From Zero to Eternity

Rejoice, comrades, for the race to Net Zero has been won. Because of the natural lag in collecting, analysing and amending all the statistical data to arrive at the correct conclusion, the reaching of this milestone was overlooked at the time, but we have run the figures, and then run them again and it is now undeniable that the United Kingdom has exceeded its brave remit to become carbon zero.

In fact, it is far better than that because now that the wind turbines also suck carbon-dioxide out of the very air itself, the proliferation of atmosphere farms has turned us into a negative carbon superpower. The carbon capturing ability – and on this there can be no doubting the science – is more than enough to cancel out all of Britain’s industrial CO₂ emissions. This includes all the fried chicken shops, the carbon dioxide breathed out by Deliveroo bike couriers, and all the hot air expended by Ladbrokes customers and Parliament combined.

Better yet is the now proven fact that every mile driven in an electric vehicle literally improves air quality by 50%. This means that as every Tesla Monstatruk_[TM] passes you by, on your long march to the lithium mines, your lungs grow healthier with each breath you take. And for every new solar-photovoltaic panel you install, your social credit score increases by a full two percent, for which The Party thanks you.

The passing of all manufacture and information technology to the control of China has effectively put us under the protectorate of the most powerful industrial and military conglomerate on the planet. This means we are no longer beholden to the United States for defence and we have become self sufficient in Chinese energy, food and security.

And, due to this happy partnership, we are able to avail ourselves of the CCP's wonderful techniques for disseminating the good news, of which there is plenty. No longer are we bound by strictly impartial news reporting, or any of that freedom of speech lunacy which so dominated the last struggling decade before we ascended the plateau to zero. No, all that is required under the various five year plans is to announce that the plan has succeeded.

Naturally, having met all of our targets, it is imperative that the people’s committees and cooperatives set new ones. There is one downside, however. Despite the days of plenty and glorious abundance with which the telescreens are filled, some anti-party activists insist on trying to spread malicious propaganda. The weekly die-ins, at which hundreds expire from what they choose to call hunger are unseemly and undignified. And they achieve nothing.

We must resist, with every fibre of our being, those negative messages of want. There is no want; we can see this demonstrated daily on TikTok. There is no hunger; the screens are full of images of tables, groaning under the sheer weight of food. The people are happy, the people own nothing yet they own everything. And our carbon emissions targets have all been exceeded. And we know this because Comrade Miliband tells us it is so.

As You Were

The current culture war – selfish, individual identity versus national cohesion – is quite bad enough, all by itself and threatens stability for all. The LGBTQIP+++ alphabet people are aided in their assault on reason by the parallel war on intelligence, waged over at least the last half-century, which churns out ever more dependent, ever dumber, ever biddable young volunteers to the cause. Meanwhile the judiciary appears to have turned on the majority law-abiding in favour of the disrupters.

Banking is broken, the globalised Ponzi scheme of growth by consumption has feasted on the ready supply of lowest-common-denominator immigration, and we are, it seems no longer able to hire for merit, being driven by the diversity agenda to hire by skin colour or gender or disability. The great and the good, from their altar at Davos have proclaimed that we will own nothing and be happy.

Well, the first part of that certainly appears to be happening, owning nothing that is. Our roads are riddled with potholes, our rail infrastructure is creaking, public services everywhere are physically breaking down when they are not merely on strike, and the chances of getting a doctor’s appointment are close to zero. Zero is the theme – it seems to be the end goal of every policy, every administrative effort; it may as well be in the main parties’ manifestos.

So it seems uncannily timely that the latest orders from the seat of world government, the UN and the IPCC, that despite the impossibility of achieving the already ridiculous Net-Zero targets, developed nations must hit that unachievable milestone ten years earlier than pledged. 2040, they are saying, not 2050, and lest you be in any doubt, 2040 is effectively tomorrow. Emissions are still rising, they wail. Yes, they are, because the unseemly dash to achieve ‘not-zero’ by 2050 is creating industrial output on a scale not seen before… in China. Using coal.

You could not invent a fiction worse than this reality. Cleverer heads than me have worked out that not only do we not currently know of sufficient mineral resources – raw materials for batteries, wiring, electronic components, etc – the extraction of these resources is despoiling vast acres of the natural landscape while also emitting ever more CO₂ into the atmosphere. It doesn’t even matter where you are on the anthropogenic climate change debate, 2050 was problematic, but 2040 is far, far worse.

Some are even calling for – and brace yourselves for this – 2025 (yes, just 20 months) to get the ball in that back of that impossibly small net. If Greta Thunberg wasn’t bad enough, prepare yourself for your kids to come home and denounce you as murderers for daring to have them, clothe them, keep them warm, transport them and feed them. Oh yes, food, that’s something else we are going to have to learn to do without, apparently.

