Photosynthesis [image credit: Nefronus @ Wikipedia]
Net Zero Watch summarises: ‘Rishi Sunak’s recent speeches on Net Zero are long on rhetoric, but the decarbonisation juggernaut rumbles on uninterrupted.’ — Pursuing climate obsession at a slightly slower rate still doesn’t work. Carbon dioxide isn’t a pollutant.
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Over in the Spectator, Fraser Nelson is inviting us to welcome a change in Rishi Sunak’s tone on Net Zero, says Andrew Montford @ NZW.
His interest has been piqued by the PM’s speech at COP28, which he says shows that Sunak has “started the difficulty work of moving the UK climate agenda from fantasy to policy”.
There will be no more precautionary-principle daftness, we are told, and attention is drawn to the Prime Minister’s claim that from now on decarbonisation will be pursued “in a more pragmatic way, which doesn’t burden working people”.
Nelson is quite correct that the whole drive for Net Zero is a fantasy. It is the triumph of political posturing and bureaucratic trickery over rational decisionmaking.
Even when the Climate Change Act was passed, the costs were double the benefits. Recent figures from the Climate Change Committee suggest that the ratio has risen to over 4 to 1, but even that result relies on the Net Zero cost estimate, a dodgy dossier of considerable disrepute [1,2 – see source]. A more realistic figure is likely to be 10 to 1 or more [3].
Yes, facing the threat of being one percent worse off, the whole political establishment (and Starmer is just as bad as Sunak) is agreed that we should adopt policies that will make us ten percent worse off instead. It is hard to express just how mad this is.
The result, namely wholesale deindustrialisation, has been predictable. What Nelson proclaims as a triumphant reduction carbon dioxide emissions is in fact just the result of the wanton destruction of manufacturing industry in this country. In the last two months, we have lost our last blast furnace and one of our six oil refineries. Our last aluminum smelter and last fertiliser factory are long since gone.
Make no mistake, this is a civilisational threat. And there haven’t even been any reductions in emissions – we have simply exported them to China, while adding some new ones as goods are shipped from Shanghai rather than manufactured here.
Nelson’s idea that Sunak is changing direction is also hard to take seriously. There is a pronounced sense of déjà vu here of course, because we were told exactly the same thing in September, in the Prime Minister’s much-vaunted Net Zero speech.
Heralded as a major change of direction, it has amounted in practice to nothing at all. The only concrete effect has been minor delays to a couple of bans and cancellation of a lot of other policies that didn’t exist in the first place.
Meanwhile, there has been a palpable intensification of the Net Zero madness.
Full article here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
December 5, 2023 at 07:27AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 