By Vijay Jayaraj

Brazil’s prosperity hinges on its capacity to harness the foundational element of any economy: energy. However, for millions of Brazilians, the path to economic advancement is complicated by the hypocritical “green” agendas of leaders in developed economies that have benefited from fossil fuels since the beginning of the industrial era.

As an Indian and someone with shared developmental interests in the BRICS economic bloc, I have been gratified by the hydrocarbon-driven growth of India to a $3.7 trillion economy over the past two decades. Other developing countries like India have transformed their economic despair to promising futures through the unhindered use of fossil fuels. Brazil’s future — now clouded by pressures to abandon coal, oil and natural gas — should be no different.

Fossil Fuels are the Keystone of Flourishing Economies

The wealth of Europe and North America is undoubtedly linked to the strategic use of fossil fuels. Since the 1950s, the transformative power of oil, gas, and coal has propelled manufacturing industries into a new era, culminating in the elevated quality of life enjoyed in the modern world.

With an estimated gross domestic product (GDP) of around $2.1 trillion, Brazil’s economy is on par with those of Russia and India — two other founding members of BRICS. In the context of Brazil’s policy planning, India is particularly relevant because of the countries’ similar challenges with poverty.

India’s GDP has undergone a meteoric rise, increasing from a modest $470 billion in 2000 to a staggering $3.7 trillion today.

How did this remarkable growth come about? The answer lies primarily in India’s bold approach to energy utilization, fully harnessing local coal reserves and becoming one of the world’s largest importers of oil and gas. In addition, with a deadline of 2070, India has the longest timeline of any country for achieving the Net Zero commitment of moving away from fossil fuels. And the country has made no categorical promise of meeting the objective.

Brazil’s Energy Pathway Should Be No Different

Brazil must adopt a similarly pragmatic approach. Currently, about 60% of the country’s electricity comes from Brazil’s abundant hydroelectric sources. Coal, oil, and gas together constitute only 10% of electricity. However, when it comes to total primary energy consumption, fossil fuels constitute about half and hydroelectric just under a third.

These are significant contributions from reliable sources, but Brazil is far from achieving universal access to affordable energy.

A 2022 study found that “11% of households still live in conditions of energy poverty, and in rural areas this number reaches 16%.” Households with adequate energy supplies had incomes at least twice of those in energy poverty. Clearly, energy will be critical not just for growth of national GDP but also for the socio-economic improvement of individual families.

When Lula Da Silva became President in 2023, he declared that he would reverse his predecessor’s cuts to Brazil’s ambitious climate targets, renewing an emphasis on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and signaling a rejection of fossil fuels. Brazil’s 2016 plan was to have 2030 emissions be 43% of 2005 levels. This has now been increased under Lula to 51%.

Lula’s new policy has not had a major impact on the nation’s oil sector yet. Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company, may ascend to the position of the third-largest oil producer globally by 2030, only behind Saudi Arabia and Iran. In December, Brazil auctioned off more than 602 lots for oil and gas exploitation. Experts believe it would be impossible for Lula to reduce fossil fuel dependency without missing goals to alleviate poverty.

For Brazil, the plan for economic growth is straightforward: Improve existing hydroelectric power systems, continue with expansion of the oil sector, and remove obstructions to the free flow of reliable and dependable coal supplies.

President Lula and future Brazilian leaders must resist the pressure of influential anti-fossil fuel lobby groups located in Washington, D.C., New York and Brussels if the country is to make any meaningful economic progress. The nearly 61 million Brazilians living on less than $6.85 a day deserve nothing less.

This commentary was first published at Real Clear Markets on May 27, 2024.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, U.K.

The Battle of the Climate Hypotheses: The Green-House Gas Forcer vs. The Winter Gatekeeper Round 2: Climate Shifts – Are They for Real?

Gabriel Oxenstierna

The climate system persistently tries to restore radiative imbalances through the meridional transport of heat via atmospheric and ocean circulation systems that control the poleward flux of latent and sensible heat, see the first article in this series, here.

