By Paul Homewood
Last month Dale Vince was interviewed on Talk TV , alongside Ben Pile.
Vince made several highly contentious claims, not to mention some outright lies:
Vince began with his laid back, hippy style, but when presented with some inconvenient facts reacted with childish facial expressions, a series of ad homs, and finally resorted to continually talking over Ben Pile, a tactic we have often seen from XR nutters.
He begins by claiming that pursuing Net Zero won’t cost a penny, will boost the economy, lower energy bills and make us all better off. The interviewer, Ian Collins, points out the the OBR have put a cost of £350 billion on Net Zero (itself an absurdly low figure – the Public Accounts Committee reckon between £25bn and £50bn a year), but Vince simply ignores this and continues his rant.
His next claim is that the UK subsidises the fossil fuel industry to the tune of £10 billion a year. This is quite simply an outright lie. North Sea oil and gas has brought in tens of billions in tax revenue, over and above normal Corporation Tax. The OBR’s latest projections say that North Sea revenues will top £43 billion over the next five years alone.
It is a weakness of TV interviewers that they so often fail to challenge liars like Dale Vince on specific issues such as this. Instead Collins just lets him continue his rant on another topic, which turned out to be EVs.
Ben Pile had made the entirely sensible point that the ban on ICE cars would effectively take peoples’ cars away from them, either because of the unaffordability of EVs or the impracticability of charging where there is no off street access. Vince pompously called this stupid, explaining that drivees could still buy second hand cars. Maybe, but for how long?
This is where Collins should have stepped in and asked Vince how people were expected to find an extra £10k for an EV, not to mention £15K for a heat pump.
But then Dale Vince totally lost the plot, making several nonsensical claims:
- The world would hit 3C of warming within 5 years (according to the IPCC, he claimed)
- We are in danger of runaway climate change, the climate is getting out of control
- 4 million have died because of climate change in the last 30 years.
Ben Pile calmly points out that deaths from extreme weather have fallen by 98% in the last 100 years, and there was no evidence that climate change had affected food production or disease. Vince has no answer to any of this, so simply pulls a few pathetic faces, and then tries to shout over him again.
Vince continues to claim that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, but nobody is stopping him building wind and solar farms – indeed he says his company is already constructing the latter. But sadly Collins fails to question what happens when the wind is not blowing and the sun shining.
But Vince did make the interesting claim that rooftop solar could supply 13% of Britain’s electricity, which would equate to 37 GW. In midsummer, this amount of solar capacity would totally overload the grid along with all of the wind power planned, leading to excess electricity, a price crash and huge constraint payments. Meanwhile in winter all of that solar capacity will be next to useless.
It is of course fundamental technical issues concerning the intermittency of wind and solar power which are crucial, for both the cost and security of our energy system. Hopefully whoever interviews him next will insist that he answers these and other factual questions, and not allow him just to rant.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
July 9, 2023 at 12:21PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 