August 31, 2023 - 7:00am
The energy crisis continues to hit Europe hard. In particular, the German economy is still reeling after losing its access to cheap Russian gas.
However, it’s not just Vladimir Putin’s war that’s to blame. A chart posted on X by Daniel Kral shows that a big part of Europe’s problem is self-inflicted. Just 10 years ago the EU (excluding the UK) was producing more than 30% of its demand for natural gas, but since then the figure has slumped to less than 15%. The timing could hardly be worse.
Foolishly, the environmental movement has decided that this is a good thing. Indeed, the focus of their campaigning effort is on stopping new fossil fuel production in the UK and EU. Most visibly, there’s Just Stop Oil — whose name says it all (or almost all, because it wants to stop gas, too). Then there’s Greenpeace, which staged a protest at Rishi Sunak’s family home because he gave the go-ahead to new exploration in the North Sea.
Official advisory bodies, like the UK’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) also believe that new production is incompatible with climate objectives. On the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, the CCC wrote to ministers to insist that “the extra gas and oil extracted will support a larger global market overall”, thus undermining global efforts to combat climate change.
But isn’t this obviously correct? Well, no — and you don’t have to deny the reality of climate change or the need for Net Zero to see why.
Firstly, to succeed politically climate objectives must be fully aligned with energy security. Europe has led the way on climate policy, so it would a disaster for the cause if the prosperity and safety of Europeans was lost while the world looked on laughing.
Secondly, the green analysis is simplistic. The assumption is that more production (in Europe) means more emissions overall. But what if we look beyond the first-order effects? Greater self-sufficiency would make it easier for Europe to permanently make do without Russian gas. Moscow, which is already having to cut production, would be forced to find alternative markets. That would require building new export infrastructure, an enormous challenge. Even if the Russians did eventually succeed in redirecting their gas, this would displace coal use in countries like China and India, thus reducing emissions.
Finally, the green advocates are forgetting that Net Zero targets consumption, rather than production. There’s a very good reason for this: the faster we make the switch to low carbon power, electric vehicles and heat pumps, the faster that the demand for fossil fuels disappears. Back in the 19th century, whale oil didn’t fall out of use because of a shortage of whales or because our ancestors outlawed whaling; rather, it was because we switched to alternative sources of illumination — like kerosene and the electric bulb.
In the 21st century, we need to do the same with the technologies that run on fossil fuels — namely, replace them with greener, cleaner, cheaper alternatives. If we’re really serious about stopping oil and gas, then making them obsolete is by far the best strategy.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeWhy does the Green movement target energy security?
Because it is an arm of a project to destabilise Western Countries. That’s why it doesn’t care less about the vast CO2 generation from non-Western origin.
The same playbook is evident in how others target the Wests record in colonialism whilst ignoring even present-day abuses by others.
Its not difficult to grasp.
Yep, exactly that.
Why so many still pretend not to see this is extraordinary.
No more driving for the plebs, insects ground up into our food, children being de facto hypnotized by LGBTP ideology in *schools*, the cramming of hundreds of thousands of *illegal* immigrants into small, previously pleasant towns, police arresting people for opinions but not for knife crimes and cities and inflation driving the average person into the ground.
All pushed by the WEF, incidentally, and none of it in our interest or at our request.
This is a very confused article, a sort of résumé of the way things are but not really offering anything in practice.
I believe that we need to re-think everything that we do. Individuals need to be involved at all levels. Every single person has to see an aim for themselves and how they can and must contribute.
But, I know that our governments are absolutely useless. They live with soundbites and employ ‘experts’ who also live with soundbites. They play for votes instead of doing things properly. They sign treaties which force us to do things that we can’t do. Worst of all, they assume that all technological problems will be solved, just because they say so.
I have worked for many years in batteries and electricity distribution and I can see that we are just painting ourselves into a corner. But nobody cares.
Ya. It was kind of a confusing essay. I think he should have noted that decreasing production here doesn’t reduce demand, but simply shifts production and profits to other jurisdictions, where environmental concerns are less relevant.
