Net zero is a national suicide pact

Greenhouse gas effect, global warming, climate change, global heating (a new one on me), climate emergency, net zero. The terms for the forthcoming apocalypse change every few years. Who now remembers the briefly famous “hole in the ozone layer” caused when an entire generation of teenage girls tried to copy Farrah Fawcett’s iconic 1970s feathered hair and used several trillion cans of hairspray to unsuccessfully (in my case anyway) keep the flicked-back sides in place? Did the hole heal when girls moved on to imitating Jennifer Aniston’s “The Rachel” cut, which could be achieved without assistance from aerosols? Admittedly, Farrah’s Fringe is not a scientifically proven explanation for the phenomenon, but, if you ask me, it’s every bit as plausible as some of the theories accounting for changes in what we used to call “the weather”. Anyway, after almost 20 years of hysterical banging on about the need to reach “net zero” by 2050 lest 70 million Britons start to resemble the crusty bits in a fish-fryer, a cross-party House of Commons committee this week recommended the Government stop using the phrase because it had become “toxic among the public”. Well, hallelujah! Was this a rare and welcome outbreak of sanity among the climate cultists who were finally acknowledging that decarbonisation and running a successful G7 economy are not, given the present state of technology, compatible? Don’t get your hopes up, please. The committee of MPs suggested finding a new phrase for the same old nonsense. Because “net zero” no longer had a positive image with the public and consensus over the transition to clean energy had broken down amid “misinformation from sceptics”. Gosh, cults are remarkably impervious to reason, aren’t they? If “net zero” has become toxic, it’s because, despite an overwhelming media consensus designed to stifle debate, the public has managed to pick up pieces of information from those pesky sceptics. People can see for themselves the effect of net zero in their vertiginous energy bills. They can see that the cost of electricity (among the highest in the world) is destroying manufacturing ( Denby Pottery, established 1809, is only the latest casualty ). They also realise that reducing 0.8 per cent of the world’s CO2 – the UK’s puny contribution – is going to have no effect on the climate, not when our competitors are busy building coal-fired power stations and increasing their emissions like billy-o. As for paying Norway £20bn a year for oil and gas when we could drill our own in neighbouring North Sea fields, has any nation ever conspired so successfully in its own downfall? Consumers, it turns out, don’t care to be patronised by scientifically illiterate MPs, mouthing the approved dogma, when people like me have been pointing out that green taxes are slapped on bills to subsidise Ed Miliband’s renewables cronies. As for what the Commons’ committee calls “tangible wins” such as new jobs – there are, indeed, thousands of green jobs. Unfortunately, most of them are in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) where, unsurprisingly, the UK’s 2050 net zero target is hugely popular. “Never interrupt your enemy when he is in the middle of making a mistake.” Sir Richard Dearlove quoted that acrid line in his devastating lecture for the Global Warming Policy Foundation (of which I am a board member) in London on Wednesday night. In “Energy Security: Blowing in the Wind”, the former head of MI6, who is one of our best geopolitical brains, outlined in excruciating detail the epic folly of British climate policy, which has failed to give sufficient weight to the strategic vulnerabilities created by dependence on foreign manufacturing, imported components and a national grid that is increasingly at the mercy of whether the sun shines or the wind blows (but not too hard!). The implications for national security are dire. Deindustrialisation, Dearlove pointed out, has not only led to the closure of vast tracts of our manufacturing capability. In the event of an emergency, we have lost much of the ability to rebuild our own energy infrastructure. (“Uncertain access to equipment and spares – for example, generators and transformers – is a graver and more chronic danger than a temporary shortage of gas.”) Should we experience the blackouts many experts predict for this winter, it won’t be the brief, homework-by-candlelight affair some of us remember from childhood. During the three-day week in 1974, thanks to the large interruptible load, a shortage could be absorbed by factories rather than households, but that ability has been lost in the reckless rush to decarbonisation. After a major blackout in the Iberian peninsula last year, it took approximately 23 hours for Spain’s electricity grid to be fully declared back to normal. There seems little hope that a Britain diminished by the destruction of its power stations (and the loss of its ability to make virgin steel at Port Talbot ) in the cause of net zero would be able to rescue a similar situation that speedily. “We have very little industry left to protect and we cannot rebuild non-existent industries which lie in foreign jurisdictions,” was the former spy chief’s bleak assessment. The well-informed audience was clearly shocked as Dearlove painted a humiliating picture of the UK having to join a queue for materials and components (“large-scale transformers ordered today now take two years to arrive”), often from “the very country which the director general of MI5 has identified as the most serious threat to Britain’s national security”. The degree to which the United Kingdom has become China’s bitch should horrify us all. Dearlove would not use such vulgar language, of course, although his angry disbelief was felt in fact after damning fact; at one point, he did answer a question with a pithy: “We’re screwed.” Asked whether China could turn off the lights in the lecture theatre where we sat, he said they probably could, and he suggested PRC spies had infiltrated climate-change groups, just as Russian spies penetrated CND during the Cold War. I urge you to watch Dearlove’s powerful lecture for yourself. All I can say is he left those of us in his audience badly shaken. Richard Tice, deputy leader of Reform UK (he coined “net stupid zero”), is normally an upbeat fellow, but he confessed: “I am really anxious. It’s unreal how stupid our leaders have been for decades.” Should there be significant power cuts this winter, Tice said Reform “will demand a general election and criminal prosecutions for negligence and malfeasance in public office”. Both Reform and the Conservatives have sensibly said they will scrap Theresa May’s 2050 target made legally binding by the Climate Change Act 2008. Maybe then arguably the greatest act of national self-harm in the history of these islands can begin to be repaired. Except Andy Burnham said this week that the country must fully commit itself to reaching net zero by 2050. “I am determined that we meet the commitment on which Labour was elected… I want Britain to believe in itself again.” His ignorance is staggering. The Prime Minister was talking dangerous tosh, timed to woo Green voters in the forthcoming Holborn and St Pancras by-election . For the same party-before-country reason, Andy has also postponed a decision to approve the development of the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea. “I urge our leading politicians to take very careful note,” Sir Richard Dearlove said. “We are not the victims of a conspiracy to make us vulnerable; we have quite casually done this to ourselves. We have, as a nation, negligently wandered close to a cliff edge and the adversaries I have described stand ready to help us over it; and the fragility of the present international order enhances the risk.” Are you listening to the man who has forgotten more about national security than you will ever know, Prime Minister? You really should. The phrase “net zero” has not been discredited by “misinformation”, but by reality. Net zero will not happen by 2050, but the doomed pursuit of that target will cause untold economic damage, give comfort to our enemies and discomfort our own people. Don’t change the phrase, change the crazy policy. The cliff edge is frighteningly close.