On Thursday, Mark linked to an opinion piece by the Guardian’s Zoe Williams about Kemi Badenoch’s “Net Zero by 2050 is impossible” speech. Mark didn’t like Williams’ piece, and when I read it, I didn’t like it, either. I’ve been thinking about it off and on since, so you could at least call it thought-provoking – although not in a good way. In what follows I will note and pass comment on some of Williams’s more outré remarks.

The title of the piece, filed under the category of “climate crisis,” is:

Badenoch’s attack on net zero is ridiculous. But so were the right’s Brexit claims, and look where they left us

Williams is going to draw a line between Brexit and opposition to Net Zero.

The subtitle:

The run-up to 2016 shows ‘common sense’ isn’t enough. Even ignorant, reactionary arguments must be properly countered

The diatribe that follows consists of 9 paragraphs.

Paragraph 1: Williams snarks about Badenoch’s lack of expertise in climate science. This invalidates Badenoch’s assessment about the viability of Net Zero. But it only takes a moment’s thought to realise that the same objection can be served up to every politician who advocates for or against Net Zero. You may retort that the same could be said about any topic, and I might agree. How many of today’s Cabinet are domain experts?

While I’m on this point, I will make the observation that climate scientists should be judge-like, disinterested. Too often they stray from reporting the facts as they believe them, to demanding preferred policies (like Net Zero). Science is an attempt to understand the Universe, and the Universe does not have morals, only Laws. There is nothing demanding Net Zero, even if there does happen to be a “Climate Crisis” (there doesn’t). It is for politicians to decide what to do with the dispassionate information that the disinterested scientists have provided to them.

Paragraph 2: Williams notes that the attack on Net Zero has been foretold. Well done, Nostradamus! No-one could have seen that coming! Strange that the sceptics’ line has long been: “As soon as the pips start squeaking, the opposition to Net Zero will begin to grow.” Maybe in Williams’s ivory tower, the pips aren’t squeaking yet. I suppose she does not worry about paying her next energy bill.

Paragraph 3: Williams cites some guy from Led by Donkeys, and his description of the evolution of climate denial, which originates elsewhere. (Maybe from Oreskes, please enlighten me if you know.) There are unpleasant overtones in the description, which goes: first they denied the science. Then they minimised the seriousness of the consequences. Then they said we couldn’t afford to do anything about it. Those are the first three ditches of climate denialism, and there is a fourth, and last, which we’ll come to in due course.

In Paragraph 4, Williams uses this extraordinary expression (as noted by potentilla here):

“Because even while outlets such as GB News have been preaching climate impossibilism for some time, it has until now been broadly disallowable in mainstream political discourse.“

Well of course the Guardian doesn’t like GB News. But can an argument that Net Zero is impossible really be disallowable? What if Net Zero really is impossible? We had better hope that it isn’t, for as a civilisation, we need to move onto other energy sources sooner or later, since hydrocarbons will eventually run out. (Note: these new energy sources will not be weather dependent, not if we want our descendants to live, not merely exist.) But can an opinion about any policy which involves the imposition of frankly draconian measures on the populace be disallowable?

Paragraph 5: Williams thinks that opposition to ULEZ, LTNs and 15-minute cities has something to do with Net Zero. Maybe people don’t want ULEZ because they can’t afford a ULEZ-compliant car? Maybe they don’t want to be locked in their neighbourhood by bus gates? Such policies are “pretty anodyne.” Yes, for you they are, but not for some of us.

Paragraph 6: Opposition to ULEZ etc “takes on the heft of an imagined constituency, people who are fed up with environmentalists.” Do not conflate advocates of Net Zero with environmentalists. True environmentalists oppose the destruction wrought in the name of Net Zero, the forests of wind turbines, the hungry maw of Mr. Drax. But Williams is unaware that there are any negatives at all about the pursuit of Net Zero. That is the only conclusion I can draw from her dismissal of opposition to it.

Paragraph 7: Sane people agree with Williams. The public are still in favour of Net Zero: a facile point, since Net Zero is more than a principle. This is where pollsters tilt the answer in the direction they want. You don’t get Net Zero for nothing. You have to exchange something for it. And it looks as if the payment will be so high that only a fool would agree to the deal. Or someone so insulated from the real world that acceding would cost them naught personally.

Then, disgracefully, we have this: “Getting into the weeds of Badenoch’s own character, a debate is playing out that is also deeply familiar – is she saying this because she’s enchanted by dark money, or is it because she’s an “irresponsible, ignorant, reactionary fool”, as one journalist put it.” So no-one sane can believe these things; anyone who claims they do, is either doing it for money, or because they are an “irresponsible, ignorant, reactionary fool.” Badenoch may be pleased to note that she has struck a nerve. There seems to be no answer other than character assassination.

Paragraph 8: Williams draws an entirely specious parallel between Brexit, i.e. “what happened last time,” and the current slow wave building against the absurdity of Net Zero. No conspiracies are needed to explain either occurrence: there are valid reasons to support both. What rational country would surrender itself to the laws of an undemocratic supranational state, outside of defeat in war? And what rational country would agree to immiserate its population for a policy that will have no measurable effect on climate change?

Then Williams has the gall, or maybe blissful unawareness, to start wondering about where the money was (in Brexit) coming from and by implication where it is coming from now to gin up opposition to Net Zero. Try looking at the funding for the very many groups advocating for this policy, funding that is, in effect, aimed at crushing what is left of a once Great country into a thin paste. (Mark’s recent Avarice in Funderland might be a good place to start.)

In Paragraph 9, mercifully the last, the Donkeys guy talks about the “last trench.” This is the stage at which we sceptics admit that the science was always right, the consequences were always apocalyptic, and that we really could afford the cost of Net Zero, but that, thanks to all the spanners we managed to toss into the works, “it’s too late.”

By that time, one presumes, rats the size of cats will be taking shifts to roam the streets with packs of rabid dogs, our roofs will have been blown off by a tremendous gale, and Williams and the Donkeys guy will be fighting tooth and nail for a lick of a wind-blown piece of paper that three months ago was wrapped around a Big Mac. Then, from stage left, er, right, out will pop a climate sceptic, and he will say, “I admit it. I was lying all the time, but it’s too late now.”

And the righteous will turn on him with knives in their eyes.

Then, thanks to the collapse of civilisation, the emissions of CO₂ will drop to trivial levels, and it will turn out that it wasn’t too late after all, because in due course, everything will return to normal. Except for the rats the size of cats. Our sleek brown friends are staying in my fantasy dystopian future.

Oh, a final note. As far as I heard, Badenoch did not say anything controversial in what might be termed “the real world.” In fact, on my reading, she did not repudiate Net Zero, only its timing, and the lack of a Plan for it. That her speech brought out such agitation in certain quarters only shows how weak their position is. They can’t argue the facts, so have to rely on a code of consensus from which no-one respectable must deviate. But respectable people must try to grab the wheel, for the present course is destruction.

PS. If a pollster asked me if I was in favour of Net Zero, I would not know how to answer. I would have no reason to oppose it in principle. I have reasons to oppose it in practice. A fantasy Net Zero in which there are no negative environmental consequences, no negative consequences for the UK’s wealth, and no negative consequences for the UK’s security, I could not oppose. But only a fool would believe that version of Net Zero exists. In the real world, the people of the UK are better off killing Net Zero rather than themselves.