It means that individuals like you and me might have to change our way of life.
nope – build nukes
nope – build nukes
It means that individuals like you and me might have to change our way of life.
“I believe that we need to re-think everything that we do. Individuals need to be involved at all levels. Every single person has to see an aim for themselves and how they can and must contribute.”
I’m sorry but what does that actually mean in practice?
Trite, meaningless verbiage!
Trite, meaningless verbiage!
My Handy Dandy Honda Generator is looking good as s plan “B”
Ya. It was kind of a confusing essay. I think he should have noted that decreasing production here doesn’t reduce demand, but simply shifts production and profits to other jurisdictions, where environmental concerns are less relevant.
“I believe that we need to re-think everything that we do. Individuals need to be involved at all levels. Every single person has to see an aim for themselves and how they can and must contribute.”
I’m sorry but what does that actually mean in practice?
My Handy Dandy Honda Generator is looking good as s plan “B”
This is a very confused article, a sort of résumé of the way things are but not really offering anything in practice.
I believe that we need to re-think everything that we do. Individuals need to be involved at all levels. Every single person has to see an aim for themselves and how they can and must contribute.
But, I know that our governments are absolutely useless. They live with soundbites and employ ‘experts’ who also live with soundbites. They play for votes instead of doing things properly. They sign treaties which force us to do things that we can’t do. Worst of all, they assume that all technological problems will be solved, just because they say so.
I have worked for many years in batteries and electricity distribution and I can see that we are just painting ourselves into a corner. But nobody cares.
What a naive piece. Wondering what Greenpeace and the rest of the eco movement was up to ought to have been learned years ago. The sudden switch to targeting climate (as in Anthropogenic Global Warming) was never about achieving Net Zero for the hardliners, but about wrecking the capitalist system. They told us so. Hence the invention of the IPCC and its very specific mandate to find evidence of man-made climate change caused by carbon dioxide, which meant a) persuading the West that “the science was proven” (which they did), and therefore b) targeting fossil fuel usage. That meant, of course, industry, along with vehicle use and other CO2 emitters, all at the time essential to the Western (ie capitalist) way of life.
That this would in many instances fall very heavily upon the developing nations was unimportant, of course. Besides, no way were China, Russia, India and other large polluters going to buy into AGW, and nor were the Middle Eastern states who needed to sell oil.
Meanwhile, of course, capitalism proved that it could fight back, by switching to “green energy”. And people who paid attention stopped wondering about the officially sanctified “science” – often because it had become an industry in itself supplying much employment, or simply because it got votes. The peculiar way the hero behind “An Inconvenient Truth” became even richer brokering so-called “carbon credits”, the sanctification of a troubled Swedish teenager, and the sometimes very odd manoeuvrings of the “green movement” are not all that odd in context. If nothing else, do read why the co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, resigned from that organisation when it moved into campaigning on topics which had nothing to do with protecting wildlife and the planet (“Confessions of a Dropout: the making of a Sensible Environmentalist”)..
Paranoid garbage. There may be a crossover of some ideologies in a minority but climate change is only conflated with left wing conspiracies to make it easier for the right to resist. Ultimately we are all in this mess.
Having read Patrick Moore on this subject, I find his reasoning a damn sight more persuasive than anything you have to say here.
Paranoid garbage?
Sadiq Khan is chairman of the C40 group and his face adorns the website where you can read how the group intends to reduce the number of clothes we buy each year, and to ensure we only eat 2500 calories per day – which is less than WW2 rations.
It isn’t paranoid when there is a 68 page report telling you that they have decided what you will be allowed to eat.
Looks like an excellent initiative. It may be uncomfortable to some, especially those who are used to high consumption and ultrawide choice of products. It is of course the wealthy west and senior age groups that take this for granted, where as most of the world’s population actually get by on significantly lower consumption.
That went from ‘paranoid right-wing conspiracy that isn’t happening’ to ‘wonderful thing that we should all welcome’ in record time!
