by David Turver
We hear a lot about how we are supposedly in a climate crisis and how The Science™ tells us we are about to succumb to global boiling. Most climate activists claim that we must cut emissions by spending more money on windmills and solar panels or we will all burn to a crisp.
I would describe myself as a lukewarmer, by which I mean that I acknowledge the earth is warming and that human emissions of CO2 have made some contribution to that warming. However, it is also true that the climate has changed dramatically without human intervention; clearly, there are other causes of climate change too.
The strategy of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases to Net Zero is classified as a “mitigation strategy” in the parlance of the IPCC. The alternative strategy is adaptation which means taking measures to adjust to climate change such as building flood defences, irrigation systems or developing new strains of crops to cope better with changing weather patterns. Most spending effort in the West is geared towards mitigation. But, what if the Net Zero cure is worse than the disease? What if mitigation is less effective than adaptation?
Mitigation Drawbacks
The mitigation strategy has significant drawbacks. First, mitigation only works if CO2 is the main climate control knob. But we know this cannot be the case because we can clearly see that temperatures have changed significantly over past millennia, as illustrated in Figure 1 below sourced from Figure 7.1 of the IPCC’s First Assessment report. These changes cannot have been caused by humans or our CO2 emissions.
Second, mitigation can only work if everyone else slashes emissions too and we can see from Figure 2 (from Our World in Data) that this is not happening.
Moreover, there are plenty of potential climatic events that could occur that we ought to be prepared for, and which will require energy and ingenuity to deal with. For example, we could see another Mount Tambora-like eruption which ejected about 40km2 of material into the atmosphere and caused a reduction in global temperatures. This led to 1816 being termed the Year Without a Summer, where European summer temperatures were the lowest on record and led to an agricultural disaster with widespread food shortages and famine.
Adaptation Success
Adaptation has been a remarkable success. The rate of people dying from natural disasters has plummeted by a factor of more than 50 in the past century as shown in Figure 3 below, sourced from Our World in Data.
This improvement has come despite (more likely because of) the near 20-fold increase in CO2 emissions that we saw in Figure 2.
Cheap energy has led to big improvements in crop yields through mechanisation, irrigation and availability of fertiliser. Cheap energy has enabled flood defences to be built and homes to be more resilient to extreme weather.
Adaptation measures have many benefits. They require no international treaty and they can be applied locally where they produce results quickly. They also work to protect against changes in the climate that are not driven by CO2. Adaptation measures might also have additional benefits such as more efficient water use or more robust crop varieties. There is no reason why we cannot continue to adapt.
Risks of Net Zero
By contrast, the risks of Net Zero mitigation policies are manifest. First and most obvious, they cannot work against climatic changes that are driven by forces other than CO2. Second is the outright cost. In 2020, the National Grid ESO estimated the cost of the energy transition to be around £3 trillion. This is probably an underestimate because the cost of renewables has gone up since then (see AR6) as interest rates have gone up from almost zero to over 5%. To put this in context, U.K. GDP was £2.3 trillion in 2023, so the cost will be at least 1.3 times GDP. For further context, the budget for NHS England was £155bn in 2022-23, so the cost of Net Zero will be around 19 times the NHS budget.
The increased penetration of renewables has led to a massive increase in our electricity bills. This increase comes from renewables subsidies as well as grid balancing costs and the massive costs of expanding the grid out to remote offshore wind farms.
Expensive energy has led to creeping deindustrialisation as we have seen with the closure of Port Talbot and our last fertiliser plant. With geo-political tensions rising the closure of domestic steel, fertiliser and chemical industries means we are less able to defend ourselves and feed the nation in the event of a crisis.
Expensive energy also means we run the risk of missing out on the industries of the future such as AI. For instance, Amazon has recently bought a 960MW datacentre campus that is adjacent to and powered by a nuclear power station. Mark Zuckerberg has said the next generation of datacentres will be 1GW or above and Microsoft is considering building a $100bn datacentre campus that could consume 5GW for OpenAI by 2030. Clearly, AI is very energy hungry and suitable datacentres cannot be run on zephyrs and sunbeams, nor with expensive energy.
