The Energy Security and Net Zero select committee has a new report out,

Zero sum game: How the UK can reframe the energy transition

The second line of the summary is,

The political consensus that enabled the UK to be a world leader in tackling climate change and transitioning to clean energy has broken down.

This was a political consensus that seems to have been the result of calculated triangulation that measured the popularity of an idea rather than its feasibility. The Tories probably thought that by standing where the centre was, they would win votes from the other lot, push them left. They thought they could depend on their base as well. That was the only reason that the Net Zero consensus persisted as long as it did.

Well, they blew that. Last time around, they stood in the centre and lost to a less unpopular party which pretended for the while to also stand in the centre. And they lost from their base those who had finally given up on them. As we know, the first thing the blue team “discovered” upon their unceremonious defenestration was that UK Net Zero was also UK self-destruction. The consensus, for so long their true north, actually pointed to a long road of decline ending in either a dry corpse falling into a ditch…

…or the first step back whence we had come.

The road to hell was flanked by signs like:

Net Zero is the growth opportunity of the twenty-first century

The Tories are now ready to at least apply the brakes. But the country is in the charge of those who form a majority on the ESNZ committee. Their preferred explanation for the new schism is the “gas price shock,” whose effects resulted in “scapegoating of the transition.”

I have to note that the gas price shock pre-dates the crumbling of the consensus by two years. The end was just a matter of when: the consensus was held together by moral posturing, not because it was the right answer to a difficult question. It was impossible to oppose Net Zero, because to say it was a mistake brought a stink and a stain upon the sayer, resulting in them being cast out, banished. Only the old, or those with no standing to lose, or a brave, principled and foolhardy few could offer token resistance to the madness.

The madness defined itself as good, and by the nature of things, everyone who stood in its path was therefore evil. So if MPs had doubts, they smiled blandly and said nothing – with a few honourable exceptions. They didn’t take it as seriously as they ought to have done. If you accede to the madness of Net Zero, you have to say no to anything of any actual use you might want to do for your country. Such is the appetite of Net Zero that, like dry rot, it has turned the timbers of the UK to powder.

Net Zero has nothing to do with tackling climate change. Climate change may have been the impetus for the Climate Change Act, but as Mark has pointed out in these pages, it was acknowledged at the time that unilateral action was pointless. But after the debacle of Copenhagen, that was all that was left. Then in 2019 we offered what we offered without conditions, in the hopes that others would follow.

Emissions cuts from the UK are not enough to dent the global total, which continues to rise. And as I am fond of saying, and I think a few more people than before are noticing, the rule applies only to territorial emissions. It means we can reduce our emissions by outsourcing manufacturing and importing the goods we used to build here. So, when a factory closed, it took us a little further down the road to Net Zero, the road to hell. The jobs lost were a parochial concern, and parochial concerns cannot be a justification to halt progress.

It would have been better, and may even have had a slight relevance to the climate, if in 2019 Theresa May had simply amended the 80% territorial target to 80% consumption instead of 100% territorial, “Net Zero.” It would have been better because the pain would have been severe straight away, and the threshold for general opposition, the cracking of the consensus, would have been reached sooner: remember, this could only happen when necessity overcame the inevitable moral stain that came with speaking up.

Net Zero may have been raised to “tackle climate change,” but a child could understand that it never had a chance of doing that. For we can just keep importing things we can no longer make. It can almost be as if nothing has changed, for a time. The lights go on, and the supermarket shelves are stocked. We can just keep importing things we can’t make any more until we run out of money. (We’ve already run out of money. But our good standing means we can get a new credit card every month, and use the advance to pay the minimum repayment on the other 150.)

According to the Committee, the term “Net Zero” has become toxic.

Well, no. The term is not the problem. The problem is the insane law that mandates it, a law that is insane now and always has been:

1. As a unilateral action, it can have no effect on climate even under the most alarmist of scenarios.
2. As a territorial action, we can pretend to be virtuous for a time with little pain, while exporting our emissions and continuing as before.

