People Are Finally Starting To Wake Up To The 'Net Zero' Madness

Imagine if a teenager with no knowledge of cars walked into a garage and started to tell the mechanics how they should be tuning the engines they are working on. Or imagine if a passenger on a flight attempted to break into the pilot’s cockpit and take over the flying of the plane, without knowing the first thing about flying a plane. Or imagine if a guy off the street offered to rewire your house, without the faintest clue about electrical wiring. You get the gist. In each of these cases, it’s obvious that they don’t have the competence or authority to make these demands.

But there are millions of people today – ranging from young daft nuisance vandals, through to mature politicians and media commentators – who think they have the competence and authority to demand an end to fossil fuels, or at the least 'net zero', by an arbitrary date. Alas, not everyone grasps how absurd this is. Compared to the intractability of the world’s carbon industries in a highly complex global industry, with tens of billions of interconnected needs, fixing a car, flying a plane or rewiring a house is a highly manageable task.

Yet on these matters we still wouldn’t counsel opinion from amateurs, unskilled in the industries in question. So with that in mind, why on earth do people entertain the deranged fantasy that individuals have the first clue about the world’s optimum oil consumption at any given time, about what the right balance of energy sources is, about the dynamically shifting global economies and the intricate web of energy demands that sustains them, and about prospective dates when we should just pretend we can bring a halt to all this?

Net zero has been one of the most widespread Dunning-Kruger ‘Mount stupid’ delusions ever wrought on modern societies, and thankfully, although it's still early days, we are starting (stress, starting) to see increased pushbacks, as more and more people are slowly waking up to how irresponsible it is, and how impoverishing it is for poorer people (and the poorer the society, the more disastrous net zero policies are for them).

Fossil fuels powered the greatest material progression-explosion the world has ever seen, lifting billions of people out of poverty and hardship - and they are still the cheapest and most efficient fuel on the planet. It's disgraceful that British MPs voted to represent our national interests are hell-bent on impeding our industrial standing in the world, prioritising misguided policies that undermine energy security, production and economic growth. They are prepared to jeopardise the UK in the name of perverse ideological agendas, for the purposes of reckless, narcissistic virtue-signalling. 

Some people have always been awake to this nonsense, while many others have been sceptical but passive. Thankfully, the signs are that enough people across Europe are now beginning to get so fed up of having their livelihoods compromised by eco-fanaticism that their influence is beginning to gather some momentum. Let's hope it continues, because the right and most pressing political question of this time is not Has the damage we’ve done to the climate taken us too far into an irreparable plight? – it is Has the damage already done by the preposterous net zero lunacy taken us too far into an irreparable plight? You can tell the kind of person you’re dealing with by which of those questions occupies most of their concern.