Our grid planning authority is planning to reduce total end user demand by about half to 600-800TWh per year by 2050, with just over 300TWh for industrial and commercial use, with the rest being used for heating homes and road and rail transport. However, just 10 of those 1GW datacentres would consume 87.6TWh in a year or about a quarter of the energy budget for the whole of industry and commerce. We are clearly heading towards a world of energy scarcity where we can no longer make the basic building blocks of a modern society, nor will we be able to compete in modern technologies. As Figure 4 below, again from Our World in Data, reminds us, there are no rich countries with low energy consumption.
Impact of Net Zero Policies
Net Zero is driving us to penury. Significant damage has already been done with productive industries shrinking compared to the whole economy since 1997. The trouble is, these industries are far more productive in terms of Gross Value Added (GVA) per hour worked than most service industries, and they consume more energy. This is why Sir Jim Ratcliffe has warned that the “chemicals industry in the U.K. is finished” and the main reason is that energy costs are five times those of the U.S. and there are carbon taxes levied on such products. This explains why we have lost six times as many jobs in energy intensive industries than have been gained in our green energy sector (see Figure 5).
The job losses have not finished either, with Stellantis (owner of Vauxhall) warning that Labour’s plan to ban new petrol cars by 2030 will lead to plant closures.
Of course, Net Zero policies have also pushed up our electricity bills with the myriad of subsidy schemes costing about £11bn each year, with extra grid balancing and extension costs on top. Plus all of the climate doom-mongering is taking a toll on the mental health of children.
Even though this economic destruction is being carried out in the name of the environment, it is far from clear that wind and solar power are environmentally friendly. I showed in this article, using data mostly from the UNECE, that renewables rank poorly overall on a range of sustainability measures including land use and mineral intensity, see Figure 6.
Other studies using US DOE data into the material intensity of wind and solar power have shown a similar result, see Figure 7.
All we get in return for all this effort is expensive, intermittent energy that needs even more minerals to be mined to make the storage required.
Conclusions
It is my belief that the economic, social and national security risks of Net Zero policies are far greater than those posed by climate change.
The risks of climate change can be averted by continuing to adapt, just as we have for millennia. It is certain that unilateral action by the U.K., or indeed multilateral action by much of the West, will do nothing to change the weather while the countries of the developing world continue to increase their consumption of hydrocarbons to make themselves richer. Indeed, even if mitigation measures were adopted globally, it is naïve to believe that bad weather will cease and we will suddenly get the “stable climate” demanded by more than 170 lawyers.
Yet we continue down the path of Net Zero, wreaking havoc on industry, jobs and the environment, pushing up energy bills and damaging the mental health of our children. The Net Zero ‘cure’ is worse than the supposed climate change disease.
David Turver writes the Eigen Values Substack page, where this article first appeared.
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Unfortunately, we have just elected a British government which wants to accelerate the drive to Net Zero. The previous government planned for us to be the lead lemming and walk over the cliff. This new government wants us to sprint towards the edge of the cliff and fling ourselves off it. God help us all.
Did we?
I would argue we did not and that the system has and always will be rigged. But surely, everybody knows that?
Count up all the votes for a party and then how many seats it got and it becomes obvious. Parliament blows hot and cold. All opposition parties favour a fairer voting system – so they say, until the vote goes their way.
Two things not on any British political agenda
An English Parliament
A written constitution.
You know why.
British parliamentary democracy is a way of changing government without a civil war.
We have just done so.
The fact that it wasn’t representative has nothing to do with it. Overwhelmingly people wanted the Tories gone.
That is achieved.
The fact that the alternative will probably be even worse, is something they haven’t woken up to. Yet,
British Parliamentary… dictatorship.
Try recalling an MP…
You may be satisfied with the pittance, democratically speaking, that you have. Many of us are not.
Nothing worse than a sleeping wokeist
“The fact that the alternative will probably be even worse, is something they haven’t woken up to. Yet,”
That’s very true. A recent opinion poll asked people why they were voting Labour. The majority – at 55% – would vote Labour to get rid of the Tories. But only 5% would vote Labour because of their policies. That suggests that support for Labour is very wide but also very shallow. If so, they could lose support very quickly due to their policies e.g. relating to nut zero, mass immigration and wokeism. Very likely a lot of the support would migrate to Reform, unless the Conservatives start being a conservative party again.
