Can there actually be a "libertarian left"? Libertarian implies free markets. Left implies collectivism (socialism). Hence "libertarian left" is a contradiction in terms.
You might also ask what the term "Right" means. Many use "Right" to categorize Fascists. Yet Fascists are Socialists.
The terms "Left" and "Right" have no coherent meanings. They should be replaced with perhaps "Totalitarian" vs "Libertarian".
David, thank you for setting out your ideas on Net Zero and the tyrannical ideas behind it [See also Ref. 1]. You describe it/them as positioned politically on the far-left. I understand the reason for such positioning to be, in part, due to the adoption of Net Zero ideas by, among others, those that were previously on the traditional left-wing of politics. However, as has been pointed out by several commentators of the British political landscape [e.g. Refs. 2 and 3], the current policy anchor points of our British political parties are often far from their traditional roots.
While, crudely speaking, the traditional right used to represent views ranging from those of conservative, middle class voters across to the wishes of commercial/industrial businesses and capitalist interests more widely. By contrast, equally crudely, the traditional left represented the interests of ordinary working people and their needs for a strong social fabric (e.g. schools, hospitals, social housing) and good working conditions (e.g. health & safety, adequate pensions). In such a world, a move to strengthen one side of the political spectrum almost inevitably meant a weakening of the other. However, the to and fro of politics over the election cycle ensured that a (sometimes fraught) dynamic balance ensued over the long-term.
Unfortunately, that political world no longer exists under the Net Zero dispensation. The demands of Net Zero can, and do, weaken both traditional left- and right-wings simultaneously. In this sense Net Zero is neither left-wing nor right-wing but Blight-wing or far-Blight. That is, while a small number of very large (often foreign) enterprises benefit hugely, Net Zero puts a Blight on many sectors of British society at the same time and maintains its stranglehold indefinitely. For example, very high energy costs make commerce/industry uncompetitive and thereby, unless relief is forthcoming, eventually destroy those business. Ordinary people working for those businesses thence become unemployed. And to make matters worse, those self-same unemployed people (and all other households) have to pay the much higher Net Zero domestic energy bills thereby adding to their immiseration.
In short, Net Zero is neither a left-wing nor a right-wing policy but rather a Blight on the political and economic landscapes of the nation. As such it might best be plotted on the z-axis (i.e. coming out of the page/screen) in your graphs. In light of this, all political parties which wish to be electorally successful might do well to abandon their misguided and erroneous virtue signalling in favour of policies which eradicate the Net Zero blight and thereby revert to a healthier political and economic policies.
One of the strangest aspects of Net Zero is that it, and its precursor (the Climate Change Act 2008), were passed into law following very limited parliamentary debate and even less cost-benefit analysis; all of which is a shocking demonstration of the weakness of current British parliamentary democracy. It is, therefore, unsurprising that the Tory and Labour wings of the so-called Uniparty are currently in retreat leaving the next general election wide open to usurper parties. Will the latter’s political offerings continue the anti-democratic Blight-wing slide, or will a reversion to more representative democracy be the result? We live in very interesting times. Let us hope that they do not become too interesting.
References
1. Rupert Darwall, “Green Tyranny – exposing the totalitarian roots of the climate industrial complex”, Encounter Books, 2019.
2. R. Eatwell & M Goodwin, “National Populism”, Pelican, 2018.
3. Matthew Goodwin, “Values, Voice and Virtue”, Penguin, 2023.
I said that as I didn't really want to engage but 🙄.
My issue, as I said elsewhere, is your framing of the debate in R/L political type terms. Why can't we just discuss the merits of issues without allowing people to hide behind dogma of whichever side they're on? I think you could write a piece that we could engage with on the merits of the issues, not political flag-waving. Most people appear to have lost the ability to think critically without the crutch of a 'side' that in essence 'tells' them what they should support/believe.
The reality is that human driven climate change is real, individual action will not suffice to fix it so govns need to be involved. I agree that there is no magic bullet, we need numerous solutions, some which are mitigations as you say and some which address the core CO2 issue. BUT WE SHOULDN'T POLITICISE THIS, otherwise a significant portion of the population will disagree solely on political terms and nothing ever gets done as the politicians are beholden to them and haven't yet shown the balls to act regardless of what their dumb-ass voters think.
OK, in all seriousness; your comment, and the article, are facile and poorly argued, but unfortunately the method is way too common nowadays. Why do people feel the need to frame everything within a larger category, i.e. why frame the net zero debate under a political (L,R, socialist etc) umbrella?
The problem with doing so is that people automatically decide as to their POV on the subject (exhibit: your comment) as a function of the framing. That is not only intellectually dishonest, it's unintelligent and IMO potentially dangerous as issues don't get discussed on their merits, only on which camp they fall into.
For clarity, I'm not commenting here on the details of Net Zero, just the stupidity of the framing of the debate.
Here's my view on the debate: It is fact that human driven climate change is a huge problem. I don't believe that sufficient change, quickly enough, can be driven from the private sector alone, therefore governments must do something to drive the changes. We can argue about the details in the Net Zero manifesto, we can't argue about the need to do something. I also think that central planning for most things is a bad idea, but in this case it's a better idea than the alternative.
