I was very heartened to spot some highly sensible commentary and suggestions from some mainstream commentators over the course of the last week.
Gerald Warner, writing for Reaction, went as far as to call for a Great Reset in a no-nonsense opening paragraph:
It is time for the Great Reset. Not the dystopian version favoured by Klaus Schwab, the caricature Bond villain running the semi-sinister, semi-comical World Economic Forum, but a radical reordering of every aspect of life in Britain and much of the developed world, to purge our institutions of the cranks, charlatans and neo-Marxists who have colonised the commanding heights of our society, while normal people simply tried to get on with their lives.
He then takes quickfire aim at woke-ism, decolonisation, the debanking debacle and the wetness of academia amidst a call to “uproot all the weeds of leftist intolerance”:
That is the current character of British education, from kindergarten to the moment when a perfectly formed snowflake emerges from its Russell Group chrysalis and takes wings towards the City, business, banking, the civil service, lobbying (especially on climate), publishing, the media, “the Arts”, politics – or perhaps remains in academe to help lobotomize the next generation of undergraduates.
That is the dystopian, neo-Marxist landscape of Britain after 13 years of Tory government, a regime that has furnished the most extravagant example of Stockholm Syndrome ever recorded in the annals of psychiatry. Why were the Tories so enfeebled as to embrace the tenets of their enemies and repudiate anyone who retained traditional beliefs? Because they were not Tories, is the answer, just ambitious opportunists eager to assume the protective colouration of their environment.
He then quickly proceeds to some superb summary paragraphs on Net Zero and Climate Alarmism (bold = my highlight):
The whole country needs to stand up and reclaim Britain for sanity. If there is one area above all where a Great Reset is needed, it is in the arena of climate change. To tune into BBC Radio 4 at any hour of the day or night is to hear the shrieking of Bedlam’s climate-demented inmates.
Net Zero must be ditched: it only took the Uxbridge by-election to hose the greenwash off the hypocritical Tories. On climate alarmism, again, we need to go to tabula rasa and reappraise the situation objectively. The government should assemble a panel of genuine climate experts who have not taken the IPCC shilling, discounting computer “modelling”, when the result is dictated by the data fed in, in favour of empirical evidence.
The great fallacy regarding climate change has been the assumption that because the perceived threat was global, it required a supranational, one-size-fits-all response. This has led to the absurdity of Britain, which produces a paltry one per cent of greenhouse gases, beggaring itself in pursuit of net zero while China, responsible for 28 per cent, opens more coal-fired power stations and grows its economy.
We need a response tailored specifically to Britain’s needs, a bespoke climate policy… For that, we need authentic, unbiased scientific information, not the extravagant propaganda of climate alarmists.
Keen observers may spot that he has referenced articles and letters that may be familiar to readers of this blog. As I have previously pointed out (also for Reaction), it has at times felt futile fighting a top-down imposed ‘consensus’ that is ruthlessly enforced, by fair means or foul. What is therefore particularly encouraging about Warner’s writing is that he has clearly got to this position despite still believing some of the climate alarmists’ gospel. I therefore believe this highlights the perilous nature (if only that double meaning was funny!) of that creed: just wait until more of Net Zero’s contradictions get unearthed such that more establishment thinkers opt to speak up.
Speaking of establishment thinkers, this is as good a point as any to provide a link to an exchange of letters from over a decade ago between the then Science Editor of The Independent and the late Professor Freeman Dyson, world-renowned physicist and a 'force-of-nature intellect' who passed away in 2020. I am hoping to write about this in more detail, but the exchange is extraordinary in so many ways - it is simply astounding to read the extent to which the journalist has been indoctrinated despite the facts of the 2009 climategate debacle being still fresh (surely?) in that science journalist’s mind.
A few days after Warner’s excellent article, Reaction published an editorial piece from publisher Iain Martin entitled: “Naive net zero groupthink misses the point of rising geopolitical dangers”. The content is fairly self-explanatory and not particularly surprising to those who intuit the complexity of implementing global top-down paradigm shifts. But Martin - like Warner, coming from a mainstream angle - usefully highlights the dangers of manufactured consent for policies that get imposed without robust and open discussion:
Anyone challenging the dominant narrative in print or online, anyone who calls for some balance and realism about how long the transition to cleaner energy will take, is used to the vehemence of the response by now.
Last week, when I observed on Twitter that we’ll need a lot of oil and gas for a long while yet if we want any growth, and noted that British industry is already paying double for electricity what US industry pays, an articulate environmentalist proudly sent me a link to an academic report purporting to prove that a “fast transition” to renewables would produce an enormous cost saving by 2050. Critique this, he said.
Okay, I thought. I’ll read the paper carefully. The three Oxford academics are all affiliated with the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford. Their models and graphs show that while there are large upfront costs, green energy is the cost-effective solution. Going green fast will save a fortune, as well as saving the planet, apparently.
The longer the academic report went on, with confident claim after claim about models and the future, the more I thought, “hold on, there must be a chapter coming about geopolitical risks in the decades ahead”, or how events have a habit of making fools of those trying to model the future. There must be something substantial in there about the fight for resources between major powers and their allies that could at the least make for unpredictability, or disrupt supply chains, or cause wars. But no, there was not.
The authors say: “Although our Fast Transition scenario is subjective, we believe it is plausible. The deployment trajectories are in line with past trends. There appear to be no major obstacles to bringing the necessary technologies to scale in terms of land use, sea, climate, raw materials, manufacturing capacity, energy return on energy invested, or system integration.”
On this confident basis they propose the redesign of our entire energy system, and economy, and map the world out until 2050. That is 27 years away.
Think how often in the last 27 years novel events, or developments that were unexpected, caused major changes in the global economy and our assumptions.
Towards cleaner energy? Great, yes, but let’s be aware of the vulnerabilities on resources and products, and make more of what we can ourselves. And get nuclear right.
Just stop oil? Don’t be daft. Oil and gas will be needed for many decades to come if we want the lights to stay on. They both involve their own vulnerabilities, of course, as the Saudis are showing right now. They have restricted supply and petrol and diesel prices are climbing again. That means when we have potential resources available – as the UK and Norway do with more gas in the North Sea – we must tap it.
Who will be the first mainstream party leader to stop telling us fairytales and test whether the electorate can handle the truth of our situation?
This is good stuff from Martin and Warner, and I hope that more join in the chorus of common sense.
We have further to go - ‘cleaner energy’ needs to be carefully defined such that we include the cost of replacement (which landfill sites will those solar panels and wind turbines go?) and the cost of backup power & grid balancing:
The cost of balancing Britain’s power grid hit £4.19 billion last year according to Nuclear Industry Association analysis of National Grid Electricity Systems Operator (ESO) data. The total cost for 2022 is equivalent to every household in Britain paying an extra £150 as National Grid ESO says the costs “are ultimately borne by consumers.” Costs have increased 250% since 2019, when the total was £1.2 billion. In those last four years, balancing the grid has cost British consumers £9.83 billion in total.
Balancing costs have spiraled since the beginning of the energy crisis: between September 2021 and December 2022, ESO data shows £5.6 billion has been spent on balancing the electricity grid, more than twice as much as the same period from September 2019 to December 2020, which totaled £2.62 billion.
And then, of course, we need to tackle the most sacred cows of all: decarbonisation. But such heresies must await another post.