Providing they don’t blow it, I wouldn’t be surprised if Reform has the highest polling numbers in the next couple of years.
Although I’m bitterly disappointed by his remarks about NATO and Russia, I’m hoping Nigel Farage will be the next prime minister.
Chris
Time then to begin protesting more vociferously AGAINST climate policy by standing in front of XR protesters with larger signs and surrounding them out of existence…perhaps wearing Yellow Vests
And what about their police protection?
With sufficient Yellow Vests present, I’m certain the police will feel protected enough
Wouldn’t this just cause longer disruptions to traffic, and ordinary citizens going about their legal business?
Advocating for more disruptive protesting to curb disrupting protesting is like advocating for more renewables in order to reduce renewables-caused high electricity bills.
More likely far shorter because once XR was pushed aside and out of the intersection the yellow vests could part the intersection leaving traffic to flow once more
With just 2 seats not yet counted, Labour + Lib Dems have 45.9% of the vote and 482 seats. Conservatives + Reform have 38.0% of the vote and 125 seats. That’s less than a third of seats/vote.
It’s an odd system, certainly, that needs reform. But let’s face it, Rishi Sunak and previous leaders like Carrie Johnson (sic) and Theresa May have done everything in their power to prevent any of Brexit being implemented. The rules of a free democracy are pretty straightforward: a government that fails the people gets thrown out regardless of who then gets in. Keir Starmer has 5 years. Let’s not make assumptions but see how he does (ie, everything on its merits).
Incidentally, system reform is unlikely, as another commenter has said, because the only ones that can change it are the ones who have just won in the current system.
It’s a system, as I already pointed out, that suits them. They aren’t going to change that.
When Cameron formed a coalition with Nick Clegg one of the concessions he made was to have a referendum on Proportional representation. Both Tories and Labour campaigned for a no vote, which is what we got.
Whether or not the proposed system was a good one or not we didn’t get a chance to try it. Instead we got 14 years of strong government.
As there are a couple of seats left to return their votes only marginal changes to the picture are possible. Labour have a massive majority on a third of the vote. Very similar to 2019 in fact. Reform got a larger share than the Lib Dems.As the Tories said voting Reform let in Labour is many places.But that shouldn’t be a factor in how you vote in most elections.
How long will the disenfranchised tolerate this situation.
Labour now have a problem with Islamic voters.
Was I mistaken in thinking that the “Labour” party supports laborers – i.e., more jobs (hopefully better jobs), not less?
If: “Significant damage has already been done with productive industries shrinking compared to the whole economy since 1997.” . . . “chemicals industry in the U.K. is finished” and the UK has “lost six times as many jobs in energy intensive industries than have been gained in our green energy sector (see Figure 5)”.
Is it possible that the new UK Labour Government will take actions that actually support workers – rather than fire them and raise their cost of living through policies of “economic destruction . . . being carried out in the name of the environment”?
If not, should they even be called “Labour Party”?
“”The Net Zero Cure is Far Worse Than the Disease””
Or we will have to burn the village to save the village.
“”Expensive energy has led to creeping deindustrialisation “”
Entirely by design. And today a new red dawn…
“”‘Keir Starmer take note’: UK’s green transition must start now, say experts””
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jul/05/keir-starmer-green-transition-must-start-now-say-experts
Experts, such as?
Ed Matthew, campaigns director at the E3G thinktank
Mike Childs, the head of policy at Friends of the Earth
Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Institute on Climate Change
Areeba Hamid, co-executive director at Greenpeace
A bunch of activists. And tellingly….
“”he [Ed Matthew] worried that the new grouping of Reform MPs could exert pressure on the Tory party, driving the “culture war” over the climate crisis.””
A brief word on that ‘climate crisis’. It’s raining, grey and mirky. Top temperature… 16C
Must be Wimbledon….
The next 5 years are unerringly forecast to be wet, dull, and miserable.
“forecast to be wet, dull, and miserable.”
And that won’t just be the weather. !!
