It’s Toytown basic economics that the price of any commodity or service is determined by the relationship between supply and demand. The less there is of anything, the higher its price will be, depending on the level of demand. The greater the level of supply the lower the price, and thus the greater the demand and usage.
Nothing could exemplify that better than energy. Restricting the supply of energy whether by design or circumstance, or even elevating the price artificially with taxes and levies, is bound to inhibit demand. And that diminishes the economy.
The Telegraph has published an article by Jonathan Leake on how Net Zero has accelerated Britain’s national decline:
For Ed Miliband and Sir Keir Starmer, Net Zero is the route to clean energy, economic growth and turning the U.K. into a global green superpower.
Across the Atlantic, however, Britain’s drive for “decarbonisation” is increasingly seen as an economic experiment – one that risks tipping the U.K. from miniscule economic growth into full-scale decline.
Chris Wright, Donald Trump’s nominee for US energy secretary, has warned that Britain’s rush to ditch fossil fuels in favour of wind and solar power is causing higher prices, driving away energy-intensive businesses and contributing to Britain’s national decline.
“The U.K., although no longer part of the EU, has continued aggressive climate policies that have driven up energy prices for its citizens and industry,” he wrote in a recent report. “The once world-leading United Kingdom now has a per capita income lower than even the poorest state in the United States.”
Leake doesn’t dispute the effects of climate change or “other consequences of greenhouse gas emissions”. His main point is that a key part of Net Zero policy is to reduce energy usage, but only in Britain. How much less?
To quote the Government’s advisory Climate Change Committee: “In our Balanced Net Zero Pathway, the U.K. economy becomes much more energy efficient, with total energy demand falling by around 33% in end-use sectors between now and 2050.”
Improved efficiency – delivering more output for the same amount of fuel, or less – could help to deliver a reduction in energy consumption. Yet huge advances would be necessary to yield a reduction in consumption of a third. Many observers believe the tail will wag the dog when it comes to this target, meaning the U.K. may be forced to curtail energy use in order to hit it.
For Wright and others, slashing energy consumption by a third and still expecting growth is heresy – an economic experiment no other country has achieved, or even attempted before.
Their view – one supported by most economists – is that access to energy has historically always been directly related to prosperity. The more energy we have, the richer we will become. And if we have less, we get poorer.
Britain’s Industrial Revolution, driven by cheap and abundant coal, is proof, Wright says, of the theory. But with decline in energy usage now far advanced, it’s clear the prioritising of climate targets is having a drastic impact on Britain’s wealth and productive capacity.
In 1970, U.K. industry consumed the equivalent of 62 million tonnes of oil each year, making most of what the nation needed including energy intensive products like steel, cement and petrochemicals. Manufacturing was by far the largest sector of the economy, contributing 30.1% of total output.
Last year, manufacturing accounted for just 9% of the U.K.’s economy.
The point is that a key part of Net Zero policy is to reduce energy usage, but only in Britain. Other countries don’t matter because it’s all about the U.K. Government’s climate policy.
For example, one of the U.K.’s proudest boasts is that it has slashed emissions from more than 800 million tonnes in 1990 to just under 400 million tonnes in 2023. These figures refer to the greenhouse gases emitted within Britain’s borders, from power stations, vehicles, homes, offices and industry.
However, it excludes all the emissions generated from things we buy from abroad, including cars, clothes, steel and cement. Such “consumption emissions” have grown, from under 200 million tonnes of CO2 in 1990 to 400 million tonnes today
If you add our overseas and domestic emissions together, the overall U.K. carbon footprint is about 800 million tonnes. This is only a slight decrease from 1990 and the U.K. has paid a pretty high price to achieve it, including continuing high energy prices and increased vulnerability to global price shocks and shortages.
“The U.K. has too little production, too much consumption, too little savings and too much debt,” Dieter Helm, Professor of Energy Economics at Oxford University, wrote recently. “Perhaps not surprisingly, since it takes time for the politics to catch up with the economics, the new Labour Government is in the process of doubling down on all four of these.
“Current (and proposed) economic policy is perpetuating an unsustainable economy. What is unsustainable will not be sustained. It will have to end, probably in a series of economic crises played out into the future. The next generation will pay the price.”
Leake goes on to explain that the U.K. is not the U.S. and does not have abundant supplies of energy on its doorstep. Britain is dependent on imports.
The key conflict then is between replacing old sources of energy with new ones or simply reducing energy consumption. Britain is steadily running down its oil-refining and steel-manufacturing capacity.
For Miliband, falling energy consumption is a sign of progress rather than an ominous portent. A spokesman for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero said: “Making the U.K. a clean energy superpower is essential to end the U.K.’s dependency on insecure fossil fuel markets.”
Exactly where we are headed is therefore not clear. It’s also a moot point whether any government can survive enforcing a vision of the future with policies that seem destined to make people poorer, more immobile, colder, hungrier, and with less and less choice in the matter.
Readers may remember the irony of this pronouncement five-and-a-half years ago:
“We will be able to look back on this period – this extraordinary period – as the beginning of a new golden age for our United Kingdom.”
Boris Johnson, statement to the Commons July 25th 2019
He was right about it being an extraordinary period.