Net Zero is an example of a "mitigation" strategy. It can only work if everyone else does the same and CO2 is the inly climate control knob. Neither condition is true which mean Net Zero is doomed to fail.
The only viable strategy to combat climate change is adaptation (flood defences, irrigation, new crop varieties etc.). This has the advantages of:
1) Working regardless of what others do
2) Working regardless of the cause of climate change
3) Not requiring us to regress to an agrarian society
Net zero is a hoax. A tax scam. It's an ongoing, tiresome lie going back over 50 years. We differ in you believing - there's that word again - that individuals should be made to change their behaviours. Who gave you the right to demand that?
You pop up, demand to be taken seriously while deriding the data in front of you because it doesn't suit your narrative.
If you believe in it, you pay for it. I don't see why those uninterested in the snake oil should. Dress it however you wish, the green scam is just that.
You obviously don’t read/understand very well. Nowhere did I say that I support net zero. I simply made a point about framing the debate in terms of something else (which you just did again). I then made the point about human caused climate change.
If you are a climate denier then factually you are wrong (and the earth isn’t flat either btw). If you aren’t, then explain to me how you expect global change on climate to happen if left to individuals and private companies. Very happy to listen to ideas, but absent that I will continue my stance that governments need to drive this. And that means btw, that we are all expected to contribute, because it turns out we all live in the same plantetary society. That’s what the social contract is. You screaming in the corner because you don’t like it is simply the ravings of an unrealistic libertarian.
Like all things Left wing it's a rod shoved into a mass of cogs. After a while, the rod breaks, and the machine restarts. If more rods are shoved in to force the machine to stop - borrowing, high taxes, regulation, debt then the machine stops and eventually breaks into pieces, destroying both machine and rod. We are long past having an energy market. The state lies to continue the hegemony. Prices will only ever go up - as was intended.
This, of course, is what Milioaf means when he says 'you'll save £300'. You will use £300 less energy, be colder, more uncomfortable, pay higher prices but you'll use less, so there's his saving.
Infuriatingly, government never pays the price. It is always customers and businesses left with the mess the state creates. We are long, long past time when universal franchise must be revoked and referism, recall and direct democracy - the repeal and prevention of law by the voter - applied.
Exactly correct except that IMHO it's actually a Globalist project which is exploiting the ideological far left as useful idiots. That's why it has blended together with the Covid psyop with the same socio-economic destruction goals to reduce or eliminate resistance to the NWO. Mass indiscriminate immigration also falls into the same Globalist playbook.
Net Zero is NOT left wing driven! It is DRIVEN by fossil fuel interests because they KNOW that it cannot work! Combined with anti-nuclear activism, net-zero (as conceived) forces societies to keep using more and more expensive fossil fuels. This is a perverse incentive cycle that is only getting worse. I have rubbed shoulders with some of these sociopaths at billionaire parties. (Fun fact, most people that attend billionaire parties ain't billionaires, they are multi-millionaires, sometimes in the upper 11 figures. But they are united in their goal to keep their money rolling in by hook or by crook. And crook they definitely do and scheme to do. Most of these men are quite intelligent. Not overly bright, but in the 120's I'd say.)
I have had multiple conversations with a few economists that I know about where things are going, and they are of the ivory tower opinion that society will collapse, billions of people will die, and this will be a good thing for the planet. I point out that this will result in their deaths, and they just look at me like I'm a stupid child. They feel insulated completely. (As in, "Yes, 6 billion people. It's inevitable. But dear lord, we are the ones who understand things, we won't suffer." See Yuval Hariri and friends.)
The real issue is that there is only one course to REAL net-zero, and that is MASSIVE build-out of nuclear power. By this I mean a war-time schedule. Failure to do this will doom societies, and all hell is going to break loose. Why? Because what humans do when living standards decline is make war. This is already happening in various ways.
The left is just a gang of useful idiots flapping in the breeze, without a clue, and taking credit for what has nothing at all to do with them. The "left" are just a convenient standard bearer, carrying water.
Conventional fuels being heavily taxed (which the government takes and gives to unreliables as subsidy) is a 'plot' by conventional fuel producers....
They've been forced - by government - to make their reliable, in demand product expensive to fund unreliables because theirs is 'running out' - and if you think uranium is running out, or gas, I've a bridge you can buy.
Uranium supply? Thorium has to scale up from 1 plant on grid globally and overcome many other technological unsolved problems. Same with fast breeders.
Uranium supply is not a problem. Even less so with molten salt reactors that consume everything. Even without breeder reactors.
The ocean contains approximately 13 tons of uranium per cubic mile. Globally there is over 4 gigatonnes of uranium in the ocean. About half of that should be easily recoverable.
This was demonstrated by Japan at a cost roughly double the spot price of mined uranium. In volume that should come down.