The Reform party at least gave voters a choice to reject Net Zero policies, that the rest of the lemmings are supporting in their ignorance of science and engineering constraints on energy policies. Yes, it’s great that the Tories are gone from government, but Labor is likely to perform even worse on climate/ energy policies because of their ideological bent will suffer no needed reform to save the economy. So now it’s Tweedledumb replacing Tweedledee!
Not only is the cure worse than the disease, but the disease doesn’t exist.
Most readers are probably well aware that the first of the three graphs in fig 1 is not about previous ice ages but rather covers less than the most recent third of the current ice age, wherein there have so far been more than 20 glacial stages when massive ice sheets covered much of the land surface but it can’t hurt to try to prevent anyone less educate on the subject from being led astray.
The latest glacial stage ended quite recently, geologically speaking, generally considered to be a bit less than 12,000 years ago when the last of the continental ice sheets (except for Antarctica) melted but sometimes considered to be 18,000 to 20,000 years ago when those ice sheets began melting in earnest.
The volume of material ejected by Mount Tambora should be expressed in cubic km.
Cubist….
I have reluctantly concluded that Net Zero et al are not pragmatic policies at all, nor were they ever intended to be. They are political, social and moral narratives that are tolerated because people are making obscene amounts of money out of them. And gaining political power out of them by taking political control of energy, the politicians control the world.
Purin did it by being a Mafia Godfather and 100% corrupt. In a democracy we need a narrative.
And ‘scientists’ will not rock the boat if they want to keep their jobs.
That about sums it up.
“”I have reluctantly concluded that Net Zero et al are not pragmatic policies””
Interesting choice of words.
You nailed it: “They are political, social and moral narratives that are tolerated because people are making obscene amounts of money out of them.”
Why have governments of all parties consistently failed, over decades, to do any proper cost-benefit analysis on Net Zero policies? Why have they persistently quoted estimates of the damage caused by climate change that are orders of magnitude higher than any reasonable estimate of the social cost? Why have they, since 2020, exempted “strategic” projects like net zero from any requirement for cost-benefit analysis at all?
The answer is obvious. If a proper cost-benefit analysis was done, even on a mitigation strategy, it would show costs orders of magnitude higher than the benefits. Use an adaptation strategy instead, and the gap would become even bigger. Those that are doing these things to us must know all this. So driving us down into penury must be the plan.
I don’t think that there is any plan at all. Most politicians are just very stupid and don’t realise what they are doing.
“Never assume malice in that which is adequately explained by stupidity”?
I agree on the lack of any plan, but…
They know what is best for the lower orders. Call it political extreme Dunning Kruger….
What the hell
Are you up to date on your boosters? FBI wants to know.
It’s certainly the plan worked out by the UN globalists to impoverish the western democracies, so they can have a real shot at taking over as a transnational power, to save the rest of the planet from the supposed ills of modern capitalism. In reality, another socialist gunpowder plot, to destroy democracy.
Figure 7 shows why developing countries use low-cost, low-resource coal. oil and gas and nuclear to lift themselves out of poverty.
They are not as stupid as the West, which is separately trying to impoverish itself with high-cost, high resource, dysfunctional wind/solar/batteries systems, and useless EVs and heat pumps in cold climates.
Be like us, join our rules-based claptrap, and you will be poor too
Numbers Don’t Lie; Fossil Fuel was 81.5% of World Energy in 2023
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https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/numbers-don-t-lie-fossil-fuel-was-81-5-of-world-energy-in-2023
Robert Bryce
.
These 9 charts from the Statistical Review Of World Energy expose the myth of the energy transition & show hydrocarbons are growing faster than alt-energy;Total world energy to all users was 620 exajoule, EJ, in 2023.
.
Global energy use in 2023 hit a new record, 620 EJ, of which about 81.5% came from hydrocarbons. Image: Energy Institute.
Amid the ongoing blizzard of propaganda about the “energy transition” and the tired antics of the goobers from Just Stop Oil/Leave it in the Ground — a pair of whom vandalized Stonehenge with orange paint last Wednesday — the Statistical Review, published by the Energy Institute, KPMG, and Kearney, provides a much-needed reality check to the narrative being promoted by the lapdog Media, academics, and the NGO-corporate-industrial-climate complex.