What has the C40 group got to do with trying to wreck the capitalist system? Seems you have your knickers in a twist about something.
Have you worked out a way to explain how the 400 feet of sea level rise in the last 28,000 years or so is natural but the next 3 feet of it is entirely down to humans who recklessly provided food, shelter and warmth to billions of humans causing a few millionths of a percent rise in CO2 in the atmosphere?
Yes. It’s called the greenhouse effect. You can read about it here:
https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/19/what-is-the-greenhouse-effect/
But the greenhouse effect describes natural climate variability. You insist that it has been suspended somehow and that those rises should have stopped a hundred years ago and that from that point forward we are solely to blame. For changes in the millionths. It does not add up.
please comment on whether green is anti-human (as opposed to anti-capitlaist)
How can it be anti human? The whole purpose of green ideology is to safeguard the future of the human race.
Ignore RK’s response to your post. He resorts to insult and ad hominem attack as he has nothing original or meaningful to contribute to any discussion to offer in their place.
You made some excellent points and contribute valuable insights for us all (well, maybe not all!) to consider. Keep posting, Sir!
While of course the author is broadly correct in everything he says, the reality is that anti-fossil fuel activism isn’t really about saving the planet at all, it’s about imposing degrowth upon the west and ideally the whole world. There is a low carbon future that doesn’t depend on fossil fuels there for the taking in the form of nuclear power, and done right it would eventually meet the original 1950s promise of electricity that is “too cheap to meter” – how mad that sounds today, yes, but it was based upon a simple calculation of the amount of uranium available at the time and that calculation has if anything improved with the advent of modern reactor designs that are hundreds of times more resource efficient and much safer.
However, the bourgeois activists of JSO, XR and the rest of them hate this prospect almost as much as a hydrocarbon economy, because they hate the freedom and mass prosperity that cheap reliable energy brings, so their activism is in fact aimed at the correct targets – if, that is, one shares their objective.
Why is the green movement targeting energy security? Perhaps, in part, because this exactly what the UN is encouraging them to do, for political reasons?
The conclusion of Section 13.9.7 (“Steps for Acceleration”) of the third part of the UN IPCC’s sixth assessment report concludes that “there is a strategic logic to focusing on actions which undermine high carbon systems at the same time as encouraging low-carbon systems. If high carbon systems are weakened then this may reduce the opposition to policies and actions aimed at accelerating climate mitigation, enabling more support for low-carbon systems …”.
And “Net Zero” (or, more accurately, the UN) explicitly targets both consumption and production. Moreover they are after reducing rich-world consumption of energy *in general*, not just energy generated using fossil fuels. Although they don’t seem to have bothered with a basic spell check before publication, Section 5.2.1.1 (“Services for Well-being”) of that UN report says “The challenge then is to address the upper limits of consumption [of energy]. When consumption only just supports the satisfaction of basic needs, any decrease causes deficiencies in human-need satisfaction. This is quite unlinke [sic] the case of consumption that exceeds the limits of basic needs, in which deprivation causes a subjective discomfort (Brand-Correa et al. 2020). Therefore, to collectively remain within environmental limits, the establishment of minimum and maximum standards of consumption, or sustainable consumption corridors, (Wiedmann et al. 2020) has been suggested.”
I dare any of the western world leaders who endorsed the IPCC’s report to say this to their publics and explain in simple terms what it would mean for them, including the possibility of “living arrangements [that] are built expressly around the practice of sharing toilets, bathrooms and kitchens” (Section 5.3.4.2, “The Sharing Economy”). I also call on those parts of the media that haven’t been bought and paid for – starting with Unherd – to start exposing the UN’s whacky calls for a collectivist revolution in the name of saving the planet honestly, and in forensic detail.
It basically sounds like the WEF’s Agenda 2030 – Schwabian global corporatism.
The UK government has embraced this programme enthusiastically with Net Zero ideology intended to erase the UK’s 1.5% contribution to global carbon emissions at great cost to the poor and small & medium-sized businesses.