The “Winter Gate-keeper hypothesis” [WGH] claims that the climate exhibits decades-long heat transport regimes separated by more or less abrupt shifts: “… climate regimes are distinct states of atmospheric circulation with different levels of poleward heat transport. Rather than changing gradually, these regimes can shift abruptly from one state to another.”[2, p. 337]

Climate regimes that are ended by climate shifts are a fundamental feature of the WGH, as they are an expression of the natural cycles that are essential to it.[2, ch. 32-33] These regimes manifest as trends in oceanic and atmospheric oscillations, in varying heat transport intensities, and in altering surface temperature trends.

Importantly, the WGH claims that changes in the flux resulting in climate shifts will be sufficient to change the radiative balance so that planet Earth either cools or warms as a result. The shifting transport regimes of heat and moisture are the fundamental explanation to climate change, says WGH.

The Green-house Gas forcer climate hypothesis doesn’t recognize the naturally occurring climate shifts on a global scale, as they don’t fit the hypothesis of a changing climate responding to gradually increasing GHG levels. Even if some climate shifts can be shown to exist, they are presumed not to be significant enough to change the global radiative balance. IPCC also doesn’t mention climate shifts or climate regimes as concepts per se.[3] Climate shifts are sorted under the category ‘internal variability’, whose effects are set to zero:

The only climate shift in the modern era that is somewhat accepted in the climate science occurred 1976. It has been studied extensively and is evident in many climate-related variables and had a lot of effects on e.g. marine ecology.[4][5][6] This is how the 1976 climate shift is described in the WGH literature:

“Recent global warming began in 1976 with a sudden climate shift in the Pacific Ocean that increased zonal atmospheric circulation and decreased poleward heat transport, affecting the global temperature trend. As a result, the multidecadal oceanic oscillations changed from a cold phase, which had led to the 1945-1975 cooling period, to a warm phase.
The abrupt climate shift of 1976 revealed the existence of multidecadal climate regimes separated by abrupt transitions. They result from changes in the global atmospheric circulation that establish distinct poleward heat transport regimes.”[2, p.342, my emph.]

The 1976 shift is thus the starting point for looking at presumptive climate shifts with opposite effects on the dominating wind patterns, the poleward heat transport and warming. One such shift happened around 1944/45 and a more recent one is claimed by the WGH to have happened around 1997.

What drives the climate shifts?

The basic concept of WGH is that polewards Meridional Transport (MT) of heat and moisture controls climate change. An increase in MT speeds up the energy transport to the polar regions, enhances radiation to space especially in the Arctic, and consequently acts as a negative feedback.

The first order driver of MT is the steep latitudinal temperature gradient (LTG; or “gradient” for short) between the tropics and the polar regions. “The LTG is a central property of Earth’s climatic system at all time scales. It drives the atmospheric-oceanic circulation and helps explain the propagation of orbital signatures through the climatic system, including the Monsoon, Arctic Oscillation, and ocean circulation.”[1, p.86][10]

The gradient arises from the differential radiative heating between tropical and polar latitudes and drives the poleward heat transport. It thereby acts as a thermodynamic engine of the planet’s climate:  “MT is the climate control knob, and it responds primarily to the LTG”. [1, p.542] Now, this gradient displays a multi-decadal variation:

A higher temperature gradient enhances the polewards heat transport, and vice versa. During the climate shift around 1945 global temperatures peaked as the gradient reached its weakest value and heat transport slowed, (period ‘A’/yellow bar in figure 2). From there the gradient started to increase, heat transport picked up steam which helped the climate to cool down in the following decades, ‘B’:

In the 1960s and early 70s the gradient grew bigger, the poleward heat transport improved and global temperatures cooled somewhat. But again the climate shifted. In the decades after the climate shift 1976, the gradient has gotten ever smaller (‘C’ and ‘D’ in fig. 2). This has negatively influenced the heat transport since 1976 and contributed to a warming climate, especially in the high north.

Transporting heat and moisture

MT is a polewards transport of heat and moisture. Sensible heat is transported in all layers of the atmosphere up to ToA, whereas latent heat is transported as moisture (water vapor) in the lower atmosphere. Water vapor in the atmosphere acts as a means of storing heat that can be released later. (See the appendix for some further explanation.)

The total precipitable water (TPW) in the air column can be used as a proxy for the amount of moisture available for MT, and for the rate of atmospheric overturning. The climate regimes and shifts (A-D) line up nicely in the TPW developments:

The TPW increases long-term as a result of global warming and there is almost 10 percent more water in the atmosphere today than 120 years ago. Warmer air holds more water, which enhances the convection and advection processes in the water cycle. It is well established that the intensity of the tropical Hadley cells have increased, and they have also significantly expanded polewards since 1997. Also the Ferrel cells show similar increases. As a result of these shifts, we have a positive trend in the polewards export of net energy from the tropics since around 2000, driving the MT, see previous post (fig. 4).

