What was going to be a quieter-than-usual (birthday!) week due to one of our little ones being away on a school trip ended up being reasonably eventful.
As a result of some past sports journalistic endeavours, I spent a week working at the Daily Mirror back in the summer of 2005. During this very short stint I watched in fascination as tabloid journalists skillfully executed their craft, ‘playing to their audience’ by writing in a style expected - and demanded - of their readership. A key mantra was drummed into me: in a saturated media market, deviating from the ‘script’ was risky (diversionary point: I have subsequently wondered who writes the script). Yes, you might temporarily win 10 new readers, but if that was at a cost of losing 1 dedicated long-term reader, the net result (over time) would be bad. This partly explains why different titles retain their house styles, almost to the extent of self-caricature.
Winding forward to September 2023, this lesson was very much front of mind when I was asked by GB News (at fairly short notice) to write an opinion piece, which ended up going live on their site on Wednesday, just after the Prime Minister’s curate’s egg speech on Net Zero (more on that later in this post). Stylistically, the piece is somewhat different from my normal fare:
The United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP) 28 may only be taking place later in the autumn, but it seems that this is not enough for the UN. There is a ‘Climate Ambition Summit’ in New York today. Various luminaries will have hypocritically expended large quantities of greenhouse gases in order to attend the event and emit hot air of their own.
The idea that there is a ‘climate crisis’ is a complete political fabrication, not that you’ll read about this in The Times.
Decarbonisation is based on a very simplistic assumption, namely that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases since the industrial age have somehow created global warming/climate change (or ‘global boiling’ as the UN Secretary General recently called it).
If this were a rational policy (and I am going to suggest that it is not), then it would be being implemented off the back of a serious increase in nuclear baseload power, providing the springboard for variable power from other sources to make up the rest, along with suitable standby power (such as gas) that can be fired up quickly.
But – as everyone surely remembers – this plan was vetoed in 2010 by a (now) Facebook executive (a certain Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister at the time) on the basis that it would “only come on stream in 2021 or 2022”. Interest rates were practically zero at the time, so the coalition government could have funded such an infrastructure investment plan with relative ease.
Putting party politics aside, the pseudo-religion of the climate alarmists needs a radical rethink, as more and more people are speaking out – modern-day heretics (I count myself among this number) – to point out multiple flaws in the rationale for decarbonisation.
GB News published my piece without links, which I have added in above (the Clegg video is worth watching - before you do so, please remove any hard and easily throwable objects from your vicinity (or at least sit on your hands) - the temptation to launch a projectile at your screen will be almost irresistable).
The responses on Twitter to the article are worth a brief perusal: for those not aware of GB News, it is under intense pressure from leftoid forces who have been partially successful in getting advertisers to boycott them. Why the leftoids are incandescant is not being made overtly clear (though I can envisage various sinister reasons why they are enraged… or should I say more enraged than normal). Given what I have observed, the pushback is just manufactured noise of very low quality: it is riven by circular arguments and hypocrisy. Consider this particular exchange as par for the course - a very new and anonymous account with hardly any followers (the equivalent of a ‘burner phone’ which can be discarded at will) starts by making a baseless accusation (arguably libellous - subsequently deleted when challenged), then proceeds to argue in circles, completely fails to engage in any of the substance matter and then retreats with a sullen block (for non-twitter users: a block is when you stop all interactions with someone - I cannot now read his tweets, but if you click the link above you probably still can):
Instructive. (Apologies for the misspelling of curiously!).
While the GB News piece was being processed by the sub-editors, my birthday lunch was interrupted by a request to be on standby to comment on Sunak’s speech, scheduled for 4:30pm that day. I filed copy shortly after 6pm and Reaction published my Net Zero Reckoning article the following morning:
Fantasies can only be sustained for so long in the face of harsh truths. Net zero is one such. The political class – possibly starting with David Cameron’s efforts to “hug a husky” (and prior to him “cutting the green crap”) – allowed cuddly thoughts of sustainable living and renewable energy to get conflated with a harder line of extremist deindustrialisation. Vested interests jumped on the bandwagon, and over the course of a few years the eco warrior’s cry of “save the whales” got perverted into “whales are CO2 emitters”, the implication being that it is just a necessary – and acceptable – sacrifice if offshore wind farms mean these great sea mammals perish.
Black is white, war is peace. Saint Greta’s creed is certainly not as pure as the driven snow.
In yesterday’s speech, Sunak promised to replace imposition, obfuscation and ideology (not-so-tacitly acknowledging that this is what we’ve been subjected to for the last few years) with consent, honesty and pragmatism. While he promises that his new direction will now be “accountable to the British public”, his announcement is a curate’s egg that will please very few, as he still claims he wants Britain to hit net zero by 2050.
Note the overt admission that HM Government has deployed obfuscation and imposed ideology on UK citizens (so much for “they work for you”).
The members of the climate alarmist cult will be devastated that heretics have ruined their nirvana. But realists like me – who believe in scientific discourse and have now finally been promised consent, honesty and pragmatism – do not consent to allowing our children’s future to be sacrificed on the net zero altar and will insist on an open discussion as to whether this is even sensible. Net zero is built on a house of cards and relies on an assumption that manmade greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming, or climate change, or global boiling. This assumption is flawed.
This battle will be fought over the coming months and years, but it will be important to make sure it is not just one of ideas. It has been pointed out that these trivial offerings from the PM could even be ruled as being illegal, such that the bureaucratic blob pushes on with these devastating policies. Legislation is needed - the Climate Change Act 2008 should be repealed.
On a more positive note, the journal paper mentioned at the end of both articles is a heartening read - I strongly recommend taking the time to study it. Apart from the humourous deadpan delivery, it has some excellent content and a very noteworthy funding admission:
Funding: this research received no external funding but was motivated by the scientific curiosity of the authors.
Well quite. Unlike various other contributions from TheScience™ that get relentlessly promoted by the climate alarmists and pharmaceutical enthusiasts in the mainstream media.
Picture credit: another paper by the same authors as the journal paper mentioned above.
This is probably enough already, but I enjoyed Gerald Warner’s column this week:
“We are governed by fools. Every authoritative institution in the country is in the hands of clowns who think there are more than a hundred sexes, that open borders are a perfectly practical proposition that will increase prosperity and that the family is “oppressive”. If we do not remove every last one of them, sooner rather than later, this lunatic asylum will crumble into bankrupt anarchy. The first to go will be the Tories: that is the one reform that is a certainty. Delaying net zero impositions by five years will not save them: their names are woven into Madame Defarge’s knitting.
We have reached a tipping point. If government does not begin to reflect the will of the people it governs – in much more substantial ways than deferring installation of heat pumps – in an age of intemperate passions, we cannot rule out the possibility that Parliament may no longer be seen as indispensable. We may need radically new forms of governance and that necessity could generate creative possibilities. Nothing is for ever and it would behove honourable members to remind themselves of that reality, before they continue to abuse and gag the British people beyond the limits of tolerance”.
Strong words. I see where he’s coming from.
PS. Weather update! Colder than average in Greenland again… (when it’s cold, it’s just weather):
Source: http://polarportal.dk/en/weather/nbsp/current-weather/