How Many Billions of People Would Die Under Net Zero?

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Chris Morrison

BBC oddball Chris Packham has hit back at claims reported on Neil Oliver‘s GB News show that half the world’s population could die if Net Zero was implemented in full. “So Ofcom can you please explain how you allow this utter BS to be broadcast,” he wails. Running to Ofcom would appear to be a trade protection measure – millions will die has been the tried and trusted modus operandi of climate catastrophist Chris for decades.

This would appear to be the same Chris Packham who told the Telegraph in October 2010 that there were too many humans on the planet, and “we need to do something about it”. In 2020, he informed the Daily Mail  that “quite frankly” smallpox, measles, mumps and malaria were there “to regulate our population”. Over his broadcast career, untroubled by Ofcom interest, Packham has claimed mass extinctions of all life on Earth unless humans stop burning hydrocarbons. Of course there are those who point out that these popular mass extinctions only seem to exist in computer models. Hydrocarbons, meanwhile, have led to unprecedented prosperity and health, unimaginable to previous generations, across many parts of a planet that now supports a sustainable population of humans numbering eight billion.

Of course Net Zero is not going to kill four billion people because Net Zero is never going to happen. Day-by-day, support is crumbling around the world as the political collectivisation project, supported by increasingly discredited computer-modelled opinions, is starting to fall apart as it bumps into the hard rock of reality. History teaches us that tribes that grow weak and decadent are easy prey for their stronger neighbours. But the suggestion that four billion will die if Net Zero should ever be inflicted on global populations is worth examining. After all, it is likely to be true.

The four billion dead noted on GB News came from a remark made by Dr. Patrick Moore, one of the original founders of Greenpeace. Interviewed on Fox News, he said: “If we ban fossil fuels, agricultural production would collapse. People will begin to starve, and half the population will die in a very short period of time”. Four billion dead if artificial fertiliser is banned is not ‘BS’, it is an almost guaranteed outcome. In a recent science paper, Emeritus Professors William Happer and Richard Lindzen of Princeton and MIT respectively noted that “eliminating fossil fuel-derived nitrogen fertiliser and pesticides will create worldwide starvation”. With the use of nitrogen fertiliser, crop yields around the world have soared in recent decades and natural famines, as opposed to those local outbreaks caused by humans, have largely disappeared.

Much of the luxury middle class Net Zero obsession is based on a seeming hatred of human progress. It is a campaign to push back the benefit of mass industrialisation, although it is doubtful that many of the ardent promoters think the drastic reductions in standards of living will apply to them. It is narcissism on stilts and based on an almost complete ignorance of how the food in their faddy diets arrives on their plates. It shows a complete disregard for the central role that hydrocarbons play in their lives. It is based on a profound distaste for almost any modern manufacturing process. These days, they do not know people who actually make things, and when they meet them they often dislike them. Nutty Guardianista George Monbiot recently tweeted that ending animal farming is as important as leaving fossil fuels in the ground. “Eating meat, milk and eggs is an indulgence the planet cannot afford,” he added.

Leaving fossil fuels in the ground will mean the following products will largely disappear.

Circulated on social media and recently published by Paul Homewood, the illustration is a wake-up call to the importance of hydrocarbons. Without it, humans would struggle to make many medicines and plastics. Similar difficulties would be found in the manufacture of common products such as clothing, food preservatives, cleaning products and soft contact lens.

Alec Epstein, the author of the best-selling book Fossil Future, agrees that Net Zero policies by 2050 would be “apocalyptically destructive”, and have in fact already been catastrophically destructive when barely implemented. A reference here, perhaps, to the wicked policies conducted by Western banks and elites in refusing to loan money to build hydrocarbon-fuelled water treatment plants in the poorer parts of the developing world. Billions still lack the cost-effective energy they need to live lives of abundance and safety, notes Epstein. Many people in developing countries still use wood and dung for cooking. Like Happer and Lindzen, he believes that if Net Zero is followed, “virtually all the world’s eight billion people will plunge into poverty and premature death”.

Much of what is planned is hiding in plain sight. The C40 group, funded by wealthy billionaires and chaired by London mayor Sadiq Khan, has investigated World War 2 style rationing with a daily meat allowance of 44g. Reduced private transport and massive restrictions on air travel have all been considered. Labour party member Khan has already made a cracking start on his elite paymasters’ concerns having recently driven many of the cars of the less affluent off London roads with specialist charging penalties.

Honesty rules the day at the U.K. Government-funded UK FIRES operation where Ivory Tower academics produce gruesomely frank reports showing that Net Zero would cut available energy by around three quarters. They assume, rightly, that there is no realistic technology currently available, or likely in the foreseeable future, to back up power sourced from the intermittent breezes and sun beams. No flying, no shipping, drastic cuts in meat consumption and no home heating are all discussed. A ruthless purge of modern building material is also proposed with traditional building supplies replaced by new materials such as “rammed earth”

A move back to primitivism is also foreshadowed by a recent United Nations report which suggested building using mud bricks, bamboo and forest ‘detritus’. It might be thought that mud and grass huts will hardly be enough to deter unfriendly foreign hordes that hove into future view on the horizon. And no point in asking the last person to turn out the lights, because there won’t be electricity anyway.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.