Ahh! I was wondering if you'd point your magic wand at seawater uranium! I did once upon a time too, but here's the rub: THERMODYNAMICS! In other words it'd take more energy to extract the 3 parts per billion of Uranium in sea water than can be extracted from the Uranium itself once it's in a reactor!
Yes there's a few experimental efforts here and there, but nobody has scaled it up beyond a few micro grammes or so, but with MASSIVE energy inputs. If I'm wrong, please give us links to references of scaled up production plants - thanks!
Same with molten salt reactors, only a few experimental efforts, and a lot of investor story time BS, but nothing even remotely close to grid supply plants.
Those 'naughty' Russians do have a Fast Breeder connected to their grid though.
Japan has field tested fabric and sponge based methods of extracting uranium from seawater. These methods are estimated to operate at around $240 per kilogram ($109 per pound) of yellowcake(52). The normal price of yellowcake is around $110 per kilogram ($50 per pound).
The seawater route to obtaining uranium is nonsense. First off your linked article is 16 years old to a pro nuclear industry web site, funded by the nuclear industry is bound to be, erm..... pro nuclear?! There's been experimental thorium reactors and experimental fast reactors for decades, but never anything much in the real world connected to grids!
According to an AI: "The construction costs for a nuclear power plant generally range from approximately $6 billion to $9 billion per gigawatt (GW) of electrical capacity. 1 kilogram of uranium-235 can produce approximately 1 gigawatt of power over a 24-hour period in a nuclear reactor."
Rendering your crude Yellowcake cost comparisons - $240 per Kg for the Japanese 2009 experimental calculations c/w mined estimate of $110 per Kg as a totally irrelevant cost.
Geologists and the nuclear industry itself reckons there's a few hundred years of Uranium ore reserves available, and at the current consumption rate nuclear supplies ~3.5% of global energy, thus if nuclear were to supply 100% non seawater uranium reserves would last less than a decade or so.
In other words, given Uranium is a tiny fraction of total reactor input costs, if the seawater route to uranium supply was viable it would have been scaled up years ago to supply reactors now today.
You are just blabbering the idiot anti-nuclear drivel that is put out to attack nuclear power. That is done to keep fossil fuels going, kicking that can down the road for as long as possible. This is destroying the future of our planet.
Congratulations. You are the reason we are going to hell. B*gger off now, "Natasha".
I totally agree with everything that you say about tyranny and Net Zero but there a one tiny flaw in it actually happening. No UK government has shown anywhere near the level of organisation required to even get near the possibility of organising a piss up in a brewery let alone the level of control envisioned here. And if any government actually shows signs of progress on anything then we tend to vote the others in whose main aim is to put the whole thing in reverse.
As a microscopic example the government mandated that only smart chargers be installed to charge EVs but then people 'turned off' the smart by disconnecting them from their WiFi and using them as dumb chargers. But then people started becoming smart by using TOU tariffs and getting cheaper electricity as a result by avoiding the peak time charges. It probably took months or years to produce the EVSE bill but it took only seconds to defeat it. As for going round and enforcing smart charging the question is: How many people are you going to employ doing that when five minutes after they've left it's back to a dumb charger. Government laws are no match for most people. It might be a good theory but it's no match for reality.
So the government has a bunch of stupid rules that the people will be forced to work around in order to live their lives.
This sounds a lot like changing the British government into the Italian. There's a lot of stupid rules, the people have to work around them, and the result is that the people end up with contempt for their corrupt, incompetent government officials.
Does this sound like a good place to be?
Or do you toss out the corrupt, incompetent regime and replace it with one that doesn't have the power to make lots of stupid rules that have to be worked around?
"We have somehow allowed the very worst people to take charge of most of our lives".
A lot of people have been noticing that recently. And not just in the UK, but in the whole of "the West", if not elsewhere as well.
The conclusion seems inescapable that this has been the inevitable outcome of our vaunted system of "free enterprise democracy". Nearly 2,500 years ago Aristotle deemed it obvious to any intelligent person that choosing political officials by election was tantamount to plutocracy, as the wealthy would simply buy votes. That is exactly what has been happening - less by bribing individual voters than by exploiting their foolishness, insouciance, gullibility and lack of education. Money is spent on buying media coverage and opinions, which apparently have decisive influence over empty minds.
Ask yourself why the outcome of most Western elections can be predicted if one knows how much money each candidate has been able to raise.
I'd argue they haven't taken control, it has been usurped. They all ram this guff into their manifestos and no one can say no to it. We're never given the opportunity to stop these fools damaging our way of life.
Very good point. It is really sad to watch how so many of the general public fall hook, line and sinker for establishment propaganda as promulgated by the bought and paid for MSM and lying Uniparty politicians, be it the false need to cut CO2 emissions, the false need to get yet another unsafe and ineffective Covid booster or the false need to fear that Putin is about to invade Europe.
At the risk of over-exposing him, I can't resist bringing out another of H. L. Mencken's penetrating insights from a century ago:
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary".
He also remarked that "Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it".