Who is going to pay for it all? Yes, you guessed it, the taxpayer. We are. Again. No matter what the cause, no matter what the cost, the sacrifices will not be made by those making the policy. But here’s their problem; in order to muster the will and the resources to do things on the scale being demanded, you have to herd the sheep along a single path to the slaughterhouse. And for that you have to get some form of buy-in from the sheep. What’s in it for us, we ask?

As it stands, nothing. We get nothing in return for the pain which will be inflicted on us. Worse, we will be berated as ignorant and bigoted (and no doubt, racist) for resisting the reduction of our living standards to that of the third world and the payment of reparation to that same third world so that they can experience the industrial progress that dragged us out of the gutter. It is the same as seeing your hard-earned council tax go to replace the windows in the housing society property next door, occupied by universal credit dependent recipients, while you in your owner-occupied hovel shiver through the winter months.

Coming soon, to a neighbourhood near you...

Madness. If you wanted to dream up a scheme to foment mass rebellion you could do far worse than the climate change lobby. But even in the face of all of the above, I still see little active resistance. In the end the Net Zero lunacy will fail not due to the scale of the technological challenge, to which we are not equal, but to apathy, our new defining national characteristic. For, if the inanities of gender ideology, enforced diversity, and the winding up of all that once made us a force for good in the world isn’t enough to get us out on the streets, I doubt very much that climate action will ignite that spark. 

Thought Experiment

What a ridiculous phrase that title is. Why not just call it a discussion, a debate, an examination of, exploration of… or just a good chat about something? Giving it the dignity of that stylised monicker seeks to elevate anybody’s random question into some sort of enlightened scientific enquiry. Anyway, last night Gaia Vince, on BBC’s Inside Science, chaired such a so-called experiment on the possibility of abundant cheap energy, with various contributors coming up with Utopian visions of pastoral bliss, free from toil, and oil.

It is almost as if the people consulted about such matters have little grasp of human nature, a failing which seems to affect most policy makers across all aspects of governance. Not only is cheap and abundant energy – for the whole world, by the way - a highly unrealistic scenario, they seem to forget how the human economy apportions resources. And how the human masses react to the meagre shares they are awarded. There are non so equal as those who control the means of production and distribution.

It was quite good timing though, just after Grants Shapps’ appointment as Minister for Energy Security and Net-Zero. And what a title that is! A bit like having a Minister of War AND Peace… or, indeed, the Ministry of Truth. Energy Security AND Net-Zero? We could have energy security almost immediately if we abandoned Net-Loser today and got on with oil and gas while building plenty of nuclear capacity. Sure, keep the windfarms, at least until the maintenance cost renders them uneconomic. If we get nuclearising right now, we should have stations on-stream before the windies collapse… around 2050 I reckon.

It strikes me that we can have either, but not both. But even if we all got behind the green catastrophe it is doubtful that baleful Britain has the ability to deliver. It should be clear by now that we are hopeless at infrastructure. The Victorian legacy systems are straining at the seams and we have done precious little to prepare for the serial failures we now see on a regular basis. 

Water, sewage, rail… all in tatters. Our roads are fucked and as for HS2, it is clear that while a small number of consultants will make fortunes from the white elephant, the project will never be completed, much as the M25 (proposed in 1944, given the go-ahead in 1975) which is still not finished and costs £billions in maintenance and disruption. The latest, HS2 Plan B, should be called HS2B or not 2B.

The engineers and inventors and pioneers of our past must look down from their celestial rest in despair. They must wonder how we can have so many people sitting idle, or else doing nothing productive, while a diminishing work force is taxed to the hilt to pay for it all, yet nobody dares propose the simple solution of getting everybody back to the real grind of building a society and an infrastructure fit for the future. And there is no sign of anything getting better.

So here’s a little question for you all: do you think we will ever achieve either energy security or net-zero, or will we simply fail at both? Answers in a thought experiment.

How Dare You!

Over the weekend I have been doing a bit of research into the government’s plans, schemes, roadmaps, incentives and aspirations for transition to a greener, cleaner, energy efficient, energy abundant future. The sheer amount of material written about it is staggering and I have come up with one firm conclusion which will come as no surprise to any regular readers of this blog; it’s a heap of crap. And a big one, at that. And that particular dung heap is growing by the hour.

Because Britain no longer does anything, at all. Nothing. Oh we can talk a good net-zero game, as we can talk about all sorts of things we are incapable of doing, but we can’t actually do it. We haven’t enough existing skilled tradesmen to do any of the clever installations of preferred technologies, but we have acres of print in terms of standards, proposals, regulations and the like. And those tradesmen are a dying breed, not even being replaced at the natural rate of attrition.