Was there a climate shift 1997?

The variations in the gradient (fig. 2) as well as in TPW corroborate the claims of climate shifts in 1945 and 1976. But what about the climate shift 1997 that has been proposed by WGH? [1, ch. 11.4] We had a peak in global temperatures during the strong El Niño 1997/98, followed by a temperature hiatus up until 2015. Still, the longer-term global warming trend has remained intact since 1976 with no signs of a climatologically relevant climate shift in global temperature data (fig. 3). The gradient in figure 2 also shows no signs of a shift after 1997. There are also no signs of a climate shift 1997 in the Earth energy imbalance (EEI) or Ocean heat content (OHC) data. However, there are other signs of a shift in 1997, e.g. in the water cycle (fig. 4) and in various climate indexes in the Arctic.

There is an on-going change in the global heat transport system, and it has resulted in an increase in the magnitude of poleward transport from 1997 in spite of the LTG getting continuously smaller. Apparently, some counter-balancing factors have been more important, such as the shift in the TPW. The Arctic has had a dramatic warming during this period, the ‘Arctic amplification’, caused by enhanced heat transport in the atmosphere and the oceans. This has reduced the temperature gradient, and apparently made other factors such as the TPW shifts more important.

Changes in the water cycle are consistent with all the claimed climate shifts, including 1997. This implies that changes in the water cycle are essential to MT, as seen in the significant developments of TPW in figure 4. We also have a lot of evidence of the 1997 shift in the Arctic, as well as in cumulative indexes of various multi-decadal climate oscillations such as AMO, ENSO and the PDO.[1, fig. 11.10]

Answering the headline question: Yes, it is clear from the data and the literature that climate regimes and climate shifts driven by transport of heat and moisture are for real. That is true not only in the modern era, but has characterized the climate throughout the Holocene, and more.[10] But it is also clear, that there are no regular interactions, or regular cycles: some fundamental global climate variables involved in the 1976 shift were not affected in 1997.

Finally, green-house gas forcing via CO₂ has no role to play in the climate shifts during the modern era. First of all, CO₂ is monotonically increasing throughout all the mentioned climate shifts, and secondly, it’s effect on heat transport has been deemed to be “negligible”.[10]

The next round will bring the battle to the Arctic, the home arena for the WGH.

Appendix: a note on sensible and latent heat

The water cycle involves around 10 times more vertical net heat transport as latent flux compared to sensible heat transport. But if we look at meridional heat transport beyond the tropics, less than half is horizontally advected as latent energy compared to sensible heat.

The meridional heat transport in the climate system can be thought of as being maintained by three components: the dry air heat transport AHT_DSE, the ocean heat transport, and the latent heat ‘joint’ mode AHT_LE.[7] In the polar latitudes the transport of dry air heat dominates over the transport of latent heat:

References

[1] Vinós, Javier, Climate of the Past, Present and Future: A scientific debate, 2nd ed., Critical Science Press, 2022.

[2] Vinós, Javier. Solving the Climate Puzzle: The Sun’s Surprising Role, Critical Science Press, 2023.

[3] IPCC AR6 WG1, Summary for Policymakers (SPM), figure SPM.2, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/summary-for-policymakers/

[4] Recent observed interdecadal climate changes in the northern-hemisphere. Trenberth, AMS 1990, https://doi.org/doi:10.1175/1520-0477(1990)071<0988:ROICCI>2.0.CO;2

[5] From Anchovies to Sardines and Back: Multidecadal Change in the Pacific Ocean, Chavez and 3 co-authors, Science 2003, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1075880

[6] Global Variations in Oceanic Evaporation (1958–2005): The Role of the Changing Wind Speed, Lisan Yu, J.of Cl. 2007, https://doi.org/10.1175/2007JCLI1714.1

[7] Decomposing the meridional heat transport in the climate system, Yang and 4 co-authors, Clim Dyn 2015, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-014-2380-5

[8] Ocean-atmosphere climate shift during the mid-to-late Holocene transition, Morley and 2 co-authors, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2013.11.039

[9] A new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts, Tsonis and 4 co-authors, https://doi.org/10.1029/2007GL030288

[10] Heat Transport Compensation in Atmosphere and Ocean over the Past 22 000 Years, Yang and 5 co-authors, Nature 2015, https://doi.org/10.1038/srep16661

To ‘corral’ is to enclose, envelop, fence, pen, coop, cage.   It is the opposite of freedom.   We don’t escape this by claiming a love of freedom.  Can we escape this by being resilient?

