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There are three symptoms that you absolutely must get medical help for: severe chest pain, sudden sight loss, and bleeding from your rectum (each of which might be evidence of a life-threatening condition). You would, however, be shocked if your doctor was to recommend corn plasters as a potential cure. Or, worse still, if your doctor proposed an entirely woo treatment such as ear candling or chakra balancing. Indeed, you might even begin to question the diagnosis when the proposed treatment is so out of step with the severity of the disease… especially if your doctor’s own lifestyle choices are at odds with what he or she is recommending to you.
This, I’m afraid, is entirely analogous to what is happening with climate change across the western states. Global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, as does the average global temperature – mostly (for now) due to warming winters rather than boiling summers. Such are the symptoms of what may well be a terminal disease. This, however, is where the problem begins. Because, having diagnosed the disease, our metaphorical doctors have prescribed the very worse forms of quackery as a (non-)solution. And it is not as if they are hiding it.
With the world still stunned by the pandemic lockdowns, representatives of the supranational technocracy flew to Scotland to pontificate on carbon reduction – most notoriously including then US President Biden being chauffeured to the venue in a 21 limo motorcade, where he appeared to sleep through the event, attracting the description of “the most carbon-intensive afternoon nap in history.” Three years later, and COP 29 came to be remembered for oil deals being struck rather than for any effective action on climate change. More notorious still, ahead of this year’s COP 30, the organisers are hacking down miles of Amazon rainforest to build a dedicated highway to the conference venue. Short of building a new coal power plant – fuelled by brown (lignite) coal from the opposite side of the planet – to power the venue, it is hard to imagine how the COP organisers could be any more climate unfriendly. Nevertheless, governments (and publics) across the west (the rest of the world is less deranged) continue to promote the quack cures prescribed by the supranational climate technocracy.
Nowhere is the quackery worse than in the UK under the auspices of Ed “mad dog” Miliband and the activists at the Committee for Climate Change, whose claim that non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs) can reduce global carbon emissions is being tested to destruction as I write. The quack cure proposed here is that we can not only maintain but also grow a technologically advanced economy by deploying NRREHTs while simultaneously phasing out fossil fuel electricity generation. Nor is the quackery limited to decarbonising electricity generation. Because in addition, we are told we can support a switch from ICE to EV transport and gas to (electric) heat pumps for home heating – despite being unclear about where the additional 60GW of electricity generation to power the EVs and the heat pumps is going to come from.
The government sales pitch was that we could meet all three of the energy objectives set out in the 2017 energy review conducted by Oxford professor Dieter Helm, although Helm cautioned against complacency:
“It is not particularly difficult to set out what an efficient energy system might look like which meets the twin objectives of the climate change targets and security of supply. There would, however, remain a binding constraint: the willingness and ability to pay for it. There have to be sufficient resources available, and there has in a democracy to be a majority who are both willing to pay and willing to force the population as a whole to pay. This constraint featured prominently in the last three general elections, and it has not gone away.”
That was five years before the post-lockdown energy shock and two years prior to the first “near miss” power outage of the UK’s NRREHTs era. And yet, the UK government continues to claim that the NRREHTs quackery can simultaneously provide lower carbon emissions, energy security, and lower prices when, in fact none of those are true. Because of the need to balance intermittency – both minute-to-minute and season to season – the UK pays far more than it needs to for the gas used when the wind drops and the sun stops shining:
“Policymakers are also fond of blaming ‘high international gas prices’ on the UK’s high energy costs. However, this claim also does not survive closer scrutiny. Firstly, there is no single ‘international gas price’ – there is not even a single British gas price! However, what policymakers mean by this expression is that, as net gas importers, we must pay whatever prices are demanded by the international gas markets.
“But this is true for all net gas importers, many of whom, like the UK, use gas as the fuel in their marginal electricity generating plant. So while ‘international gas prices’ may explain periods of higher energy prices in the UK, they do not explain why the UK has relatively expensive energy compared with other countries. This additional expense undermines the UK’s international competitiveness and is driving de-industrialisation.”
Nor is the UK’s electricity all that secure these days. Domestically, the failure to invest in maintaining and updating the grid infrastructure – as witnessed by Heathrow airport being taken out by a fire in two 60-yer-old transformers last month – means that failures and power outages are becoming more common, while existing generating capacity is declining due to gas and nuclear plants (coal has already closed) coming to the end of their working lives. Nor is the solution to simply add more windfarms, because it turns out that the grid lacks the capacity (and the materials) needed to connect these. And so, the proposed “solution” to energy security is to attempt to wire the UK grid into a wider European grid (the UK imported 14.5 percent of its electricity from Europe in the past year) in the fantasy belief that a problem shared would be a problem halved… it isn’t, as we saw in Spain, Portugal and southern France earlier this month.