I read about the intention to install 600,000 heat pumps a year. Yeah, right. There aren’t enough trainees in the country to even get close to the manpower we’d need for that. And when they are installed, who will maintain them? Who will engage with the freezing pensioners robbed of their life savings to replace their reliable gas boilers when they fail to perform effectively in cold weather? (Because, of course, they will; their coefficient of performance is nowhere near that claimed in the literature.)

What is far more likely to happen is that once the existing unrealistic targets are missed, a small army of bureaucrats and meddlers, ‘advisors’ and newly qualified but untested ‘experts’ will be drafted in to write yet more proposals, set yet more even more unattainable goals and generate productivity less than the square root of fuck-all. In fact, their hot air will merely add to the problem we are supposedly trying to solve.

Some will argue ‘twas ever thus, but at least back in the days of Sir Humphrey, access to the levers of meddling was strictly controlled, whereas today anybody can become an instant part of the problem without ever getting anywhere near the Civil Service entrance exam. In other words, there are no checks and balances on those who would enter the burgeoning market for ever more pointless papers which just push yet more burden on those expected to actually solve the problems.

She won't be happy... but who cares?

If there actually even is a real and pressing problem. If these intellectual remote island dwellers only had a means of communication and the intellect with which to understand it, they would surely conclude that their very existence was the real issue here. If every target was abandoned and every green ideal simply ignored, the progress towards ‘not-zero’ would not be impeded in any significant way. Let’s try it. Let us simply ignore the wailing and existential teeth-gnashing of the acolytes of Saint Greta and see what really happens.

Net Nowhere

 The media is positively luxuriating in its bunker mentality. Tweeting from the trenches on the frozen streets of where they are now calling ‘Keev’ and pontificating like drunken football fans arguing about the refereeing, they have conveniently overlooked the war being waged not only on our doorsteps but right inside our houses. The conflict between heating and eating, a miserable pair of mutually exclusive options formerly only inflicted on ‘the poor’ is now pushing ahead on all fronts.

Fuel for driving has increased by over 50% in the last year. Fuel for heating and cooking is right behind it, with gas being the more obvious contender but electricity – already the most costly energy - ready to double, maybe triple in price. We put up with it, cutting back on ‘luxury’ treats such as medication and so forth, up to a point. But soon the cost of even getting to work may make work itself uneconomic for a very large number of people. And all the while the headlines lie to us about how very much cheaper so-called renewables are.

It all depends on who you read and where you go to listen to your news, but it is surely undeniable that the push for the impossibility of Net Zero is coming from those who do not have to face the economic realities. Smug accounts of ‘well, I have a solar array and a power wall and my bills have come down enormously’ and ‘with my eco set-up, I am virtually off-grid’ totally ignore the plain truth that most of us, even had we the roofs or the land to install such glittery, new-age tech, simply can’t afford it.

The true cost of Net Zero

You can probably install a quite decent 5 kW array and a basic battery storage system for under £20k these days. But who has £20k to spend, especially if your monthly fuel bill lands you in the red? And what are you really getting? Those doing the bragging quite often got in on the now defunct government feed-in tariff which actually paid you three times the retail price for every unit you generated (no wonder they stopped it so abruptly) and have reason to be smug. But if you are not so compensated, how do the numbers stack up?

According to Ofgem, the average household in the UK has 2.4 people living in it, and uses 2,900 kWh of electricity and 12,000 kWh of gas respectively. That’s around 15,000 kWh of energy a year, or around 40 kWh per day. Your 5 kW (peak) system is only at best around 20% of that, which is 1 kW (not enough to boil a standard kettle, used directly). Multiply that by 8 hours of good light in a day (not winter, obviously) and you could produce 8 kWh, or a fifth of your needs.

So, if your combined electricity and gas bill is around £200 a month, you could save around £40 a month if you invest £20k now, which investment will pay for itself in in a mere 500 months, or a bit over 40 years… which is twice as long as such a system is designed to last. Of course, other figures are available and this is a fag-packet estimate for an all-electric future. And there absolutely will be low energy users who could benefit hugely. But few of them are you or me.  

So the recent news that the government has admitted it has no idea what Net Zero will cost will come as no surprise to many. (Links here and here) We knew, all along, that we had no coherent energy policy, and the war in Ukraine has shown how fragile is the reliance on Russian gas (itself a policy to make the EU appear greener by offshoring their emissions). We are sheep, led by other fleecier sheep, themselves fleeced by the special interest lobbies and acting against our joint interests. For those who insist on believing in deep state collision, the most apt phrase which springs to mind involves a piss up in a brewery.