It is no surprise that the whole climate change agenda, which has now reached its fulfilment objective in NZ fanaticism, is primarily associated with the far left. Following the pushback against the left in the 1980s (in particular through the success of Thatcherism and Reaganism) culminating in the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the ousting of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe the global left was in despair. With no hope of achieving their agenda at the ballot box, the option of piggy backing onto environmentalism, and the idea of the destruction of the world through man’s greed (manifested through capitalism), to provide an apparent scientific necessity to adopt the leftist command and control economy was a golden opportunity gladly seized. And by promoting it as all based on science, which too few people can be bothered to study in the detail necessary to repudiate, the natural defenders of capitalism have fallen into line rather than fighting back.
In other words extreme environmentalism is not incidentally identifiable with far left authoritarianism; it is purposively an instrument of the far left to achieve its agenda under the guise of science which most of them know is spurious but convenient.
David has done a yeoman’s job and a wonderful public service exposing the high cost of NetZero in the U.K.
But unfortunately the U.K. government and its NetZero agencies have all worked together to maintain the fiction of cheap wind & solar power.
There is no single web resource where one can view the effective consumer cost of gas generation and RE generation including the various subsidy schemes.
The fiction that gas generation is the most expensive of all U.K. power types is well entrenched.
So much so that the initial answers of ALL the various AI apps and chat bots say that gas is what causes high prices and more RE is needed to lower prices.
Now, all the AI resources when challenged enough, especially by referring them to David’s Substack, will admit that gas is the cheapest way to generate power, and that fact “Is not a matter of opinion.”
After that, one can have an acquaintance ask the same AI system the same questions, and every time the chatbot will say that gas drives U.K. high prices and more RE is the solution.
Aargh!
It appears that decades of U.K. government resources being used to sell the “cheap RE” lie have been very successful.
How can anyone convince people who might be brought over to the truthful side if every time they ask AI why U.K. power is so expensive, they’re told that gas is the cause, and RE is the answer?
I wish I had answers. The U.K. government has been very successful in their campaign of lies.
What’s amazing to me is the general public, even after opening their electricity bills every month, still somehow believe this fiction.
The AIs all are trained on the corpus of (much of) the internet, so they regurgitate the words that most commonly follow each other.
They're trained, and then cut off from updating after a certain point. So they won't learn more if things get updated.
For every Substack like OGH's, there's a thousand press releases with "gas is the most expensive method", so it's not surprising that AI returns that. And it can't update.
I think the UK has much too high an opinion of itself here. All of this was mapped out first in the US. The strategy was the response to Hubbert's little paper, and it began not so long after Hubbert, that curation of the story by fossil fuel interests began in earnest. Anti-nuclear was key to this strategy and those anti-nuclear lies still get major play in media.
The funding of David Brower in 1970 to create Friends of the Earth (FoE) was a key turning point in strategy by fossil fuel interests. David used FoE to take over the Sierra Club and turn the Sierra Club (a pro-nuclear NGO) into a premier anti-nuclear organization. This strategy has continued to the present day with curations like the total career funding of Mark Z. Jacobson by oil industry cutouts donating to Stanford on his behalf. After Mark published his 2015 PNAS codswallop ( https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1510028112 ), Stanford was given another $70 million by an oil industry cutout. Few people realize that MZJ never received money from any other source than fossil fuel interests supporting his entire career.
The government of the UK are imitating "their betters across the pond" who created the game the net-zero goons on the "left" are pushing. The real focus of attack is nuclear power. Everything else is distractions. Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain.
Agreed. ChatGPT is useful for non-political facts but it seems to have “swallowed” the establishment lie that the high UK electricity bills are due to the price of gas. I asked it https://chatgpt.com/ “Why are electricity bills in the UK so high?” and it immediately spouted establishment propaganda such as “The war in Ukraine (starting in 2022) further tightened global gas supplies—Russia cut exports to Europe, leading to record-high wholesale gas and electricity prices” with no recognition that gas supplies to Europe were cut due to self-harming sanctions against Russia or the fact that Biden blew up the Nord Stream pipeline for good measure. It also said nothing about the massive wind and solar subsidies which get loaded onto the retail price.
They believe it because that what they told and told again and again and again so ingrained in their psyche im afraid. At some point people will begin to question it but many wont because they get plenty of financial support so its not a real financial problem to them.
Can there actually be a "libertarian left"? Libertarian implies free markets. Left implies collectivism (socialism). Hence "libertarian left" is a contradiction in terms.
You might also ask what the term "Right" means. Many use "Right" to categorize Fascists. Yet Fascists are Socialists.
The terms "Left" and "Right" have no coherent meanings. They should be replaced with perhaps "Totalitarian" vs "Libertarian".
Blight-wing Politics?
David, thank you for setting out your ideas on Net Zero and the tyrannical ideas behind it [See also Ref. 1]. You describe it/them as positioned politically on the far-left. I understand the reason for such positioning to be, in part, due to the adoption of Net Zero ideas by, among others, those that were previously on the traditional left-wing of politics. However, as has been pointed out by several commentators of the British political landscape [e.g. Refs. 2 and 3], the current policy anchor points of our British political parties are often far from their traditional roots.
