Green targets throw up massive contradictions – and no one is willing to resolve them says Andrew Orlowski.
See below for the full article which I am re-publishing as I have had several requests to publicise this new petition to repeal the UK 2008 Climate Change Act.
I am also taking the opportunity to attach links to two further articles from Australia on the same subject as follows:
Despite the green revolution, record energy use, the world still runs on 82% fossil fuels - by Jo Nova - 27.06.23
Monash, a Fresh Clown in the Climate Circus - by Tony Thomas for The Quadrant - 27.06.23
Green targets throw up massive contradictions – and no one is willing to resolve them says Andrew Orlowski.
“The rockets go up, who cares where they come down?” sang Tom Lehrer. “That’s not my department”.
He was satirising the moral negligence of the great German rocket engineer Werner Von Braun, who was poached from Peenemünde to build the US ballistic missile programme. But we don’t need to look far to see Von Brauns today. They are all around us.
Take climate change targets. How good it must have felt for politicians to set those lofty goals, knowing that someone else must deal with the cost and the implementation? But now the bills are now arriving, and they’re bringing a world of hurt.
To sum up: Western policy elites have embarked on the electrification of society, replacing hydrocarbons in housing and transport, but without the technology to replace it well.
Path to net zero
The UK’s climate change committee (CCC), which advises the Government on net zero, has modelled a way to reach the target by 2042.
It includes a 50 per cent reduction in meat and dairy consumption, along with the production and public acceptance of lab-grown meat.
It would also require a 15 per cent cut in air passenger levels compared to pre-pandemic levels, and the widespread acceptance of heat pumps in homes.
The UK would also need to plant 70,000 hectares of trees per year by 2050, a roughly five-fold increase on today’s levels.
The cost of renewable energy would also have to further halve by 2050, the CCC said.
The CCC said it was a “highly optimistic scenario, stretching feasibility in a wide range of areas”.
The laptop elites of Davos who back this transition are not technologically savvy people – they’re fundamentally frivolous people, anecdotalists who yawned their way through their science GCSEs. A squiggle on the back of an envelope will impress them.
They must be astonished how easy the “energy transition” project has been so far, with Maoist cadres of activist investors ensuring the most valuable stuff our economy depends on is left in the ground.
Electrification is a profound change, however, and in practice, means two things. The public is being required to surrender a superior product for an inferior one. And secondly, the infrastructure to transition to these inferior products cheaply and reliably does not exist.
To make an additional rod for our backs, Governments have decreed that a proportion of the replacement energy for hydrocarbons must come from methods that we wisely abandoned in the Middle Ages: the sun and the wind.
Even if we could acquire superior equivalents to a combination gas boiler or a 38 tonne diesel truck, in reality they’d go unused. The capacity required to generate the required level of supply, even expensively, will be absent for a very long time.
So it’s fairly safe to predict that net zero will fail – those targets will be missed. But for now, the policy throws up massive contradictions, while resolving them is nobody’s department.
For example, ministers say we need a multiple of the electricity generation capacity we have today. The National Grid says we’ll all have to get by with a lot less. In fact, so many contradictory measures have been passed, that “it is now beyond any minister or civil servant to name them all, let alone understand how they interact with each other,” Professor Dieter Helm warns in his latest bulletin on the UK energy industry, published this month.
“The resulting complexity is the prime route to enabling lobbying by vested interests, and the consequent capture of each of the technology-specific interventions,” Helm adds.
The pain is being most acutely felt in Germany. Auto manufacturing is the bedrock of the economy, earning over €500bn (£430bn) of revenue, some 20pc of national income. Car culture is deeply enmeshed in Germany’s social fabric, with the Mittelstand companies playing a key role. Now the entire industry faces annihilation.
Thanks to Government decree, a flood of inferior products made in China – low-cost electric vehicles – makes those skills redundant. To produce an electric vehicle, you don’t need much more than a motor and a battery. The control electronics are trivial.
Gone are the deep-level skills of designing a transmission system and combustion chambers, of working to strict safety and health and fuel efficiency standards.
Many of the new vehicles will come from familiar brands – a lot of the major car marques are now Chinese. And how inferior are they? The New Car Assessment Programme for Latin America and the Caribbean (Latin NCAP) took a Sehol EV through its paces last year, and had to stop the test. It scored zero out of five for safety.
In addition, under globalisation we have surrendered supplies of essential minerals and processing technologies to an increasingly hostile superpower. “How did we go down a route where the material supply is substantially controlled by China?” asks auto industry commentator Hilton Holloway.
Resource-rich China - Share of top producing countries in extraction
What happens next? We can make a decent educated guess. The auto industry is a highly protectionist one, albeit very skilled at disguising this protectionism as altruism. For example, France backed the switch to diesel two decades ago because its auto companies were very good at making diesel engines.
“The KPIs in the car industries are set by national bodies, and they’re manipulated by domestic manufacturers,” one industry insider says.
“This time they’ve screwed up the protectionism: they didn’t realise they needed to protect themselves from electric vehicles.”
Brussels, which is seeking to ban internal combustion engines by 2035, is getting a reminder of where the power lies in the European Union. Germany has left a loophole open for synthetic hydrocarbons vehicles that could save its internal combustion/hybrid market – and will now be seeking a way to prohibit imports of Chinese EVs, probably on safety grounds.
If that sounds implausible, ask yourself why you can’t buy a US truck in Europe or the UK. And if you doubt Germany’s determination to protect its industrial crown jewels, just recall that this is a country demolishing wind farms to dig up the coal that lies beneath. They don’t mess about.
For this article in pdf, please click here:
Andrew Orlowski is a technology journalist who writes a weekly Telegraph column every Monday. He founded the research network Think of X and previously worked for The Register. You can find him on Twitter @AndrewOrlowski
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