The ‘Net Zero’ slogan is on the lips of politicians of all shades, uttered by royalty and rock-stars alike, and, of course, by those execrable people who padlock themselves to railings and glue themselves to public highways in the name of Just Stop Oil. Net Zero, referring to the reduction of carbon emissions, has been sold to us as an achievable aim and one that we must achieve by around 2050. What few at the receiving end of this slogan know—and few on whom most of the burden of achieving Net Zero will fall—is how little thought was applied between the invention and subsequent imposition of the Net Zero policy. Therefore, nobody has a clue how it is going to be achieved.
Ross Clark, in his highly readable, entertaining, and informative book, Not Zero, explains the origins of Net Zero and systematically demolishes the current ways we are trying to achieve it. Clark is not a climate change denier, and he is not unconcerned with the issue of atmospheric pollution by the combustion of carbon compounds. Rather, he is concerned about how unbalanced reporting is distorting the picture on climate change and how we have become unduly concerned with this issue at the expense of so many other worthy causes.
While it is true that record high temperatures are being experienced in some places, this phenomenon is counterbalanced by record low temperatures elsewhere. Notably, this is never reported in the mainstream media. The high temperatures bring considerable advantages for agriculture, for example, and humans are not passive players in the face of climate change. We have been adapting to changes in climate for thousands of years, and it is not inconceivable that we may do so again. However, Clark reckons that many of the current attempts that are being made to reduce carbon emissions in the West are ultimately futile at the global scale, given the copious amounts of carbon emissions coming out of China.
Futile measures
The introduction of Net Zero as an aim of the British government, COVID-19 measures aside, is one of the least democratic processes ever to produce a shift in policy that would have such immediate and deleterious effects on the British population. While the embers of Theresa May’s failed government were barely still glowing, she committed the United Kingdom to Net Zero as an outcome, under pressure from the international environmental lobby. She then left office without having established any process for achieving such an ambitious goal. That this happened under a conservative prime minister, and that the baton was picked up so enthusiastically by her predecessor Boris Johnson, is astonishing. The present incumbent, Rishi Sunak, is no less enthusiastic.
Some of the measures that are supposed to help us achieve Net Zero were already in place by the time of Theresa May’s resignation. Solar panels have adorned roofs in the United Kingdom for decades. They are unsightly and make barely a dent in our energy needs. Likewise, wind turbines have been visible across the British landscape for many years, but make a minimal contribution to our energy needs. Solar panels are only effective when the sun shines, which it frequently does not in Great Britain, and wind turbines are only effective when the wind blows. In both cases, it is not possible to store up much of the energy generated.
Largely, the wind and solar initiatives have failed—yet the only solution ever proposed, instead of waiting for research and development to catch up with the storage issue, is to build more solar and wind fields until they become the blight on the landscape that they now are. Picturesque hillsides are festooned with serried ranks of wind turbines—an arrangement which, incidentally, reduces their efficiency as it slows the wind down. Vast areas of arable land are covered with banks of solar panels. which glint up at you as you land at almost any airport in the United Kingdom; the landscape is truly ruined in some places.
Electric vehicles are another major plank of the Zero Carbon initiative. There have long been electric cars, mainly hybrids, which charge themselves as they are driven. They make use of the first law of thermodynamics, converting one form of energy (kinetic) into another (electric). Totally electric vehicles, which convert electric into kinetic energy, are also subject to the laws of thermodynamics, meaning that the energy needed to generate the electricity that charges their enormous batteries has to come from somewhere. With renewable forms of energy making a relatively small and unpredictable contribution to our national energy needs, this comes largely from burning fossil fuels. We may be removing pollution from our roads and city centres, which is laudable, but we are merely transferring the pollution to someone else unfortunate enough to live near a fossil fuel fired power station.
False alarm
One obvious way of producing clean energy is nuclear fission, and Clark gives this a very honest assessment. It is not without its risks, as we know, but there are very logical explanations for why Chernobyl overheated (communism) and Fukushima leaked (geology). These sorts of events are rare and avoidable, but constructing nuclear power stations is extremely expensive and there still remains the problem of nuclear waste. Nuclear fusion is a safe option but is unlikely to work in our lifetimes. In any case, whether by fission or fusion, the word ‘nuclear’ is enough for the eco-zealots to start screaming “Armageddon.” It must not be forgotten that these people are less concerned with producing energy in ways that will allow us to maintain our standards of living and make economic progress than with being ‘anti-capitalist.’ Apparently they would be happier if we all returned to a stone-age standard of living, provided the planet was saved and they were in power.
Clark also treats wood burning and the use of trees as a means of carbon capture in-depth. At least one major power station in the United Kingdom has shifted from burning coal to burning wood. This has made our carbon emission figures better, but not because wood burning does not release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—it does, and at far less return in energy than coal. Rather, it makes our figures better because wood is considered a ‘biomass,’ and this is not counted in our carbon emissions figures. We apply the same principle to gas, which we produce in lesser quantities in order to make ourselves look better—only to import it from abroad to satisfy our energy needs. Wood is a good carbon sink, so we do not burn our own trees—we let them flourish and we import the carbon capturing wood, thus denuding forests in other parts of the world and leaving them to their fate. Clark relates how, whereas once we kept the trees along our railway lines well-trimmed, now we let them grow freely in the name of rewilding and carbon capture. It is the branches from these same trees that fall and block the lines and disrupt our rail network. It would be very hard to make any of this up for a comedy routine.
Sadly, for a frequent flyer like me, there was little solace in the chapter where air-travel was covered. While the airline industry is cleaner than before, it will prove very difficult not to burn fossil fuels, and large amounts of them, in order to keep us in the air. I suppose this demonstrates one of Clark’s central theses, that it is easy to approve of and support Net Zero as a philosophy until it demands that you make practical sacrifices yourself.
However, the urgency imposed on us by the net zero movement is false and that is the real point of this excellent book, which I have hardly done justice in this brief review. Not Zero should be compulsory reading for every British member of Parliament. After all, it was they who let this potentially disastrous policy pass with hardly a murmur of protest. Nonetheless, I take heart from Clark’s reassuring assertion that “we are not being fried, frozen, drowned, burned, or blown away by human-induced climate change.”