While, crudely speaking, the traditional right used to represent views ranging from those of conservative, middle class voters across to the wishes of commercial/industrial businesses and capitalist interests more widely. By contrast, equally crudely, the traditional left represented the interests of ordinary working people and their needs for a strong social fabric (e.g. schools, hospitals, social housing) and good working conditions (e.g. health & safety, adequate pensions). In such a world, a move to strengthen one side of the political spectrum almost inevitably meant a weakening of the other. However, the to and fro of politics over the election cycle ensured that a (sometimes fraught) dynamic balance ensued over the long-term.
Unfortunately, that political world no longer exists under the Net Zero dispensation. The demands of Net Zero can, and do, weaken both traditional left- and right-wings simultaneously. In this sense Net Zero is neither left-wing nor right-wing but Blight-wing or far-Blight. That is, while a small number of very large (often foreign) enterprises benefit hugely, Net Zero puts a Blight on many sectors of British society at the same time and maintains its stranglehold indefinitely. For example, very high energy costs make commerce/industry uncompetitive and thereby, unless relief is forthcoming, eventually destroy those business. Ordinary people working for those businesses thence become unemployed. And to make matters worse, those self-same unemployed people (and all other households) have to pay the much higher Net Zero domestic energy bills thereby adding to their immiseration.
In short, Net Zero is neither a left-wing nor a right-wing policy but rather a Blight on the political and economic landscapes of the nation. As such it might best be plotted on the z-axis (i.e. coming out of the page/screen) in your graphs. In light of this, all political parties which wish to be electorally successful might do well to abandon their misguided and erroneous virtue signalling in favour of policies which eradicate the Net Zero blight and thereby revert to a healthier political and economic policies.
One of the strangest aspects of Net Zero is that it, and its precursor (the Climate Change Act 2008), were passed into law following very limited parliamentary debate and even less cost-benefit analysis; all of which is a shocking demonstration of the weakness of current British parliamentary democracy. It is, therefore, unsurprising that the Tory and Labour wings of the so-called Uniparty are currently in retreat leaving the next general election wide open to usurper parties. Will the latter’s political offerings continue the anti-democratic Blight-wing slide, or will a reversion to more representative democracy be the result? We live in very interesting times. Let us hope that they do not become too interesting.
References
1. Rupert Darwall, “Green Tyranny – exposing the totalitarian roots of the climate industrial complex”, Encounter Books, 2019.
2. R. Eatwell & M Goodwin, “National Populism”, Pelican, 2018.
3. Matthew Goodwin, “Values, Voice and Virtue”, Penguin, 2023.
Regards, John Cullen.
That is an extraordinarily well written trolling piece. You obviously don't believe most of what you said but it reads like you do, well done!!
Which parts do you think I don't believe?
I said that as I didn't really want to engage but 🙄.
My issue, as I said elsewhere, is your framing of the debate in R/L political type terms. Why can't we just discuss the merits of issues without allowing people to hide behind dogma of whichever side they're on? I think you could write a piece that we could engage with on the merits of the issues, not political flag-waving. Most people appear to have lost the ability to think critically without the crutch of a 'side' that in essence 'tells' them what they should support/believe.
The reality is that human driven climate change is real, individual action will not suffice to fix it so govns need to be involved. I agree that there is no magic bullet, we need numerous solutions, some which are mitigations as you say and some which address the core CO2 issue. BUT WE SHOULDN'T POLITICISE THIS, otherwise a significant portion of the population will disagree solely on political terms and nothing ever gets done as the politicians are beholden to them and haven't yet shown the balls to act regardless of what their dumb-ass voters think.
Net zero is the most destructive, socialist imposition every forced on an economy.
When it is abolished the naion will grow. While it exists we have an appalling form of socialism and, as everyone knows, 'socialism does not work'.
😂
Bless you.
OK, in all seriousness; your comment, and the article, are facile and poorly argued, but unfortunately the method is way too common nowadays. Why do people feel the need to frame everything within a larger category, i.e. why frame the net zero debate under a political (L,R, socialist etc) umbrella?
The problem with doing so is that people automatically decide as to their POV on the subject (exhibit: your comment) as a function of the framing. That is not only intellectually dishonest, it's unintelligent and IMO potentially dangerous as issues don't get discussed on their merits, only on which camp they fall into.
For clarity, I'm not commenting here on the details of Net Zero, just the stupidity of the framing of the debate.
Here's my view on the debate: It is fact that human driven climate change is a huge problem. I don't believe that sufficient change, quickly enough, can be driven from the private sector alone, therefore governments must do something to drive the changes. We can argue about the details in the Net Zero manifesto, we can't argue about the need to do something. I also think that central planning for most things is a bad idea, but in this case it's a better idea than the alternative.
Net Zero is an example of a "mitigation" strategy. It can only work if everyone else does the same and CO2 is the inly climate control knob. Neither condition is true which mean Net Zero is doomed to fail.