The new Statistical Review, released last Thursday, shows, yet again, that despite the hype, subsidies, and mandates, wind and solar energy aren’t keeping pace with the growth in hydrocarbons.
Global hydrocarbon use and CO2 emissions hit record highs in 2023, with hydrocarbon consumption up 1.5% to 504 exajoules (EJ).
That increase was “driven by coal, up 1.6%, [and] oil up 2% to above 100 million barrels [per day] for the first time.”
Global natural gas demand was flat, mainly due to stunning de-industrialization in Europe.
Gas demand in the U.K. fell by 10%. It also fell by 11% in Spain, 10% in Italy, and 11% in France.
.
Soaring electricity demand was, yet again, the big story in 2023.
Global power generation increased by 2.5% to 29,924 terawatt-hours.
About 32% (9,456 TWh) was generated in China, where electricity production surged by nearly 7%.
The U.S. came in a distant second in power generated, with 4,494 TWh.
US domestic power production dropped by about 1% last year.
Power generation in India also increased by about 7% last year to a record 1,958 TWh, 75% of which came from coal-fired power plants.
“Clearly, AI is very energy hungry and suitable datacentres cannot be run on zephyrs and sunbeams, nor with expensive energy.”
Does anyone have a clue why we need AI?
People have an aversion to their own termination.
That would be a question to pose to a chat bot.
Be interesting to see what the (non)-answer is.
some day I need to get into it- just out of curiosity- I’ll ask that
first the title needs fixing:
“Globalists Plan to deprive world’s poor and impoverished of heat, clean water and food is on track to kill millions over the next 5 decades”
The lukewarmist position is:
“I acknowledge the earth is warming and that human emissions of CO2 have made some contribution to that warming. However, it is also true that the climate has changed dramatically without human intervention; clearly, there are other causes of climate change too.”
From all of the posts, references, and arguments made here at WUWT:
Other causes of climatic variation, such as solar cycles and astronomical/orbital mechanics have been shown time and again, over millennia, to be much more consistent, casually-related, and stronger than any purported influences from GHGs.
the biggest flaw of this article is to go to the warmists battlefield. They twist words, logic and context such that an argument cannot be made properly because it is forced to start from a lie.
grifts continue
“They are political, social and moral narratives that are tolerated because people are making obscene amounts of money out of them.” Follow the money – the fundamental lie is just inconvenient.
The Brits have demonstrated that “moderation”, i.e. accepting the premises of a nihilist cult, but promising the same goals done in a less radical way, satisfies no one for long. Net Zero or The Green New Deal or the Energiewende have proven to be failures, with economic destruction as the only real results.
“we have lost six times as many jobs in energy intensive industries than have been gained in our green energy sector” can also be stated as “each job in the green energy sector destroys on average six jobs in energy intensive industries”.
Don’t forget that most jobs in the green energy sector do not pay as well as jobs in the in the fossil fuel sector, especially oil, so you are impoverishing your workers as well.
Yes. IIRC the Wall St Journal last year reported US O/G workers annual income averaged ~$75k while the green energy workforce was ~$45k.
And as David Middleton has mentioned here on WUWT, the green workers are terribly inefficient in producing useful energy [say, Btu per worker per year].
It is beyond idiotic to think that weather is going to get more uncertain & extreme then insist on policies to make our energy grid weather dependent.
Sadly, there will have to be a catastrophic grid collapse somewhere before the voters realize the extent by which they have been fooled by the climate alarmists.
It goes further than that; “green jobs” exist only because of government mandates and subsidies, and are therefore a parasite on the economy.
So while “jobs” that actually produce something useful that others will voluntarily pay for are destroyed, the “created” so-called “jobs” produce nothing useful and require endless robbery of the taxpayers.
And so economic “metrics” falsify the “news” by suggesting the parasite consuming the economic body is food.
Seems Portugal discovered that many years ago, yet nobody learned anything.
__________________________________________
There isn’t any disease to be cured, please stop buying into the bullshit.