I am a bit tired of the freedom mantra.  It has given a lot of accredited propagandists the opportunity to speak nonsense when they could be testing perceived barriers to freedom.

They suggest there is chaos, when all I see are cycles.  To suggest that change is bad, when change is the only constant in life and at coral reefs.

Understanding, derived from truth is much more important than freedom – and it is harder, it requires some discipline.   And when it comes to the Great Barrier Reef it requires the ‘talking heads’ to get in the water, and to observe.

Perhaps resilience begins with some awareness of the reality of the situation, and after that some historical perspective.

What does it mean to be resilient – for a coral reef, for a community, for an individual?  How can we measure resilience?  It is important.

According to the American Psychological Association: “Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioural flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands. [end quote]

So, what does it mean to adapt?  And what should we be adapting to?  And what is more important – freedom or truth in terms of being resilient and being adaptable.

There are usually choices.   But those forcing change don’t usually agree when an individual refuses to be corralled in a particular direction, and instead smashes through a perceived barrier.   Of course, that requires a level of fitness, a level of fitness beyond that assumed by the builder of the barrier seeking to corral.

Earlier today I posted a comment on Robin Guenier’s most recent piece about the UK’s Net Zero Policy. I was irritated (yet again) by an article in the Guardian. This one was headed “Factcheck: no, Richard Tice, volcanoes are not to blame for climate change” and was written by Simon Evans of Carbon Brief. Suffice it to say that Carbon Brief and the people who write for it see the world very differently from me. One example of our substantial differences can be found here. My opinion is that Carbon Brief’s work is anything but even-handed, and that they need to be fact-checked every bit as thoroughly as they feel the need to fact-check others. It’s a war of attrition, and although they are the ones with the resources and open access to a national newspaper that is fully on-board with their agenda, I am not inclined to be ground down and let them get away with peddling opinion under the guise of fact-checking. And so, having commented earlier, I decided that a more detailed analysis might be useful.

As I said in my earlier comment, I am not a fan of Richard Tice, and I shall not be voting for his Reform Party at the forthcoming general election. Nevertheless, I don’t believe he should be unfairly traduced. If Mr Evans wishes to present his disagreements with Mr Tice’s comments and with the Reform Party manifesto, that is of course his prerogative, but I bridle more than a little when I see an opinion piece masquerading as a fact-check.

The opening paragraph of the fact-check gets things off to a dubious start:

Despite 40C record heat in 2022 and the wettest 18 months on record this winter, this general election seems set to test the UK’s political consensus on climate change like never before.

The reference to 40C heat provides a link – but it links only to a Carbon Brief article. Fair enough – I shamelessly link to my own articles from time to time – but it doesn’t offer a factual, as opposed to an opinionated, basis for the claim. As we sceptics constantly point out, claims of record 40C heat in the UK are driven by dodgy practices, such as relying on low-grade weather stations that don’t meet WMO standards and which have high margins of error, as well as taking temperature readings when jet fighters are landing nearby, that sort of thing. The Carbo Brief article that is linked to duly relies on the Coningsby measurement that marginally exceed 40C. Well, if Carbon Brief can cite their own work, then we at Cliscep can do likewise – here’s Jit’s take-down of the hype around that dubious record temperature.

The wettest 18 months claim is backed up by another link, but only to a paywalled Financial Times article. Having said that, the claim is all over the internet, and whatever the truth of it, it has been unusually wet over much (but not all) of the country. Regardless, those two statements about weather don’t “prove” man-made climate change, nor do they make the case (implicit within the paragraph) that the UK’s political consensus on climate change is a good thing. After all, isn’t the whole point of an election to present the electorate with a choice, rather than with a consensus whereby it doesn’t matter who you vote for?