The only viable strategy to combat climate change is adaptation (flood defences, irrigation, new crop varieties etc.). This has the advantages of:
1) Working regardless of what others do
2) Working regardless of the cause of climate change
3) Not requiring us to regress to an agrarian society
4) Likely cheaper
Net zero is a hoax. A tax scam. It's an ongoing, tiresome lie going back over 50 years. We differ in you believing - there's that word again - that individuals should be made to change their behaviours. Who gave you the right to demand that?
You pop up, demand to be taken seriously while deriding the data in front of you because it doesn't suit your narrative.
If you believe in it, you pay for it. I don't see why those uninterested in the snake oil should. Dress it however you wish, the green scam is just that.
You obviously don’t read/understand very well. Nowhere did I say that I support net zero. I simply made a point about framing the debate in terms of something else (which you just did again). I then made the point about human caused climate change.
If you are a climate denier then factually you are wrong (and the earth isn’t flat either btw). If you aren’t, then explain to me how you expect global change on climate to happen if left to individuals and private companies. Very happy to listen to ideas, but absent that I will continue my stance that governments need to drive this. And that means btw, that we are all expected to contribute, because it turns out we all live in the same plantetary society. That’s what the social contract is. You screaming in the corner because you don’t like it is simply the ravings of an unrealistic libertarian.
Like all things Left wing it's a rod shoved into a mass of cogs. After a while, the rod breaks, and the machine restarts. If more rods are shoved in to force the machine to stop - borrowing, high taxes, regulation, debt then the machine stops and eventually breaks into pieces, destroying both machine and rod. We are long past having an energy market. The state lies to continue the hegemony. Prices will only ever go up - as was intended.
This, of course, is what Milioaf means when he says 'you'll save £300'. You will use £300 less energy, be colder, more uncomfortable, pay higher prices but you'll use less, so there's his saving.
Infuriatingly, government never pays the price. It is always customers and businesses left with the mess the state creates. We are long, long past time when universal franchise must be revoked and referism, recall and direct democracy - the repeal and prevention of law by the voter - applied.
Far left is bought, or subverted with dei esg control mechanics.
Exactly correct except that IMHO it's actually a Globalist project which is exploiting the ideological far left as useful idiots. That's why it has blended together with the Covid psyop with the same socio-economic destruction goals to reduce or eliminate resistance to the NWO. Mass indiscriminate immigration also falls into the same Globalist playbook.
Net Zero is NOT left wing driven! It is DRIVEN by fossil fuel interests because they KNOW that it cannot work! Combined with anti-nuclear activism, net-zero (as conceived) forces societies to keep using more and more expensive fossil fuels. This is a perverse incentive cycle that is only getting worse. I have rubbed shoulders with some of these sociopaths at billionaire parties. (Fun fact, most people that attend billionaire parties ain't billionaires, they are multi-millionaires, sometimes in the upper 11 figures. But they are united in their goal to keep their money rolling in by hook or by crook. And crook they definitely do and scheme to do. Most of these men are quite intelligent. Not overly bright, but in the 120's I'd say.)
I have had multiple conversations with a few economists that I know about where things are going, and they are of the ivory tower opinion that society will collapse, billions of people will die, and this will be a good thing for the planet. I point out that this will result in their deaths, and they just look at me like I'm a stupid child. They feel insulated completely. (As in, "Yes, 6 billion people. It's inevitable. But dear lord, we are the ones who understand things, we won't suffer." See Yuval Hariri and friends.)
The real issue is that there is only one course to REAL net-zero, and that is MASSIVE build-out of nuclear power. By this I mean a war-time schedule. Failure to do this will doom societies, and all hell is going to break loose. Why? Because what humans do when living standards decline is make war. This is already happening in various ways.
The left is just a gang of useful idiots flapping in the breeze, without a clue, and taking credit for what has nothing at all to do with them. The "left" are just a convenient standard bearer, carrying water.
Conventional fuels being heavily taxed (which the government takes and gives to unreliables as subsidy) is a 'plot' by conventional fuel producers....
They've been forced - by government - to make their reliable, in demand product expensive to fund unreliables because theirs is 'running out' - and if you think uranium is running out, or gas, I've a bridge you can buy.
Uranium supply? Thorium has to scale up from 1 plant on grid globally and overcome many other technological unsolved problems. Same with fast breeders.
Uranium supply is not a problem. Even less so with molten salt reactors that consume everything. Even without breeder reactors.
The ocean contains approximately 13 tons of uranium per cubic mile. Globally there is over 4 gigatonnes of uranium in the ocean. About half of that should be easily recoverable.
This was demonstrated by Japan at a cost roughly double the spot price of mined uranium. In volume that should come down.
The only issue is will and making the decision.
Ahh! I was wondering if you'd point your magic wand at seawater uranium! I did once upon a time too, but here's the rub: THERMODYNAMICS! In other words it'd take more energy to extract the 3 parts per billion of Uranium in sea water than can be extracted from the Uranium itself once it's in a reactor!
Yes there's a few experimental efforts here and there, but nobody has scaled it up beyond a few micro grammes or so, but with MASSIVE energy inputs. If I'm wrong, please give us links to references of scaled up production plants - thanks!
