Repeal the Climate Change Act 2008; Cancel Net Zero - NOW!

At long last the main stream media have woken up from their trance-like adherence to the Green Agenda and now accept the impossibility of the ‘sustainable’ targets written into UK law by the Climate Change Act 2008 and Theresa May’s utterly stupid and vainglorious attempt to secure a ‘legacy’ for her troubled term as Prime Minister by introducing Net Zero via a statutory instrument amendment to CCA 2008. Here’s what Jeremy Warner was writing in the Telegraph yesterday:

It is as plain as a pike staff that net zero by 2050 is already an almost wholly unrealistic objective, but the pretence goes on, apparently oblivious to the scale of the challenge.

More than 90pc of the country's current energy provision – gas, coal, oil, diesel and petrol – is not meant to exist in 27 years' time. The idea that alternatives can be achieved in such a short space of time is cloud cuckoo land.

Even to come close requires the Government to start putting its hand in its pocket in a manner not yet remotely contemplated.

Note the bold. Here are two graphs of the primary energy mix in the UK in 2021:

Gas and oil account for over 75%. Biofuels and renewables account for just 14% - and that has come at huge cost to consumers and the environment, as well as presenting huge technical challenges to national grid stability, which have yet to be resolved. On the domestic front, heat pumps have turned out to be very expensive to install and next to useless in the British climate, while hydrogen boilers will require a 4 inch wide hole to be drilled in a nearby wall to reduce the risk of explosions! So you spend thousands insulating and draughtproofing your home, to reduce energy consumption, then you have to have a bloody great hole drilled in an outside wall in order to get the latest thing in sustainable eco-friendly heating! And you can’t cook with hydrogen!

To get to net zero, the contribution from coal, oil and gas will need to go to nothing in the next 27 years and the contributions from biomass and renewables will need to be increased from 14% to almost 100%. That is not going to be possible, unless the population is reduced by say, 80-90% and the remainder confined to “15 minute towns and cities” . . . . . .

Warner goes on:

Instead, ministers hide behind a list of headline grabbing targets, aspirations and notional commitments which they fondly hope will of themselves galvanise the private sector into investing and bringing about the desired transition.

Well, here's the truth: they will not. I've been talking to the climate change activist Daragh Coleman, whose CBI Projects consultancy has been crunching some of the numbers, using data from Imperial College London.

By his calculation, removing all hydrocarbon-based sources of energy from the economy by 2050 would result by way of replacement in a 400pc increase in peak demand for electricity from the UK's 20m-plus households. 

On average, electricity usage would surge from 12.8 kW/hours a day per household to 126.8. Business demand would grow by a similar order of magnitude.

Given current dithering and Treasury scrimping, how on earth is that going to be achieved?

Even with advances in energy storage and efficiency, it's going to require something like a five-fold expansion in both the National Grid's and the country's generating capacity.

And by the way, National Grid does not disagree. 

It has stated that over the next seven years it will need to install five times the amount of transmission infrastructure in England and Wales than has been built in the last 30 years to support the Government's target of 50 GW of offshore wind by 2030.

It’s all a farce, and it always has been a farce, pie in the sky, cloud cuckoo land thinking from fanatical Greens and climate activists. For 15 years, ‘Green’ energy and climate change sceptics have been pointing out the absurdity of the UK policy of unilaterally and drastically reducing carbon emissions in order to ‘save the planet’, but we’ve been ignored, side-lined, ridiculed as ‘moon-landing conspiracy theorists’ and labelled ‘deniers’, in direct comparison to Holocaust deniers. Now look at the mess they’ve got us in. And it’s March, and it’s still bloody cold! And here’s a picture of some fake global warming snow on the Lake District mountains. Try using a ground source heat pump up there!

Postscript

This post just appeared at WUWT and it’s highly relevant.

The author reproduces this graph of global primary energy use and its projection:

There Is No Energy Transition, Just Energy Addition

As Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright explained in his viral video a few weeks ago, dishonest terminology surrounds the climate debate.  One of these terms is “Energy Transition”.  The term’s use gives the impression that there exists a quick, easy and scalable alternative to eliminate fossil fuel use without serious impact on people. 

Current primary energy distribution by source, and forecasts by organizations like the EIA in their International Energy Outlook 2021, show that this “energy transition” is non-existent.  As you can see in the title graph above, and also in Liberty’s ESG report on Bettering Human Lives, no present quantity of primary energy generated by oil or gas is currently replaced by renewables.  A couple of headlines from the report that you don’t hear a lot:

• Global primary energy use is about to grow by almost 50% between 2020 – 2050 as impoverished people rise from poverty;

• Oil consumption rises in all EIA scenarios. In their “Reference Scenario”, oil consumption rises at about 1 million bopd/year for the next 30 years, almost the same steady yearly increase of the last 5 decades;

• Natural gas consumption will continue to growth through 2050.

The reason for this growth is simple: fossil fuels are abundant, cheap and efficient to provide reliable and dense energy at scale.  They have helped to generate a quality-of-life revolution for a portion of humanity, and people in poverty who have missed out on this blessing rightfully want what you and I already have.

So much for the ‘just transition’; it’s just addition. The climate saviour idiots in charge in the United Kingdom have yet to get the message.