But surely high prices and a lack of energy security are prices worth paying if they reverse the growth of carbon dioxide emissions? Except, of course, global carbon dioxide emissions have continued to grow despite the deployment of NRREHTs and the closure of western coal plants. And in the UK’s case, this issue is plain embarrassing since our domestic contribution to global carbon emissions works out at just 0.8 percent. So that, if the entire island of Great Britain were to slip peacefully beneath the waters of the North Atlantic tomorrow, it would have no noticeable impact on climate change.
This is an exaggeration, of course, since the real impact on carbon emissions if Britain disappeared would be from imports, shipping costs and international travel, which account for more than half of the UK’s true carbon footprint:
“Emissions associated with imports to the UK, including international travel, have risen from about 316m tonnes of carbon in 1990 to 360m tonnes in 2016 and 358m tonnes in 2017, the latest year for which data is available.”
Given the de-industrialisation that has taken place in the past five years, and especially the UK’s increased dependence upon imported steel following the closure of all but one of its blast furnaces, this number is likely to have grown… and will grow further as the UK looks to China to supply the mountains of wind turbines and solar panels that are proposed by the UK government. One reason, perhaps, why nobody has funded an update on the research.
To anyone prepared to read beyond the media headline then, the current UK policy fails to meet all three energy priorities. And this, along with the technocrats flying around on private jets and buying up seaside properties, makes the whole thing look like a sham… just another means of allowing the multi-national energy corporations to fleece us of trillions of dollars in subsidies and gouged prices. The latter, of course, being the point where the policy fails because too high electricity prices will ultimately bankrupt consumers and businesses alike… hardly – as often claimed – a model that the rest of the world will be in a hurry to replicate.
The current situation has been a gift to a growing nationalist-populist coalition around the Reform UK party which tends to claim that climate change isn’t happening – as evidenced by the blatant hypocrisy of the technocrats – and that a return to fossil fuels will at least lower prices and return energy security. Unfortunately, in both cases, they are mostly wrong… although (perhaps a surprise to my left-leaning readers) Reform UK did at least propose taking energy back into public (but not state) ownership at last year’s election.
Certainly, bringing all generation under one roof would do away with the misallocation of costs within the current system. But the simple assumption that fossil fuel use declined solely as a result of government policy is incorrect. Coal production, for example, did not end with Thatcher’s withdrawal of subsidies following the 1984-85 miners’ strike or Blair’s turn to NRREHTs. A few deep mines remained profitable until the 1990s, while the last open cast mine didn’t close until 2023 (disconnecting the supply to Port Talbot steelworks and more or less guaranteeing its closure). There are still vast quantities of coal beneath the ground. But it is doubtful whether these can be produced profitably without subsidies similar to those currently going to NRREHTs.
When it comes to oil and gas, the situation is worse because there are few viable reserves left in the offshore fields where production peaked a quarter of a century ago. Whenever global prices spike, we witness renewed interest in oil and gas fields in the deep Atlantic, but it turns out that the wider economy cannot cope with such high prices without slumping into a recession… which then causes oil and gas prices to fall back. The same issue bedevils the potential recovery of shale gas from the supposedly vast deposit in northern England. Indeed, there may not be any shale gas left beneath the ground at all. And even if there is, a combination of warped and broken geology beneath the ground and insufficient open space above, may render much of it inaccessible. Not that these were the only problems. Even with the support of government, few test wells were drilled before rising costs and fleeing investors brought the curtain down prior to the pandemic. So that, even if a future populist government wanted to turn to shale gas to fill the gap in the UK’s energy, they will likely be unable to do so.
In the end, and following multiple widespread power outages resulting from the growing lack of inertia, future UK governments – populist or neoliberal – will be forced to turn back to coal as the least unprofitable means of keeping the lights on… particularly – and no doubt accompanied by howls of protests from environmental groups – the billion tonnes of lignite at Ballymoney in Northern Ireland. Not least because, as fast as the UK is closing fossil fuel generation, China alone is more than replacing it.
This, perhaps, should lead us to what should be an obvious conclusion about tackling climate change… that the solution (or at least mitigation) is on the consumption side rather than domestic energy generation. That is, that we would have a far greater impact on global greenhouse gas emissions by lowering our consumption of discretionary goods than we will ever manage by dismantling our electricity generation and de-industrialising what remains of our manufacturing base. But that would require an unthinkable policy reversal to the multi-trillion dollar green-industrial-complex that has grown up in the decades since the technocracy first saw climate change as a potential cash-cow.
As you made it to the end…
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