Same with molten salt reactors, only a few experimental efforts, and a lot of investor story time BS, but nothing even remotely close to grid supply plants.
Those 'naughty' Russians do have a Fast Breeder connected to their grid though.
Uranium:
Japan has field tested fabric and sponge based methods of extracting uranium from seawater. These methods are estimated to operate at around $240 per kilogram ($109 per pound) of yellowcake(52). The normal price of yellowcake is around $110 per kilogram ($50 per pound).
52. M Tamada. Current status of technology for collection of uranium from seawater. Erice seminar 2009: https://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/uranium-sea-09_Tamada.pdf
Seawater extraction will not be scaled up while uranium is double the cost of the mined price. The point is that it is available, and proven.
Molten salt reactors:
China has been running a 2MW experimental reactor connected to the grid since 2021.
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/china-refuels-thorium-reactor-without-shutdown/
Breaking ground on a 10 MW molten-salt reactor this year.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/chinas-thorium-molten-salt-reactor
The seawater route to obtaining uranium is nonsense. First off your linked article is 16 years old to a pro nuclear industry web site, funded by the nuclear industry is bound to be, erm..... pro nuclear?! There's been experimental thorium reactors and experimental fast reactors for decades, but never anything much in the real world connected to grids!
According to an AI: "The construction costs for a nuclear power plant generally range from approximately $6 billion to $9 billion per gigawatt (GW) of electrical capacity. 1 kilogram of uranium-235 can produce approximately 1 gigawatt of power over a 24-hour period in a nuclear reactor."
Rendering your crude Yellowcake cost comparisons - $240 per Kg for the Japanese 2009 experimental calculations c/w mined estimate of $110 per Kg as a totally irrelevant cost.
Geologists and the nuclear industry itself reckons there's a few hundred years of Uranium ore reserves available, and at the current consumption rate nuclear supplies ~3.5% of global energy, thus if nuclear were to supply 100% non seawater uranium reserves would last less than a decade or so.
In other words, given Uranium is a tiny fraction of total reactor input costs, if the seawater route to uranium supply was viable it would have been scaled up years ago to supply reactors now today.
Well, you showed your true colors here.
You are just blabbering the idiot anti-nuclear drivel that is put out to attack nuclear power. That is done to keep fossil fuels going, kicking that can down the road for as long as possible. This is destroying the future of our planet.
Congratulations. You are the reason we are going to hell. B*gger off now, "Natasha".
Here ya go, David…
https://substack.com/home/post/p-165681913
Seen that already. I am a big fan of Richard's work
Brilliant! I enjoyed the behavioural and cultural comparisons.
I totally agree with everything that you say about tyranny and Net Zero but there a one tiny flaw in it actually happening. No UK government has shown anywhere near the level of organisation required to even get near the possibility of organising a piss up in a brewery let alone the level of control envisioned here. And if any government actually shows signs of progress on anything then we tend to vote the others in whose main aim is to put the whole thing in reverse.
As a microscopic example the government mandated that only smart chargers be installed to charge EVs but then people 'turned off' the smart by disconnecting them from their WiFi and using them as dumb chargers. But then people started becoming smart by using TOU tariffs and getting cheaper electricity as a result by avoiding the peak time charges. It probably took months or years to produce the EVSE bill but it took only seconds to defeat it. As for going round and enforcing smart charging the question is: How many people are you going to employ doing that when five minutes after they've left it's back to a dumb charger. Government laws are no match for most people. It might be a good theory but it's no match for reality.
So the government has a bunch of stupid rules that the people will be forced to work around in order to live their lives.
This sounds a lot like changing the British government into the Italian. There's a lot of stupid rules, the people have to work around them, and the result is that the people end up with contempt for their corrupt, incompetent government officials.
Does this sound like a good place to be?
Or do you toss out the corrupt, incompetent regime and replace it with one that doesn't have the power to make lots of stupid rules that have to be worked around?
"We have somehow allowed the very worst people to take charge of most of our lives".
A lot of people have been noticing that recently. And not just in the UK, but in the whole of "the West", if not elsewhere as well.
The conclusion seems inescapable that this has been the inevitable outcome of our vaunted system of "free enterprise democracy". Nearly 2,500 years ago Aristotle deemed it obvious to any intelligent person that choosing political officials by election was tantamount to plutocracy, as the wealthy would simply buy votes. That is exactly what has been happening - less by bribing individual voters than by exploiting their foolishness, insouciance, gullibility and lack of education. Money is spent on buying media coverage and opinions, which apparently have decisive influence over empty minds.
Ask yourself why the outcome of most Western elections can be predicted if one knows how much money each candidate has been able to raise.
I'd argue they haven't taken control, it has been usurped. They all ram this guff into their manifestos and no one can say no to it. We're never given the opportunity to stop these fools damaging our way of life.
Very good point. It is really sad to watch how so many of the general public fall hook, line and sinker for establishment propaganda as promulgated by the bought and paid for MSM and lying Uniparty politicians, be it the false need to cut CO2 emissions, the false need to get yet another unsafe and ineffective Covid booster or the false need to fear that Putin is about to invade Europe.
