Net Zero - the Art of Believing 10 Impossible Things Before Breakfast
The global economy is battling another global energy crisis but Ed Miliband refuses to be shaken in his convictions.
Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’
‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!’Lewis Carroll
Like most adults, I stopped believing in fairies and Father Christmas a long time ago. Unfortunately, many of our politicians seem unable to throw off their childhood fantasies. Ed Miliband is the prime exemplar of his class. It is astonishing that someone in charge of energy policy can have so little understanding of his brief. It does not help that he is surrounded by people who reinforce his beliefs, in a supercharged echo chamber, formalised in the form of the Climate Change Committee. For comparison similar issues arise constantly in the NHS, which is run by people who have never emptied a bed pan or wielded a scalpel - but I digress.
In this short post I’d like to pick up on the quote from Lewis Carroll and list the 10 impossible Net Zero things that you must believe in order to support decarbonising our economy at breakneck speed.
Reducing our CO2 emissions will reduce global temperature despite accounting for less than 1% of global emissions.
Offshoring our manufacturing (and its emissions) will not destroy jobs, particularly in high skilled offshore, steel, aluminium and car-manufacturing sectors. Or green jobs will replace these jobs despite most renewable technology being made in China.
We can close down all fossil fuel generation despite electricity only accounting for 20% of energy use and being vital to maintain grid security during long gaps in wind and solar generation. Essentially, we need to believe that new physics and economic models can fill the gap, along with massive investments in grid infrastructure and/or carbon capture and storage.
Battery storage will replace fossil fuel generation and imports, despite the environmental, economic and engineering challenges of delivering grid scale storage that covers many days. None of these challenges have been solved yet but they will be any day now.
Renewable energy is the cheapest energy available as long as we ignore the massive public subsidies. Just give them long enough and somehow the subsidies will come down, despite having gone up again in AR7 (the latest Contracts for Difference allocation round).
We will all switch to EVs despite half of us not being able charge at home and the technology being unsuitable for commercial use, such as road haulage. We also need to ignore stagnant sales, plummeting residual values, safety concerns, an electricity grid creaking at the seams, and the cost of replacing batteries.
Covering agricultural land with turbines, solar panels and batteries is a price worth paying despite the loss of home grown food production and increased reliance on imported food, along with their extra emissions. It is even worth destroying our peat uplands and losing their massive potential as carbon sinks.
Energy security can be managed by importing oil, gas and electricity whenever we need it, despite what goes on elsewhere in the world and that prices are set globally despite the fact that US energy prices are much lower than ours.
We can ignore the thousands of things, other than energy, which rely on oil for their existence, including: clothing, medicines, plastics, synthetic rubber, lubricants and fertilisers.
The astronomical costs, both economic and societal are a price worth paying, despite all of the above.
I could go on but hopefully you get my point. I’d like to think that any reasonably intelligent person would come to the same conclusion I came to 20 years ago. But it appears not.
In my experience, those supporting NetZero believe all these things are going to work or are a price worth paying to save the planet. Others simply won’t engage because these facts do not fit their mental model of how the world is. Overcoming the cognitive dissonance required it just too painful emotionally, and so they avoid any discussions that could help them understand what is really happening.
What is the solution? I have no idea other than to keep plugging away with these articles. If you have any friends who might benefit, please do consider sharing with them - but don’t hold your breath. They will come round in the end but it is going to require an existential crisis. Perhaps one where we experience rolling blackouts, patients dying in operating theatres, public services closing down, flights being cancelled - you get the idea.
Unfortunately, when this happens, I don’t see people sitting back and quietly accepting their new lifestyle. When they realise how much they have been lied to they will probably be outraged. And who knows where that might take us?