There follows a guest post by Lynne Sash, an expert in the engineering, defence and healthcare industries, who says Net Zero, like the response to Covid, is part of the Permanent Emergency propagated by elites, under which “the whole of one’s life must be a demonstration of fealty to the scientism of collective welfare in which there is no longer any behaviour that is truly private”.
I agree with John Fernley that renewable energy is not a stand-alone substitute for fossil fuels, and that nuclear energy must receive more serious consideration. I will not discuss the scientific arguments relating to anthropogenic (manmade) global warming (AGW), which are covered in depth elsewhere. But these arguments are only one aspect of the Net Zero philosophy. Proponents of Net Zero advocate not so much an energy policy as a way of reframing society without being transparent about what that entails.
A prime example of this was the Insulate Britain protests that disrupted traffic during 2021. I agree that promoting home insulation is a laudable cause. But instead of pointlessly gluing one’s face to the road, it might have made more sense to point to the Scottish Government programme providing free cavity wall insulation to qualifying households. My neighbours in Edinburgh benefited from this scheme, and it is reasonable to ask whether and how it could be extended to the rest of the country. But rational discourse and problem-solving have never been the point of Climate Crisis agitation, which is really aimed at generating anxiety that can be mobilised for large-scale, and largely unexamined, social change.
Read More: Net Zero is Part of the Permanent Emergency Where Nothing is Any Longer Truly Private