After observing that Reform has eschewed the consensus in favour of outright climate scepticism, we are told:

Last Friday, in an interview with BBC Breakfast, the Reform leader, Richard Tice, offered a summary, saying that the UK should scrap its net zero target since, he claimed, it would “make zero difference to climate change”. Instead, he argued we should simply adapt to global heating.

The link offered to the BBC Breakfast interview doesn’t work (though in the absence of a TV licence, I couldn’t watch it anyway), so I have to rely on Mr Evans’ summary of what was said. If Mr Tice said that the UK’s net zero target should be scrapped because it make zero difference to climate change, then Mr Tice is correct. The UK contributes less than 1% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions on an ongoing basis, and most of the rest of the world is increasing those emissions. Nothing the UK does can make any measurable difference to the climate. Adapting to climate change, rather than, Canute-like, forlornly and unsuccessfully seeking to stop it, is a sensible and thoughtful position to adopt.

We are told that he then cited the IPCC and blamed the sun and volcanoes for climate change. It’s at this point that Mr Evans actually makes a good point – the IPCC does indeed blame humankind for all of the warming that the planet is currently experiencing. And yet climate scientists seem to be at a loss to explain current levels of warming that weren’t predicted by their climate models. They are very reluctant to admit that the Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption has had anything to do with it, but it might have done. A lively discussion has been taking place in comments on my article about volcanoes here.

Mr Evans tells us that:

Contrary to Tice’s first falsehood, reaching net zero emissions is the only way to stop climate change, according to the IPCC.

This is where context and nuance are important. It’s true that the IPCC is keen on reducing emissions to net zero in order (in the view of its authors) to stop climate change. However, they are clear that those reductions have to take place globally. I challenge Mr Evans to find a single statement from the IPCC to the effect that a single country such as the UK can do anything about climate change by unilaterally achieving net zero if the rest of the world doesn’t follow suit. And it is a fact that most of the rest of the world most certainly isn’t following suit.

We are told that Mr Tice said “Net zero will make zero difference to climate change, as confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that says if you get to net zero, it’ll make no difference to sea level rise for between 200 and 1,000 years.” I suspect that the IPCC is less sanguine than that, and I confess I haven’t checked. However, claiming something over a 200 to 1,000 year time frame is different to claiming that it won’t ever happen or that the IPCC says it won’t happen. And so Mr Evans’ rebuttal is not directly on point when he says “Second, far from saying that net zero makes no difference to sea level rise, the IPCC says the rise will be greater if emissions continue to increase.” The IPCC does say that, but pointing that out doesn’t meet head-on the focus of Mr Tice’s claim. As for the logic of adaptation ahead of mitigation, we are told:

Third, while adaptation is important, it cannot be the only response to global heating. The IPCC says there is a “rapidly closing window of opportunity” to secure a livable and sustainable future for all” by cutting emissions, and that many will be unable to adapt if this opportunity is missed.

Perfectly true, but again it neither demonstrates that Mr Tice is offering misleading facts, nor does it meet his argument. If the rapidly closing window of opportunity is about to shut, because the rest of the world is leaning on the window rather than keeping it open, then it is futile for the UK to fight them. And, selfish though it may be, if the UK can, unlike some countries, fairly readily adapt to climate change, then the fact that adaptation is a problem for others doesn’t mean that it’s wrong for UK politicians to put UK adaptation policies ahead of futile attempt to mitigate. Next we are told:

Finally, it is a fact that we humans are causing the climate crisis, not the sun or volcanoes as Tice implies. The IPCC says it is “unequivocal” that humans are responsible for heating the planet and that our emissions have caused 100% of recent warming.

Well now, what is a fact? Is it a fact that there is a climate crisis? For the likes of Mr Evans, that is unarguable, but it’s nevertheless only an opinion, however firmly held. If there isn’t a climate crisis, then humans aren’t causing something that isn’t happening. It’s true that the IPCC says it’s “unequivocal” that humanity’s emissions have caused 100% of recent warming, but that doesn’t make it a fact. It’s the considered opinion of a lot of scientists, and it’s not unreasonable to give due weight to their opinion. Nevertheless, opinion, however much based on science, is not fact. Scientists have been known to be wrong, and even scientific consensus can change. After all, isn’t that how science works?

