Temperatures plunged last week across Europe and the wind stopped blowing for a number of days. Without gas- and coal-fired turbines coming immediately to the rescue, thousands of people could have perished in the bitter cold. Yet natural gas is being legislated out of existence as a source of electricity across the continent. The black lie at the heart of Net Zero energy fantasies is that there are workable back-ups for intermittent wind and solar. Apart from oil and gas, there are none. Once politicians remove them from the mix – if elected, the British Labour party plans this in barely 60 months – the old and the infirm will shiver and die when a windless electricity grid produces negligible amounts of crucial power.
Exaggeration? Not really. Earlier this year, Lord Frost delivered the annual GWPF lecture on Net Zero which he titled ‘Not Dark Yet, But’s It’s Getting There’. He felt that members of Western governments “actively prefer to live in complete cognitive dissonance rather than confront what they know in their hearts: that they are pursuing unfeasible and internally contradictory policies”. There can be no excuse for what Lord Frost describes as “high status” opinions on Net Zero. The lack of ‘green’ back-up for intermittent power is becoming obvious to all but the most blinkered and boneheaded. But a wilful refusal to confront the issue is the current default ‘settled’ position. If the grid collapses in a few years’ time, the politicians and all their trusted messengers in the media will have a great deal of explaining to do. As the frozen bodies pile up, their trite, pseudoscientific, ‘saving the planet’ political slogans will be found somewhat wanting.
The idea that we can power most of our energy from the wind and the sun has been kept afloat by the promise of massive battery storage. There can be no further excuse for peddling this delusion. Earlier this year, the U.K. Royal Society published a wide-ranging storage paper pointing out that current batteries cannot possibly store more than a fraction of the energy needed to support the grid when wind fails. And fail it does, not just during spells of extremely cold weather but, as the Royal Society pointed out, during past annual low wind speed periods. Desperate to keep the Net Zero fiction alive, the Royal Society promoted hydrogen as a back-up, an idea only slightly less dumb than digging up the planet to produce vast quantities of limited life batteries.
Highly explosive, expensive to extract, weak kinetic energy compared to natural gas, difficult to store and move around – there is no end to the disadvantages of hydrogen. The Royal Society seems to envisage a new nationwide complex of storage and pipes that would likely cost hundreds of billions of pounds. Francis Menton of the Manhattan Contrarian noted that the Royal Society’s paper contained valuable information, but was “actually useless for any public policy purpose”.
Wherever you look, promoters of green energy engage in largely unchallenged deceptions. To coincide with COP28, Channel 4 is running a ‘climate emergency’ season. “With their combined, deep expertise, Kevin McCloud, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Mary Portas will front a powerful three-part series aiming to kickstart real change, by identifying the practical steps that governments and big business can take to eliminate our carbon emissions,” reads the press release. It’s an odd choice of “deep expertise” on offer, namely, the Grand Designs TV host, a TV cook and a shop window dresser. Within minutes into the first programme, the zombie statistic that wind was nine times cheaper than gas last winter was trotted out. In fact, this occurred only briefly with a number of abnormal wholesale price spikes in electricity in the wake of developments in Ukraine. Suggesting that wind is nine times cheaper than gas is as wilfully misleading as stating that wind was infinitely more expensive when oil prices turned negative at the start of global Covid lockdowns.
Without reliable back-up, subsidy-hunting promoters can add as many windmills as they like, but it will not make any difference when there is no wind. Last week, wind struggled to provide 3% of Britain’s electricity. As the investigative climate journalist (and former accountant) Paul Homewood is fond of noting – twice nothing is still nothing. In the meantime, British electricity users are set to pay almost £100 billion in subsidies for renewables supplying the grid over the next six years. Even when the wind is blowing, this growing subsidy covers barely 5% of total U.K. energy, since the grid only accounts for 25% of consumed energy. Last week’s dismal contribution brought that down to almost zero.
The true insanity of Net Zero has yet to be faced by global elites seeking to ‘transform’ human societies in collectivist ways never attempted in the past. Since this is a political project, truth is the first casualty in the war on wicked humanity. Nobody is paying much attention to the work of the Government-funded U.K. FIRES that notes that the U.K. is likely to have barely a quarter of the energy promised by the Government and the Climate Change Committee in 2050 if all legal obligations of Net Zero are followed. In its latest energy review, U.K. FIRES writes that the “whole excitement“ of its project has been to recognise that such a shortfall is close to a certain reality. As the Daily Sceptic has reported, U.K. FIRES bases it findings on a brutally honest reality. It does not assume that technology still to be perfected, or even invented, will somehow lead to minimal disturbance in comfortable industrialised lifestyles. A world of little energy means no personal transport, no flying and shipping, freezing homes, meat-free diets and dwellings made of “rammed” Earth. And, probably, far fewer humans.
In his recent paper, Lord Frost identified a current active determination across politicians and opinion formers not too look too closely at all the Net Zero issues. This was worrying, he commented, adding the words of the political and economic writer Sir Alfred Sherman: “You can wake a man who’s asleep, but you can’t wake a man who’s pretending to be asleep.”