Territorial Net Zero is Net Zero Lite. But there is still pain. The effort to tie up our bit of the problem – the territorial emissions that we cannot export away – is eroding our way of life. Because the easy stuff gets cut first, escalating pain has to be applied to cut the rest. It means a vast and dilute network of intermittent electricity leading to ruined landscapes, damaged ecology and expensive energy. Expensive energy leading to self-imposed rationing.

We are now far enough down the road to hell that, looking over our shoulders, we see a life that was better. For the first time in Britain’s history we have not just lost prosperity, we have chosen to give it up. Just as every parent looked forward to a better life for their child… they now look forward to bequeathing them a country that is worse. And not worse because of climate change: worse because of the insane medicine we took to cure it. We see in the distance behind us better things that we have thrown away deliberately, not had wrested from us by an adversary.

Then we turn our backs on the past and trudge on.

The next freshly-stuck billboard we pass has a slogan that reads,

Remember the wider benefits of the energy transition

They say it’s about the messaging, but it isn’t. A bleak vista surrounds us: what is the messaging supposed to say? That others see differently, see lambs gambolling on a hillside of spring grass?

The messaging that the Committee says we need connects “the energy transition” – no longer Net Zero, that phrase has been struck out by the censor’s pen – with benefits such as,

Lower bills,

Warmer homes,

Jobs and career opportunities for young people,

Energy security,

And health improvements.

That’s all great, but these things are all features of the world we are deliberately abandoning, not features of the Net Zero world we are travelling to, if we don’t just throw ourselves into the ditch before we get there.

The Committee says that the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero should drop Net Zero from its name. I concur. They should drop it from their remit, too.

Calling this journey the road to hell may be overly dramatic. The road to hell is long, and life is still good. That we can see cracks appearing, and can point to individual instances of decline, is something that has always been. In generalising from the specific, I am engaging in just the sort of thing that happens when the localised destruction of a weather event is generalised to the global destruction of climate change. So there should always be a questioning voice: can it really be that bad? I’ve already said that we can partly sidestep Net Zero by exporting emissions, after all. That will still be the case when the new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism comes in. And ultimately, fossil fuels will run out either way. Net Zero may shorten the journey, but the destination is the same. Is it hell, regardless? If so, human civilisation is kaput everywhere, not just here.

In the absence of Net Zero, the future history of dwindling hydrocarbons plays out quite differently, I think. In any case, in the absence of Net Zero, our own reckoning with the final hydrocarbon drought comes much later. A hundred years later? Time in which the cost of hydrocarbons rises, and this incentivises alternatives. Renewables have never been these alternatives, nor can they ever be. If history is a guide, then the new energy will be more dense than the old, which, superseded, will never run out. If the new energy is less dense, then the foundation of civilisation is cracked from side to side.

Towards the end of their summary, the Committee says:

We are concerned at the increasing use of “credibility laundering” of internet myths relating to the energy transition. We would like to see social media platforms encouraged or mandated to emphasise credible information sources over those working to engender outrage and misinformation.

I had to look up what “credibility laundering” means. It means to demonstrate virtue publicly, to deflect attention from more sinister realities. I do not know who the Committee accuses of this. I do know that the charge of “credibility laundering” finds an exemplar in the Committee itself, whose pursuit of virtue has seemingly blinded it to physical realities.

The consensus has broken. The pain is now such that the moral cost of opposition to Net Zero has dwindled by comparison. So the dogged virtue hunters fear they are losing the debate. Their solution, freshly stuck to the next billboard on the road to hell is the slogan,

SILENCE

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Apologies for this slightly incoherent rant. I was working out my thinking as I went on Sunday evening, and suffering from the first virus of autumn. I would appreciate it if, in comments, anyone has a better explanation for Net Zero than a triumph of virtue-signalling over good sense.

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The last two recommendations of the Committee:

The Committee’s report.

David Turver on the report.