed’s short time in the office, the country’s last coal plant and its Port Talbot steel plant have been shut down, regulatory approvals for solar farms were rushed through over the heads of local community objections and the North Sea’s oil and gas field developments have been sacrificed to Greenpeace’s climate lawsuit.
Unsurprisingly, it was reported in July that Britain fell out of the top 10 manufacturing nations list for the first time. Mr. Miliband’s decision not to challenge a lawsuit filed by Greenpeace has compromised the country’s investment environment. According to Brendon Long, Director of Research at investment company Zeus Capital, Mr. Miliband’s decision would put wider investment in Britain at risk. He said:
London has fallen out of the top 10 capital markets in terms of monies raised from initial public offerings. That might reflect that financial markets are increasingly concerned with the U.K. as a jurisdiction that values and defends property rights and the sanctity of honouring agreements made.
To be fair to Mad Ed, some of these developments were already in train during the previous Tory Government’s term of office. Nevertheless, he has built up a CV that would be the envy of the wildest Left-wing Brussels bureaucrat.
But most egregious in the Labour Government’s short record of rule is its move to cut winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners while pledging nearly £22bn for projects in unproven technologies to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions. Rubbing salt into the wound, Ed Miliband insisted in July that Labour will honour its pledge of £11.6bn in overseas climate aid.
It is not much better across the pond. President Biden’s promised to make climate change front and centre of his administration’s policies across the whole of Government. This has been followed by the duplicitously-named Inflation Reduction Act, which unleashes a debt-driven tsunami of subsidies on favoured industries – solar, wind, EVs, batteries, hydrogen. I have written on Biden’s fractured and contradictory energy policies elsewhere (here, here and here).
Models Not Fit For Purpose
These absurd and immiserating “Net Zero” policies of the West imposed at great cost to ordinary working men and women are justified by the true believers in the Church of Climate by invocations of the “climate crisis”. Mr. Miliband and his ilk would respond along the lines that when the house is on fire, you don’t muck about but do “whatever it takes”. Doubtless, the lockdown and vaccination mandates imposed by “experts” in response to Covid would be offered as an example.
These twin hysterias – Covid and climate – share much in common. Both spring from not-fit-for-purpose and impossible to validate computer models that escalated alleged risks on flimsy assumptions. An infamous March 16th 2020 bombshell report by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London, warned of 510,000 deaths in the country if the country did not immediately adopt a ruthless Covid suppression strategy.
By March 25th, Ferguson’s prediction of half a million fatalities in the U.K. was adjusted downward to “unlikely to exceed 20,000”, a reduction by a factor of 25. This drastic reduction was credited to the U.K.’s lockdown, imposed two days previously. It was later found that Dr. Ferguson’s model was not fit for purpose.
Much as Ferguson’s model drove governments to impose Covid lockdowns affecting nearly three billion people on the planet, Professor Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” model was used by the UN’s IPCC, mainstream media and politicians to push the man-made global warming (now called climate change or climate crisis) hysteria over the past two decades. But like Prof. Ferguson’s model, Dr. Mann’s work has been cited by credible scientists as more in keeping with junk science.
Yet these hysterias prove irresistible for governments which love to accumulate power, activist academics in search of research grants and Left-wing billionaire foundations that support the vast climate industrial complex. The great essayist H.L. Mencken had this to say about governments:
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Yet it would be naïve to view the climate industrial complex as a vast conspiracy. Steve Koonin in his book Unsettled offers a more plausible explanation, seeing a “self-reinforcing alignment of perspectives and interests” among governments doing practical politics à la Mencken, hubristic academics ‘saving the planet’, grifting NGOs, businesses eager for crony capitalist rents, intellectuals virtue-signalling their luxury beliefs and the mass of followers who make the mistake of believing what they’re told.
Dr. Tilak K. Doshi is an economist, a former contributor to Forbe and a member of the CO2 Coalition. Follow him on Substack and X.
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When the last nail is sunk into the Net Zero con, the grifters must be sent to jail. This is nothing less than deliberate treason and genocide.
But all they do each time is say “We were only following the science”—But who funded all of the science? Almost all climate change science is funded by government, and as we know, who pays the piper calls the tune.
Like COVID the lazy, dumb public are completely in on it.
Try tell a random person on the street that there is no climate change, that there is nothing at all to worry about CO2 and they’ll look at you like you’re mad.
For as long as all the brainwashing mechanisms remain in place (centralised education, mass media control) the state and all the grifters that feed off it will continue to control the minds of the public.
” it will continue to control the minds of the public.”
Until the lights go out and they find they cannot have a car anymore and their heating costs are un-affordable. It will start to get gritty and people will then kick back, I sometimes think the legal over-reaction to the riots was because they know the public will soon start to kick back and they wanted to send a warning to anyone thinking of objecting or protesting.
Exactly this – remove social media for a short time and people will have to think for themselves
I have a very different view of social media (and the Internet more generally) I think it’s the only source of real and useful information.