Regarding global warming, never have so many believed
in so much for so long based on so little. Marty
1. More rain is not a problem.
2. Warmer weather is not a problem.
3. More arable land is not a problem.
4. Longer growing seasons is not a problem.
5. CO2 greening of the earth is not a problem.
6. There isn’t any Climate Crisis.
Over the thousands of years of human civilization, adaptation has always been the best strategy to deal with climate change. Adaptation remains the best strategy to deal with climate change today.
Humans are nothing else if not adaptable. It’s one reason we are the dominant species. I like my spot on the food chain and I want to keep it.
Good article but I objected to the author’s self identification as a lukewarmer.
“I would describe myself as a lukewarmer, by which I mean that I acknowledge the earth is warming and that human emissions of CO2 have made some contribution to that warming.”
I consider that description to be a climate science realist. That description works to describe me too.
I consider a lukewarmer to be a person who thinks CO2 emissions are a problem that must be solved someday. But there is no rush to solve the problem by 2050.
There are other definitions of lukewarmers.
The feelings about CO2 range from an immediate, serious problem (Climate Howlers), to a long term moderate problem, to the Nutters who claim CO does nothing at all,
I am completely out of that ordinary range with the belief that CO2 emissions are good news and doubling atmospheric CO2 would support more human, animal and plant life.
I object to the title implying climate change is a disease.
Also, the two 1990-era charts showing averages of proxies in the past 10,000 years do not how the numbers or the x axis. The IPCC stripped off those numbers off the charts before presenting them. The original charts showed +/- 0.5 degree variations versus the climate in about 1990, or for the decade ending about 1990. Those +/- 0.5 degree C. variations are too small to be statistically significant.
But the unsmoothed average for the Holocene Climate Optimum Period showed at least a +1 degree C. warmer than 1990 peak about 8000 years ago. Sea level estimates back up that claim.
The global average temperature increased about +0.7 degrees since 1990. That means 2023 was warmer than any prior warm period in the past 5000 years … but probably not warmer than the highest temperatures during the Holocene Climate Optimum period from about 5000 to 10000 years ago.
Estimated average temperatures have not changed very much in the past 10,000 years.
But that does not tell us much about the long term effect of increasing CO2 +2.5 ppm a year for the next 100 to 200 years.
Semantics all the way down.
I consider a lukewarmer/AGW-zealot as anyone who keeps pushing the CO2 warming myth…
… and other facets of the AGW scam like MWP and RWP denial…
… and has no empirical scientific evidence to back it up.
AGW-zealots are far worse and less realty-based than lukewarmers.
Can we please not have any more articles from this clown? I do not need to hear from “lukewarmers” who are just now reluctantly coming to the conclusion that maybe the whole green agenda is not feasible. This was obvious decades ago.
Two questions:
1) Are the CO2 emissions shown in Figure 6 for gas based on combined cycle gas or simple cycle gas?
2) When solar and wind machines are placed on a grid (with requirements that their power be accepted on the grid before any other) former base-load plants have to be operated in a cyclic load manner. The more wind and solar there is, the more the demand for cyclic backup there is. Coal and nuclear plants and the steam portion of a combined cycle gas turbine machine are steam engines and are are generally not designed to operate on a cyclic basis – or at least rapid cyclic bases as is required by rapid changes in solar and wind machine outputs. Simple cycle gas plants are most often used for this service but their fuel economy at part load is poor. Some such plants burn near 40% of their full power fuel feed just to stay hot and idling ready to respond to sudden changes in demand. Thus solar and wind power impose degraded fuel efficiency on the backup fossil fuel machines and the more wind and solar there is on the system, the less the backup machines fuel efficiency. Has anybody calculated the fuel efficiencies of various combinations of solar, wind, and fossil backup on a grid? Such a calculation, or model, might be very revealing about the amount that CO2 emissions are reduced, if any, by adding solar and wind machines to a grid.
I struggle to understand why you would even be a lukewarmer.
As a climate skeptic, I fully support your fight against this climate change con. However, when you are challenging the crap and misinformation of these warmists, please make sure you are using correct terminology, because you may just be providing an ammunition to them to beat you down. In this article for instance, when you are talking about the Mount Tambora-like eruption, “which ejected about 40km2 of material into the atmosphere…” the warmists can object to your mingling into science, if you can’t even tell the difference between area and volume! That should have been 40 km³. Wouldn’t you say??