Nuclear energy is the way forward. Unfortunately it’s all too late however and trying to ‘stop oil’ is futile and ridiculous. This crisis is only going one way and will result in mass migration, droughts, fires, floods and conflict.
It’s never too late. You have to start on nuclear now, like Sweden is doing. This same approach handcuffed the UK 10 years ago.
That would have been a good use of the time money and engineering resources being spaffed on HS2.
Correct. That clip of our then Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg arguing in 2010 that we shouldn’t be focusing on nuclear power because a new station will only come online in 2021 or 2022 comes to mind.
Do you get some sort of weird thrill predicting the imminent death and starvation of millions?
Not really, but it isn’t imminent either, it’s already happening.
No it isn’t. Deaths related to climate are at all time lows. Why do you keep lying?
You are forgetting that we are dealing with “Green” Activists here who have no understanding of Science, Engineering and Economics.
If they did they would be cancelled by their colleagues No Win, No Win
On the contrary, most of them are students called Rupert or Indigo apparently.
This has never been primarily about the environment. It’s always been an anti-capitalist, anti-western culture movement using the environment as an excuse to take us all back to a small, communitarian lifestyle. This will be catastrophic if allowed to succeed.
It’s got nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with taking down the system. Queering to demoralise the mind, hypothermia to demoralise the body. Et voila, communism. More explicitly, to create a global world order shifting resources around the planet is a required part of the plan.
Romans 1:24-28
“…so it would a disaster for the cause if the prosperity and safety of Europeans was lost while the world looked on laughing.”
Yet it was Trump who they laughed at when he suggested that it was a mistake to rely on Russian energy.
I imagine that the fundamental motivations of the Just Stop Oil types are far more psychological. It’s a repudiation of parents and grandparents for “not caring, for never caring, for forcing me to grow up (?), for not understanding me, for not reading me the right books, for not hating colonialism enough, for ruining everything…”
There’s a real hatred there. So they’ll “take away your precious car, no more golf, no more swimming pools, no more vacations in Florida (“pretty soon there won’t even be a Florida!!)…I’m gonna make you eat bugs!”
The motivations are very similar to those of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
You certainly have a wild imagination!
Because a large number of these voices may well be troll farm employees of states that want to turn us against each other. They appear to be having much success when we have a weak and floundering Conservative Party and a Labour Party that is willing to foist literally any ill-thought out social madness on society in the name of the insatiable beast called “progressivism”.
The Chinese and non-western countries continue to increase coal and other fossil fuels and tell the West they will only stop if the West pays them trillions to develop renewables. The Western Govts are heavily in debt from COVID spending and won’t / can’t pay those “climate reparations.” Maybe John Kerry can give the “Climate crimes against humanity” speech in Beijing. This is all such nonsense as even the IPCC doesn’t claim the world ends if the temp raises 2 C…
I thought the article was sensible if possibly surprisingly unexciting given the drama around the subject.
Maybe that is a good thing. This debate – like some others – has got too polarised. Yes, some of the leading climate campaigners such as Roger Hallam (one of the main founders of Extinction Rebellion) are as much concerned with overthrowing capitalism as sorting the climate. Yes, like most self righteous folk, they are often unscrupulous in their use of numbers and arguments. Yes, if we just listened to the simplistic slogans from the NGOs we will blow up the economy. Yes, etc etc BUT there is a real issue with global warming which we need to address – but in a sensible not monomaniac fashion.
No, it is not just a ramp by anti-capitalists, the woke, Davos, mad climate scientists or [insert hate group of choice]. No, just because the climate propaganda exaggerates the certainty of the forecasts does not mean the basic idea is wrong. No, the science is not complete nonsense. BUT the panjandrums of the climate world seem to think it sensible to communicate an oversimplified and in places implausible story in order to get us to move in the preferred direction.
