Chris Stark may be the departing chief executive of the UK Climate Change Committee, but he isn’t going quietly. Naturally, both the Guardian and the BBC are happy to publicise his claims.

Yesterday, a Guardian article, in its title alone, assured us that “net zero” has become an unhelpful slogan (per Mr Stark), and that “environmental progress” is being inhibited by a populist response and a culture war around the term. Read on, and we are told that not only has a culture war developed, but also that it is “dangerous”.

Linking to another Guardian article written by Fiona Harvey three months ago, the suggestion is that “sensible” improvements to the economy and to people’s lives are being blocked by a populist response to the net zero label. Sigh. Where to begin?

First of all, the cheap reference to populism (never defined) strikes me as yet another example of the establishment’s contempt for the wishes of the people (aka democracy), as recently evidenced by the European Court of Human Rights decision in the case of Verein Klimaseniorinnen Schweiz and others v Switzerland.

According to the Fiona Harvey article (the link to which is the purported justification for the reference to “sensible improvements to the economy and to people’s lives”), the UK should invest £26Bn per annum in a low-carbon economy:

Investing in energy infrastructure, transport, innovation in new technologies such as AI, and the natural environment would boost the UK’s economy rapidly, the research found.

Strip that out, and what does it mean? “Energy infrastructure” is a reference, I assume, to the hugely expensive panoply of super-pylons, undersea cables, battery storage, hydrogen plants, solar panels, on-and offshore wind farms and all the rest of it, blighting our environment and rendering UK energy supply both more expensive and less reliable. Other than a reference to yet another overly-optimistic paper by Lord Stern and his colleagues, those benefits aren’t explained. Nor is there a rationalisation for the environmental damage caused by such proposals sitting in the same sentence as “the natural environment”. Innovation in new technologies, such as AI, seems to be bizarre to say the least, given that such technologies are likely to require huge amounts of energy, and that is the very thing they are discouraging us from using. The article contains delusional words with little basis in reality.

Next we are told that Mr Stark didn’t expect the net zero slogan to become so associated with the campaign against it. My guess is that this is because he failed to comprehend that, far from offering sensible improvements to the economy and people’s lives, it threatens to destroy the economy, while rendering people’s lives smaller, colder, more miserable, and more expensive. A stark reality that has so far eluded Mr Stark and his ilk, as evidenced by the next quote:

A small group of politicians or political voices has moved in to say that net zero is something that you can’t afford, net zero is something that you should be afraid of … But we’ve still got to reduce emissions. In the end, that’s all that matters.

And there you have it – reducing emissions is all that matters, regardless of the cost. And he wonders why the “net zero” logo is starting to be problematic.

Bizarrely, he seems to be completely adrift regarding the expense and problems associated with heat pumps, claiming that they offer “a low-carbon and potentially low-cost alternative to gas boilers.” Don’t you just love that word “potentially”? The reality is that even with the £7,500 Government grant now on offer, people aren’t interested in heat pumps because they are still far more expensive than gas boilers, often involve massive disruption, and still sometimes leave them feeling cold. Another stark reality.

Reading the Guardian article is like viewing a parallel universe, completely adrift from reality. Take this, for example:

Policymakers should focus instead on what lies behind net zero – investment in the UK’s economy, in ways that would not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions but cut energy use, improve national security, clean up the air and protect nature and the countryside, he added.

Has he seen just how comprehensively Scotland’s nature and countryside has been trashed by wind farms? How does replacing reliable energy with unreliable, expensive and unpredictable energy, with increasing dependency on interconnectors “improve national security”? We aren’t told – presumably because the stark reality is that it doesn’t; on the contrary it damages it.

And so to the final paragraph:

Stark pointed to China, the US and the EU, which are all investing heavily in low-carbon technologies that are cheaper or becoming cheaper than fossil fuels.

Clearly he hasn’t read Jo Nova recently (if at all).

The BBC, naturally, is in on the act, and treats us to Mr Stark’s view that “Rishi Sunak has “set us back” on climate change and left the UK at risk of falling behind other countries…”. It’s a lengthy article, but I read on in vain to discover how exactly this has put the UK “at risk”. We are told that Mr Sunak has sent the world a message that the UK is “less ambitious” than it was, but why that message is risky, or even problematic, isn’t explained. Apparently, it’s “extremely hard to recover”, but those words are left hanging too. Then we are treated to the Government seeking to explain why net zero is important and why its approach to it is the right one. It’s all rather bizarre.

The article then moves on to the recent Scottish debacle with Mr Stark being quoted as saying that “it was “desperately disappointing” that the SNP government” had ditched its climate targets. [Note to BBC – in Scotland they have an SNP/Green coalition government, not one consisting of the SNP alone]. Mr Stark said the targets had been over-ambitious from the start. Well indeed – there’s another stark reality. And a Scottish government spokesperson was quoted as saying that the 2045 net zero target remains in place, despite back-tracking on 2030 and 2040 targets. My rather sceptical view of that is that the Scottish government knows that nobody in office now will still be in post to be held accountable when another stark reality bites, namely that the 2045 target is also over-ambitious, and frankly unattainable.

Perhaps predictably, the BBC article ends with a snide dig at sceptics, with a claim that a vacuum could be created whereby “climate change denial could creep in.” Instead we are left with a load of vacuous statements such as “the wettest 18 months ever in this country” (ever! Seriously?) and “the hottest year on record”. And there it rests. These people really do seem to believe that it’s vital for the UK to achieve net zero in order to prevent climate change, despite the stark reality being that nothing the UK does can make any measurable difference to anything climatic (though their plans will leave us poorer, colder and more miserable, and our countryside an industrialised hell-scape). Perhaps the penny hasn’t yet dropped after all. .