Long form interviews and podcasts in particular are incredibly interesting and give you the chance to find out what interesting and relevant people actually think, unlike the highly edited and manipulated garbage you see on the TV.
True, there is a lot of crap in social.media too. And so this forces users to curate and select their own information.
So I think it’s rather the opposite of what you say. Social media and the Internet are more likely to make people think. Take it away (or censor it) and they can go back to outsourcing all theor thinking to the highly controlled mass media.
Put this way, if state powers are trying to censor it, it’s probably because it makes people think more, not less.
I might define it differently – for me social media is Facebook, instagram, TikTok and the ilk – podcasts, streaming media etc I don’t include in the same bucket. Like you, I love a podcast, sometimes hours long – a real relief from the voxpop 30 sec content!
Testing the water if you like.
All while living standards fall, and more and more private property falls into the hands of Lloyds Banking Group and investors like Blackrock/Vanguard etc.
Another BRIC in the Wall
On Tuesday and Wednesday next week the BRICS group of nations are meeting in Kazan in Russia. One of the key topics is a new BRICS based payment and finance system, which could see BRICS countries move away from needing western currencies for trade. At the same time it would be salutary to look at how the BRICS countries are doing with regard to net-zero – climate madness?
When I consider such matters I find it hard not to conclude that the western world has gone mad and is tearing itself to pieces and is for some bizarre reason committing social and economic suicide. The way things are going it may not be many years before we are begging Russia and China to send us some aid to stave of famine and destitution.
It all emanates from the UN and filters its way down through all National Governments, through all Local Governments, through all education and media, so that it ends up becoming perceived ultimate truth that no one questions. No one likes to make a fool of themselves by questioning things that are viewed as FACT. ——But what we mostly hear from Politicians and Media is not fact at all. It is claims of certainty where there are NONE. Which leads us back to the UN where 75% of the countries have Tyrants, Kings, Colonels and Dictators in charge. The UN Sustainable Development Agenda is about having a world run by technocrats controlling the worlds wealth, resources and YOU. To do this they need a fairly plausible excuse and that excuse is “Climate Change”. Every human activity involves the release of some CO2, so controlling that CO2 with climate policies allows control over every human activity. It really is as crude and as simple as that.
Exactly. This.
Well said
Let’s have electric fire engines! What could possibly go wrong?
Frank Spencer has had children….and they work for the Hesse fire service in Germany:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YkfWyj2TiA
The next instalment of ‘Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em’?:
‘The British Army’s electrification of vehicles as part of Project Lurcher is designed to lower the carbon footprint of the service.’
Project Lurker more like. Imagine the fun the writers of ‘Dads Army’ could have with this dottiness.
‘Don’t panic!’ ‘We’re all doomed’
Lunacy on stilts…….
P.S. Is it just me or is Mr Miliband a dead ringer for the key cast member of SMDAE?
I thought we already had electric fire engines, aka EVs
“Yet it would be naïve to view the climate industrial complex as a vast conspiracy.”
Well, who knows, but the rest of that paragraph sets out some alternative “explanations” that don’t really get to the root cause of the irrationality. If everyone is just following the “orthodoxy”, where and why did this “orthodoxy” start?
Anyway, if you go along with something in collusion with others, for gain, when you know it’s rubbish then that’s a conspiracy.
George Carlin!
UN Agenda 2021 and Agenda 2030 is being imposed on us.
It has nothing to do with the climate, as the UN has admitted. It’s about global wealth re-distribution, one-world governance and control.
https://www.climatedepot.com/2017/05/24/global-warming-is-not-about-the-science-un-admits-climate-change-policy-is-about-how-we-redistribute-the-worlds-wealth/
Exactly.
Edenhoffers words about “we redistribute the world’s wealth by climate policy” is well known to all of us who have looked into this issue for a long time, but what he said has never been on mainstream news and never discussed as far as I am aware. All the general public get is the bad news and the scary “we must fight climate change” or “climate change is real and happening now” stuff so that people have become conditioned into accepting there is a serious climate problem so they more readily accept all of the draconian policies around energy and wealth. It is s pincer movement of government and media.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-oceans-are-boiling-and-other-tall-stories/
A very complementary article by David Wright at TCW which ends with this wholly correct albeit obvious conclusion…
“Will the politicians wake up to this scam? Unfortunately not before colossal damage, even ruination, has been done to our economies and the lives of whole populations have been made miserable.”
A demoralizing situation. But as the hardships ratchet up, surely then more people will take a stand against these fanatics.
High energy prices are not only harmful to traditional industrialisation. Modern computer technology also needs vast amounts of energy. Data centres requiring a gigawatt are being planned in the States, and Microsoft are in the process of buying the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant to just feed their data centre. If our energy prices remain high and intermittent, we can say goodbye to any technology advances that might create economic growth.
The answer to the question posed in the opening paragraphs is – evil intent.
The real question is why?
There is a conspiracy in that, because it got pushed from the very top starting in the Club of Rome.