From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Chris Morrison

This Friday, January 24th, the UK Parliament is due to vote on a Private Member’s Bill that could lead to mass starvation, widespread disease and fatalities and the almost certain collapse of civil liberties and society within a few years. The bill has the support of a third of voting MPs and there is a clear and present danger that it could pass. Many MPs depart for their constituencies on a Friday and 200 remaining zealots could have a chance to swing a vote their way. The bill is a thinly-disguised attempt using meaningless climate and nature crisis verbosity to ration and control almost everything that citizens consume. The obvious attack on civil liberties should serve as a warning to other countries to stand against the Net Zero hysterics that have infiltrated large sections of elite British society.

The bill is coming up for its important second reading and is supported by around 200 members of Parliament, mostly drawn from collectivist, Left-wing parties. Promoted by the Green Blob-funded Zero Hour, support for the Climate and Nature Bill is widespread in liberal elites across Britain. Almost all the 72 Lib Dem MPs led by the clownish Ed Davey are on board along with 90 members of the governing Labour party. A variety of smaller parties are committed along with a couple of crackpot Conservatives, Simon Hoare and Roger Gale. In the House of Lords, the former TV presenter Baroness ‘Joan’ Bakewell is signed up, while Labour City Mayors Andy Burnham and the sinister Sadiq Khan also believe in the ghastly cause. The Church Times reports the support of a number of bishops including the other-worldly former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. In addition, 17 union chiefs, mostly from the non-wealth creating public sector, support the bill.

Starvation, death, disease and civil collapse – an emotional exaggeration or a reasonable conclusion once the facts are examined? Let us consider those facts, something that this unholy dark green money alliance of zealots and boobies do not appear to have done. (Apologies of course to those of them who, in fact, know exactly what is being planned and an earnest request for them to absent themselves from future polite and civilised society.)

The bill has two lines of attack, namely the removal of almost all hydrocarbon use in the near future and a complete ban on the production, exploration, sale or importation of hydrocarbons, referred to in the bill as “fossil fuels”. It appears that a near 90% reduction in hydrocarbon use within a decade is sought and this would affect everything from the energy that heats homes and drives a modern economy to the medicines and food that sustains life. If such a plan was followed in the UK, almost immediate societal collapse would follow. People would freeze in winter, there would be no food in the shops or medicines in the hospitals and pharmacies. There would be no power to run sewage treatment plants or hydrocarbon-based chemicals to clean the water. A complete breakdown of law and order would be likely as citizens survive as best they can.

The bill is short on figures but it calls for UK total emissions of carbon dioxide to be limited  to “no more than a proportionate share” of the United Nations remaining global carbon budget. This “budget” is of course just a made-up figure, along with the 1.5°C temperature warming scare. Paul Homewood has run the figures based on Zero Hour’s own calculations and notes that these suggest dropping emissions down to a third within five years. But this is not the end of the story since the bill mandates that an account must be taken of emissions released by all UK imports. This takes the allowance down to around 10% of the current level. The reductions needed are barely imaginable and Homewood observes that a ban on all imported goods and food would still get the country nowhere near mandated targets. “Quite how we would manage to feed ourselves with half of our food supply gone does not seem to have occurred to the authors of the bill. According to Zero Hour, we would have to survive on ‘low carbon fruit, veg, nuts, pulses and grains’,” he reports.

It is obvious that industry would close, money would flee the country, ports and airports would shut due to lack of traffic, non-meat diets would be strictly rationed, cars would disappear from the roads and even local travel would become difficult. Under such circumstances, civil collapse would be more than likely and might only be averted by the imposition of strict emergency powers and the suspension of democratic liberties and institutions.

All justified, no doubt, in the cause of Saving the Planet.

The current promoter of the bill in Parliament is Roz Savage, a Lib Dem MP who spent part of her youth rowing single-handed around the oceans thinking about the climate and nature. At Cambridge University, according to Wiki, she won a half-blue for competing in the Women’s Lightweight Boat Race. Almost two years of paddling around the Pacific might have been better spent considering the vital role that hydrocarbons play in modern society. Almost half the food produced in the world is reliant on the use of fertiliser derived from hydrocarbons and the scourge of famine has been eliminated in many parts of the world due to its use.

How many supporters of this wretched bill understand how reliant humankind is on naturally-occurring hydrocarbons? And how many care to educate themselves on how the science around climate has been traduced and capture by well-funded political activists, neo-Malthusians and grant-desperate academics. In turn this has produced a media echo-chamber promoting scares that are mostly fake and invented by rigged computer models. If we are charitable, perhaps excuses can be made for the level of ignorance shown by some supporters of the bill. They might not be aware, for instance, that apart from food, heating, transport and plastics, hydrocarbons are used to make medicines. They are present in vaccines, injections and pills. Halogenated hydrocarbons are used in medicine to make anaesthetics like halothane, propellants for inhalers and sedatives like chloral hydrate.

A little science and realism might go a long way for supporters of a bill that seeks to ensure the end of the “exploration, extraction, export and import of fossil fuels by the United Kingdom as rapidly as possible”. Even the mad Miliband, the current Energy Minister, accepts that gas has a part to play in keeping the lights on – hardly a surprise given the wind droughts of this winter, the lack of back-ups and the consequent need for up to 70% gas electricity generation. If realism fails to materialise there are tough choices ahead – who will step up to the plate to take away the life-saving heat that warms the homes of senior citizens or ban the inhalers that calm their winter asthma? Perhaps the 200 MPs listed on the Zero Hour site as supports of the bill will be asked such questions next time they seek the votes of the wider electorate.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.