At the risk of over-exposing him, I can't resist bringing out another of H. L. Mencken's penetrating insights from a century ago:
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary".
He also remarked that "Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it".
Well Done!
Lets ensure we keep up the articles to ensure we get back from the dark side!
https://nigelsouthway.substack.com/p/the-climate-change-stand-off
A brilliant article thank you. And congratulations on your continued and well deserved success.
It is no surprise that the whole climate change agenda, which has now reached its fulfilment objective in NZ fanaticism, is primarily associated with the far left. Following the pushback against the left in the 1980s (in particular through the success of Thatcherism and Reaganism) culminating in the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the ousting of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe the global left was in despair. With no hope of achieving their agenda at the ballot box, the option of piggy backing onto environmentalism, and the idea of the destruction of the world through man’s greed (manifested through capitalism), to provide an apparent scientific necessity to adopt the leftist command and control economy was a golden opportunity gladly seized. And by promoting it as all based on science, which too few people can be bothered to study in the detail necessary to repudiate, the natural defenders of capitalism have fallen into line rather than fighting back.
In other words extreme environmentalism is not incidentally identifiable with far left authoritarianism; it is purposively an instrument of the far left to achieve its agenda under the guise of science which most of them know is spurious but convenient.
David has done a yeoman’s job and a wonderful public service exposing the high cost of NetZero in the U.K.
But unfortunately the U.K. government and its NetZero agencies have all worked together to maintain the fiction of cheap wind & solar power.
There is no single web resource where one can view the effective consumer cost of gas generation and RE generation including the various subsidy schemes.
The fiction that gas generation is the most expensive of all U.K. power types is well entrenched.
So much so that the initial answers of ALL the various AI apps and chat bots say that gas is what causes high prices and more RE is needed to lower prices.
Now, all the AI resources when challenged enough, especially by referring them to David’s Substack, will admit that gas is the cheapest way to generate power, and that fact “Is not a matter of opinion.”
After that, one can have an acquaintance ask the same AI system the same questions, and every time the chatbot will say that gas drives U.K. high prices and more RE is the solution.
Aargh!
It appears that decades of U.K. government resources being used to sell the “cheap RE” lie have been very successful.
How can anyone convince people who might be brought over to the truthful side if every time they ask AI why U.K. power is so expensive, they’re told that gas is the cause, and RE is the answer?
I wish I had answers. The U.K. government has been very successful in their campaign of lies.
What’s amazing to me is the general public, even after opening their electricity bills every month, still somehow believe this fiction.
The AIs all are trained on the corpus of (much of) the internet, so they regurgitate the words that most commonly follow each other.
They're trained, and then cut off from updating after a certain point. So they won't learn more if things get updated.
For every Substack like OGH's, there's a thousand press releases with "gas is the most expensive method", so it's not surprising that AI returns that. And it can't update.
I think the UK has much too high an opinion of itself here. All of this was mapped out first in the US. The strategy was the response to Hubbert's little paper, and it began not so long after Hubbert, that curation of the story by fossil fuel interests began in earnest. Anti-nuclear was key to this strategy and those anti-nuclear lies still get major play in media.
The funding of David Brower in 1970 to create Friends of the Earth (FoE) was a key turning point in strategy by fossil fuel interests. David used FoE to take over the Sierra Club and turn the Sierra Club (a pro-nuclear NGO) into a premier anti-nuclear organization. This strategy has continued to the present day with curations like the total career funding of Mark Z. Jacobson by oil industry cutouts donating to Stanford on his behalf. After Mark published his 2015 PNAS codswallop ( https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1510028112 ), Stanford was given another $70 million by an oil industry cutout. Few people realize that MZJ never received money from any other source than fossil fuel interests supporting his entire career.
The government of the UK are imitating "their betters across the pond" who created the game the net-zero goons on the "left" are pushing. The real focus of attack is nuclear power. Everything else is distractions. Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain.
Agreed. ChatGPT is useful for non-political facts but it seems to have “swallowed” the establishment lie that the high UK electricity bills are due to the price of gas. I asked it https://chatgpt.com/ “Why are electricity bills in the UK so high?” and it immediately spouted establishment propaganda such as “The war in Ukraine (starting in 2022) further tightened global gas supplies—Russia cut exports to Europe, leading to record-high wholesale gas and electricity prices” with no recognition that gas supplies to Europe were cut due to self-harming sanctions against Russia or the fact that Biden blew up the Nord Stream pipeline for good measure. It also said nothing about the massive wind and solar subsidies which get loaded onto the retail price.
You have to watch it on those non-political facts as well. "AI" is just a superannuated search engine.
They believe it because that what they told and told again and again and again so ingrained in their psyche im afraid. At some point people will begin to question it but many wont because they get plenty of financial support so its not a real financial problem to them.
You’re probably correct: if it doesn’t directly impact them, they don’t care.
I guess 15 years of flat GDP and current deindustrialization due to high power prices have not yet effected enough people!