The Telegraph piece is worth reading in full.
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“Leake doesn’t dispute the effects of climate change or “other consequences of greenhouse gas emissions”.”
For him, it is an academic point. It is also difficult to persuade a public (that have been swamped with Green Propaganda for decades) that the simple Settled Science (as pushed by Politicians and the Legacy Media) isn’t settled, and that the Sun has a large influence over the Earth’s climate and explains much. To most, it’s a very different Science, with High Energy Protons, Plasmas and Electromagnetism in the mix. Interesting, Exciting even, but it needs explaining.
However, the NET Zero policies, a non solution to a non problem, are of immediate concern, and the consequences are easily shown. Just look at what is happening in the UK, Australia, in Germany and elsewhere in the EU, where deindustrialisation is occurring.
The sun controls climate, from (2:10):
https://youtu.be/_g6TD6XgXrI
It is easier to ignore whether or not global warming is real since there are too many retards in this country who have been brainwashed over global warming – just see them queuing up for their next booster. Putting forward the case that coping with any changes that do happen – bearing in mind no prediction has ever come true since the scam started – is much cheaper than basically totally destroying your country’s economy and way of life.
In around 2012, a retired nurse told me that we needed Climate Change policies, because of the Precautionary Principle. I did say it, the Precautionary Principle, was appropriate when we didn’t know much, but that the best response was to find out stuff: stuff that would help come up with an appropriate response. And that had happened, and it was ‘adapt, and monitor’.
Guess whether they took the jabs. You don’t have to, do you?
“We will be able to look back on this period – this extraordinary period – as the beginning of a new golden age for our United Kingdom.”
Well, that aged like milk.
A bit like Johnson himself.
The UK is being dismantled ! Maps showing us as just a type of county of the EU were around during Bliars early days as PM !
It is no longer the aim of the UK government to “tackle climate change”. The official objective now is simply to reduce (to net zero) the UK’s share of global greenhouse gas emissions. This is how they justify charging ahead with Net Zero unilaterally when it is obvious that most of the rest of the world will never follow suit. The Lab/Con/Lib/SNP Uniparty is intent on wrecking the country at the bidding of their globalist overlords and it’s not going to have the slightest impact on the global climate: https://metatron.substack.com/p/debunking-the-climate-change-hoax.
This. An up-vote is not enough.
“one of the U.K.’s proudest boasts”
It’s not my proud boast.
In fact I find it unbelievably stupid, and an evil betrayal of the English people.
It should say the UK Government as Net Zero is not something the electorate has had a proper say on.
My impression with the general public is that the vast majority either think it is a load of crap or simply don’t consider it at all. The unthinking just do what they’re told to do and they couldn’t be happy any other way. Thinking they say, does my head in. Look at all the post-industrial wastelands in this country where everyone is on drugs and on the dole and looks like they spent a few months close to Chernobyl. Wales, Scotalnd, Northern Ireland as well. I doubt that these people have been granted any solace through the Green agenda.
Bonkers absolutely bonkers.
Yes, Leake goes on to “explain” that Britain doesn’t have abundant supplies of energy on its doorstep.
“The UK, they point out, no longer has the massive natural energy resources provided first by its coal mines and more recently by North Sea oil and gas. We have little choice but to rely on imports and explore new forms of generation such as renewable energy.”
This is COMPLETELY UNTRUE. It is one of the lies that net zero nutters tell about us.
In fact there is considerable oil and gas left in the North Sea. The government take a tax of over 80% to discourage its exploitation, and have made it clear they will not allow new exploration. It is the government that is killing North Sea oil.
The nutters have also banned fracking in Britain, preventing that source of energy.
And we are still sitting on mountains of coal.
Don’t believe the net zero lies about energy self sufficiency.
It was a measure of the woeful bias in the MSM that the Labour Party was never asked to explain what “Green Technology” actually is (16th century windmills? Chinese solar panels) nor what a “Green Energy Superpower” consisted of other than being a former superpower dragged to its knees by expensive energy…or is the plan that we export renewable energy globally?
Actually maybe Green Superpower is like a “Red Dwarf” or a “Black Hole” – something that happens to a large entity as is goes into catastrophic terminal decline?
I used to be a member of the Association of Industrial Archaeology. Well, it’s going to have its work cut out in the next few years. Britain, the first country to industrialise is now the first to fully de-industrialise. What a distinction – or epitaph! As the late, great Fred Dibnah said: ‘Britain was built by men in overalls, and ruined by men in suits.’ Especially now by one with the brain the size of a millipede. I go back on the AIA being able to cope with the new archaeological sites being created. They’ll be demolished quickly (like the collieries were), labelled ‘brown sites’ and then offered to the uni-partys’ friends the big builders,to cater for the mass of immigrants flowing in from God-knows well.
The rush to ditch hydrocarbons alarms me, as does the ignorance of those leading us down this dangerous path into the unknown. And the statement from the DESNZ spokesman only reinforces my fears. They want to wean us off “inscure fossil fuel markets”. We could be more secure if we relied on the coal, oil and gas within our borders. But, no, they think security will come from sources of electricity that only exist when the weather’s right, or during the hours of daylight.
We may become a “clean energy superpower”, but it would have to be on a part-time basis.