Next Mr Evans moves on to attacking the section of the Reform Party’s manifesto dealing with energy and environment. He claims to have counted “30 false or misleading statements about the climate crisis and efforts to limit global heating” but is sadly a little coy with regard to identifying and dealing with them one by one. Instead he falls back on a link to an article in Skeptical Science, and the irrelevance of claims that CO2 is essential for photosynthesis and represents only 0.04% of the atmosphere. It’s true, I am happy to accept, that these points are irrelevant to the question of the UK’s energy policy, but they are not false or misleading. The same can be said about talking points such as the Roman Warm Period and vine-growing in the north of England in centuries gone by. Mr Evans dismisses this stuff, reasonably enough inasmuch as it is irrelevant to an adult discussion of energy policy, but his own claim that such warmth was only a regional phase and was quite different from “unparalleled” “global heating” today is itself not without controversy.

Next it becomes really interesting:

It falsely claims that climate action has “sent energy bills soaring”. In fact it is the UK’s heavy reliance on gas that is predominantly to blame.

There’s just one problem – it isn’t a false claim. His link to his own assertion on “X” and to another article he wrote at the Guardian linking to another piece of work he produced at Carbon Brief don’t change that. Please do refer once more to The Lies Have It to understand how Carbon Brief’s assertions about the relative prices of gas and of renewables must be taken with a large pinch of salt. You might consider the egregious basis on which such claims are made by reference to the Levelised Cost of Electricity while you’re at it.

Next we’re told that Reform is wrong to blame Net Zero for increasing inflation, because Mr Evans believes that the key drivers of inflation are fossil fuel price shocks and climate-induced food price rises. Linking to himself again on “X” and to a European Central Bank research bulletin whose authors argue for this point of view and urge that models should incorporate these assumptions, is not the same as proving that Reform’s claims are wrong. And we sceptics, unlike much of the populace from whom the costs have been well hidden, are very much aware of the high levels of subsidies paid to renewable energy providers and of the costs loaded on the suppliers of fossil fuels.

Moving now towards the end of the article we find this:

Reform says net zero will only be possible at a cost “estimated by the National Grid and others at some £2tn or more”. This is misleading by omission. In 2020, National Grid did indeed put the cost of a net zero energy system at around £3tn. The next line from the document by National Grid pointed out: “Scenarios where we hit net zero in 2050 … incur broadly the same costs as the scenario where we miss our net zero target.”

I found this paragraph to be contain one of the most bizarre lines of argument in the whole article. If a net zero energy system will cost around £3tn, then that represents a cost of well over £100,000 per UK household. To claim that this can be ignored because the costs would be broadly the same if the 2050 net zero target was missed is itself misleading by omission. The omission in question being what the cost would be if we didn’t have a net zero target.

It’s worth taking a look at the section of the website dealing with this on the part of National Grid ESO. I can find nothing in it that justifies a claim that not pursuing net zero (as opposed to pursuing it but failing to meet the 2050 target date) would be just as expensive. On the contrary, it contains a telling little sentence that Mr Evans didn’t share with his readers:

Importantly, our project doesn’t provide the total cost of meeting net zero to UK Plc and does not include costs related to energy demands from a number of areas such as aviation, shipping, rail, agriculture and industrial and commercial heat demand.

I still don’t know what are the 30 false or misleading statements contained in Reform’s manifesto relating to energy and environment, but I trust Mr Evans isn’t referring to this, because so far as I can see every word is true:

Net Zero sends our money abroad and damages critical industries like steel production. The government has turned Britain from being an exporter of oil and gas into a net importer. They have bet our future on unreliable wind and solar power and destroyed our energy security. It’s time for a common sense energy strategy.

As a postscript, I see that BBC Verify has weighed in with an article headed “Is Labour’s 2030 green energy goal realistic and how would it affect bills?”. It’s rather more even-handed than I’m used to seeing, possibly because the BBC top brass must be acutely aware that their every word will be scrutinised during the general election claim for any evidence of partiality. Sadly, although it is reasonably balanced, it also strikes me as being rather lightweight and lacking the in-depth analysis I would have preferred to see.

Still, at least the BBC is trying – for the duration of the election campaign – to avoid falling into one faction or the other so far as net zero and energy policy are concerned. Meanwhile, Mr Evans is in one faction and I am in the other. What is fact and what is fiction is, regrettably, in the eye of the beholder.