Last month, the Guardian’s star climate and Net Zero headbanger George Monbiot was singing the praises of solar power, stating that along with wind it is “the cheapest component of our energy supply”. Alas, Our George, a posher person’s version of the down-market climate comedy clown Jim Dale, has not always been so effusive in promoting sunbeams as the answer to running a modern industrial economy. In June 2013, he noted that solar worked well at lower latitudes where peak electricity demand coincided with peak sunlight, but “less well” in places like the UK where peak winter demand occurs between 5pm to 7pm. After “initial enthusiasm”, he wrote that he was turned away from solar to give “reluctant” endorsement to large-scale wind and nuclear power.
What has changed in the meantime seemingly to alter his view, we may well ask. Nothing much. Solar still requires large and numerous subsidies, currently estimated at up to £4 billion a year, to provide intermittent, unreliable power amounting to a pitiful 6% of UK electricity. To achieve this, vast swathes of productive food-producing land are being turned into unsightly industrial dead zones. But ‘cheap’ wind and solar, along with expensive baseload-only nuclear, are all he has to justify cutting off humanity’s vital supply of hydrocarbons. Battery storage, explosive hydrogen, hydro, tidal power, cold fusion – all have failed various financial hurdles or the laws of physics and chemistry, sometimes both.
The tide of Net Zero fantasy is rapidly retreating, not least because the general public is slowly starting to understand the vital role that hydrocarbon-produced fertiliser plays in keeping world hunger at bay. Plastics, building materials and life-saving medicines can also be added to an extremely lengthy list. Anyone who wants to ‘Just Stop Oil’ needs to explain how life will continue with a 50% reduction in global food supplies resulting in horrendous decreases in populations around the world. The current problems in the Gulf with a potential 20% cut in global oil and gas are a massive wake-up call to push back on the decades-long nonsense peddled by elite, middle-class attention-seekers such as G. Monbiot.
Monbiot hates hydrocarbons with a vengeance and compares Norway’s vital exports to the British 19th century trade in opium – “a curse to be dumped on other countries”. One might wonder if he has ever tried spreading his luxury sneers and beliefs among Africans using natural gas and oil to improve crop yields, produce better drugs to battle tropical disease killers and to power water sanitation plants. Needless to say, Monbiot was a big supporter of last year’s Climate and Nature private member’s bill in the British Parliament. Mercifully, this disgusting anti-human bill did not pass since it would have cut UK hydrocarbon use to just 10% within a decade. That cull of 90% would have included the use of hydrocarbons in everything that was domestically or internationally produced. In addition to Monbiot, 200 MPs were prepared to support this high water mark of utter Net Zero stupidity.
The latest Guardian article is more of the usual sneering and effrontery. Tufton Street “junktanks” and the “billionaire” press tell us that energy security will be enhanced by reinvesting in North Sea gas, he reports. Their claims are said to be the “opposite of the truth”. Presumably, these are the wrong types of billionaires since later in his article he refers to the “indispensable” Carbon Brief. This is an activist blog that is ultimately funded by numerous billionaire foundations including those connected to Michael Bloomberg and hedge fund manager Sir Christopher Hohn.
The widely debunked argument that UK electricity prices, some of the highest in the industrial world, are determined by the ‘marginal’ cost of gas is given centre stage. It is correct that gas determines some of the input cost of power to the electricity grid, but conveniently missing is a note that the charge is levied at the wholesale level, not the retail one. The wholesale price accounts for only a third of the final cost to the consumer base, which is forced to pay annual charges totalling around £15 billion every year to keep the breezes and the sunbeams feeding their low kinetic irregular energy into an increasingly unstable grid. Last October, a group of leading UK energy executives told a Parliamentary committee that retail electricity rates would continue to rise even if the price of gas fell dramatically because of the ongoing burden of Net Zero levies.
If you want an idea of how much subsidy is flowing from consumers to green producers then consider the case of governing Labour party funder Dale Vince. Over the last 20 years, his 76 aging onshore wind turbines have collected £145 million in subsidies, yet they currently produce just 0.06% of UK electricity power. In addition, his company Ecotricity has secured an exemption from the current Ofgem consumer price cap to charge more for a ‘green’ investment tariff to his no-doubt virtuous retail customers. “By far the cheapest component of our energy supply is the electricity produced by renewables, principally wind and solar,” writes Monbiot. For those who consider the actual figures, ‘cheap’ is not a word that readily springs to mind.
All the evidence shows that nobody would erect a wind turbine unless they were provided with a guaranteed and highly artificial profit. None of this appears to trouble the Monbiots of this world. In addition, it seems that blind eyes are turned to the appalling ecological damage caused by wind turbines, whether it be the half a million Amazonian balsa wood trees illegally logged every year to provide the core for giant blades, or the horrendous death toll of bats and large raptors.
None of this appears to have troubled Monbiot. He contents himself with simple, largely anti-human messages based on the unproven claim that said humans control the climate by burning the hated hydrocarbons. Ecological collapse is the standard sandwich board uniform for Monbiot, as it is for Jim ‘join-dots’ Dale. Over the years, some of Monbiot’s attempts at scare-mongering have been on a par with anything Dale has dreamt up.
Who can forget his claim that flying across the Atlantic is now as unacceptable as child abuse. The Guardian did not archive this work, but it is still available online.
Arctic systems have not collapsed, the cyclical ice melt has been on pause for 20 years, whales, walruses, polar bears and seals are doing just fine. In fact, the bears are thought to be at record numbers since the 1950s when hunting was largely banned. On the Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral ecosystem in the world, the coral recently came off three years of record growth, and is still recording its fourth highest total since serious observations began nearly 40 years ago.
Another old favourite: ‘Why vegans were right all along: famine can only be avoided if the rich give up meat, fish and dairy.‘
This article was written in December 2002 and it has not worn well. In particular, the suggestion that within as little as 10 years “the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world’s animals or it continues to feed the world’s people. It cannot do both.” Of course it did do both, helped by a 10% growth in global vegetation boosted by extra atmospheric supplies of hydrocarbon-produced carbon dioxide.
Monbiot still draws an adoring crowd in echo chambers such as that provided by the completely unbiased BBC Question Time audience. But his closed mind and increasingly bizarre neo-Malthusian attachment to Net Zero is starting to catch up with him. He has not had to seriously debate his outlandish claims for years, at least since he added his name to a 2018 letter to the Guardian, which, with stupendous pomposity, stated he and the other signatories would no longer “lend our credibility” to debates over whether human-triggered climate change is real. Among the other giants of broadcast media declaring that they had no further interest in the time-honoured process of debating conflicting scientific opinions were Jonathan Porritt, Caroline Lucas, Clive Lewis and Professor Mark Maslin. Like most hardcore activists, Monbiot has fled Twitter, now X under Elon Musk’s control, seemingly horrified by the unwelcome outbreak of free speech. In a long rambling goodbye, he observed that intelligent conversation had been drowned out by a “tsunami of stupidity”.
Perhaps we should all be grateful for his retirement from the tedium of having to justify his increasingly outlandish claptrap. Jobs all round for Jim Dale. Few mainstream media operations seek to provide a balanced debate on climate change and Net Zero, but those that do such as Talk and GB News struggle to find opposing voices to appear with anyone who disputes the ‘settled’ narrative. All except Jim Dale, with his word-salad ‘whack-a-mole’ claims of imminent climate Armageddon. Like many of Monbiot’s past claims, they are truly some of the great comedy gifts of our time.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