We need a better debate which centres on scientifically plausible targets and policies compatible with continued economic growth and with not inflicting unacceptable pain on poorer individuals (and countries). We need to get real.
A good starting point would be if we were treated like adults and stopped being fed simplistic BS in hope of steering us down the chosen path. Currently, for example, we are being told we must limit the rise to 1.5 C and therefore we must achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. Yet I have never met a single sentient being who thinks there is any chance whatsoever of limiting the rise to 1.5 C – except of course a few ostriches who do not believe in global warming at all but I am not sure they qualify as sentient beings – and most agree that if we can keep it below 2.5 C we will be doing well. On the corollary, carbon neutrality by 2050, the only people I have encountered who believe this is possible turn out to include the cheerful assumption in their small print that we will be able to suck enormous quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere using technologies yet to be perfected. These two examples are merely the tip of the iceberg – to pick an appropriate metaphor – and I could list many more.
After the problems with COVID misinformation coming – as it turned out – as often from official as loony sources, I do not think this will work. As the UnHerd comments section illustrates, it just encourages total scepticism and cynicism. It also corrupts the work of scientists who have to articulate any dissenting opinion with extraordinary delicacy for fear of having their funding cut off if they appear to be off message.
If we continue on the present course with loopy targets and insufficient consideration given to the cost of schemes we will see more and more resistance as with ULEZ and heat pumps and end up achieving little. A rise of 2.5 C is not the end of the world but 5 C would certainly feel like it.
My problem is that, having been made a fool of, I’m reluctant to trust or believe any science which purports to prove that CO2 and all that goes with its use as a fuel is causing more rapid climate changes than the planet has already experienced. As you observe, scientists who dare to step out of line are punished, meaning that we don’t have any more a system in which open debate can take place. Open scientific debate throws up both good points and cranks, and leaves the audience to sort the wheat from the chaff by pondering, testing, probing further.
If the global climate is indeed now heading inexorably towards “too hot for current life forms”, then I need uncontaminated experts to explain it. Certainly not the BBC and most other mainstream media. But where to find this reliable, honest source of information?
Assuming one can be found, and it does predict dire consequences, who can then be trusted to take heed and appropriate action on that advice alone? It’s an impossible ask in a world so corrupted by agendas and suspicions, not to mention quasi-religious dogmas.
I think you have put your finger on the key point. I think the short answer is the Physicists.
As you say, most of the participants in the climate debate are compromised one way or another. What we need is “quality assurance” on the climate story. Physicists tend to include some of the brightest, most rigorous and most BS resistant scientists. If you like, they are the first XI while Climate Studies, when this debate kicked off, was a backwater dominated by a sloppy third XI team (often ironically failed physicists).
In fact the first serious global warming study was done in the 1960s by the JASON group (a very high powered Pentagon think tank dominated by top ranking physicists which usually evaluated futuristic weapon systems). As far as I can make out, they worked out the central forecasts on the back of an envelope one afternoon and sixty years (and endless expensive computer models) later no one has improved materially on their work. One has to accept that these early forecasts of the impact of carbon on global warming have worked extremely well so far – especially when one thinks of economic and weather forecasts.
Unfortunately it is increasingly hard to get access to the unvarnished opinions of physicists. The Royal Society used to be a good source of rigorous and balanced views but their climate output now appears to have fallen under the control of climate science professors. Most physicists keep their opinions to themselves or pay lip service to orthodoxy.
If one wants to be optimistic, however, I suspect that some of the quiet dissent that clearly exists within Climate Science (in particular that on the seemingly arcane issues of feedback loops and modelling the ice ages) is going to force a debate about the basic science of global warming and the physicists could end up umpiring.
The other factor that may force a proper and honest debate is that things like ULEZ and the cost of compulsory heat pumps are leading to increasing political resistance. The current IPCC approach – we are scientists, it is all very simple and you must do what we say – will not work much longer. At a minimum, they are going to need someone to mark their homework and reassure the public. A few Nobel Prize physicists?
But I am a compulsive – if very cynical – optimist.