Delingpole: Britain Signs £1 Trillion ‘Net Zero’ Carbon Suicide Note

ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND - MAY 03: British Prime Minister Theresa May addresses the Scottish Con
Michal Wachucik/Getty
James Delingpole

As predicted, Theresa May’s lame-duck government has gone ahead and signed the £1 trillion suicide note committing the UK to ‘Net Zero’ decarbonisation by 2050.

Do any of the incompetent, virtue-signalling pillocks — both on the Government and Opposition benches — who signed this piece of magical unicorn fairytale tosh have any idea what £1 trillion looks like?

Here’s one helpful offering from the Global Warming Policy Foundation:

With that sum of money, it points out, you could pay the salaries of 314,000 NHS nurses for a century.

Another way of looking at it is this: if one second is one pound, then £1 trillion is the equivalent of a pound spent every second for 32,000 years.

Whichever way you look at it, £1 trillion is the kind of public expenditure you’d need to be out of your mind not sign off without very serious scrutiny.

After all, if you’re going to make a huge fuss about the bagatelle of £350 million on the side of a bus, then clearly you’re going to pay much, much more attention to a figure several orders of magnitude even than the £750 billion or so the government spends on health, education, defence, welfare, housing, foreign aid, and so on.

But yesterday our elected representatives in parliament — the people we rely on to ensure that the money taken from us in the form of taxation or borrowing or inflationary money printing is spent responsibly and wisely — gave it all of 90 minutes sketchy thought before deciding that £1 trillion was so trivial as not even to be deserving of any kind of cost-benefit analysis.

Let’s be clear on the facts, here.

Climate change — aka Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming — is #fakenews.

Even if it were not an imaginary problem cooked up for ideological reasons by activist scientists, shyster politicians, green campaigners and crony capitalists — there is no evidence whatsoever that it is within mankind’s ability to control the climate by reducing industrial CO2 output.

Furthermore, even if we were to believe the green loons, braindead politicians, and rent-seeking scum suckers from the renewables industry who claim that it is possible, such gestures are only going to make sense if all the world’s major economies follow suit. Countries that choose to ‘decarbonise’ their economies unilaterally will simply be committing suicide by burdening their own producers with unnecessary extra costs. And since China — by far the world’s biggest producer of CO2 – isn’t playing ball, nor is the U.S., nor is India, nor, we learn this week, is Japan –there is no chance on earth that this is going to happen.

Net Zero by 2050 is a hopeless aspiration.

Here, according to Terence Corcoran, are the kind of measures it would entail:

On a global basis, the magnitude of the implied decarbonization effort illustrated in the graph takes us beyond the possible and into the world of junk science fiction. In 2018, world consumption of fossil fuels rose to 11,865 million tonnes of oil equivalent (mtoe). To get that down to near zero by 2050 as proposed by the zeroists would require a lot of alternative energy sources.

University of Colorado scientist Roger Pielke Jr. did some of the rough numbers. “There are 11,161 days until 2050. Getting to net zero by 2050 requires replacing one mtoe of fossil fuel consumption every day starting now.” On a global basis, such a transition would require building the equivalent of one new 1.5-gigawatt nuclear plant every day for the next 30 years.

If not nuclear, then maybe solar? According to a U.S. government site, it takes about three million solar panels to produce one gigawatt of energy, which means that by 2050 the world will need 3,000,000 X 11,865 solar panels to offset fossil fuels. The wind alternative would require about 430 new wind turbines each of the 11,865 days leading to 2050.

You can understand why socialists and other collectivists might wish to sign up to such lunacy. These kind of grand, state-driven projects would certainly not have looked out of place in Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China.

What is baffling beyond measure, though, is the degree to which so many Conservatives — not just doomed, third-rate Theresa May but even her supposedly more go-ahead likely successor Boris Johnson — are choosing to dive headlong over that green cliff, in the manner of lemmings or walruses in a staged BBC documentary.

The problem when conservatives unquestionably support these utopian eco-loon projects is not just that it results in extremely bad, expensive, poorly considered, wasteful and damaging policy. It’s also that it emboldens the left which will always, but always, find a way of going one better by promising even more government expenditure and more intrusive legislation to solve the same alleged problem.

This is just what is happening now.

But as various people have pointed out to Dan Hannan, it’s hardly much use for a Conservative MEP to point the finger at Labour’s economically destructive green lunacy when the Conservatives are going down the same road while actually in government.

There’s going to be a General Election soon. (There’ll have to be if Boris Johnson becomes prime minister and keeps his promise to deliver Brexit by October 31.) Let’s hope that it will afford an opportunity for parliament to be cleansed like the Augean stables and filled with MPs capable of doing the basic maths required to understand that spending £1 trillion of taxpayers’ money (a very conservative estimate by the way: the real figure will be much, much higher) on green, crony-capitalism vanity projects is not a recipe for peace and harmony in post-Brexit Britain: it’s an open invitation for ordinary British people to follow the French, put on their gilets jaunes and take to the streets in protest at the worst misuse of scarce resources in British history.

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