An article in the Critic asks if we are facing another great depression. I’m surprised that there is any doubt about it. Twenty years of vandalism of the energy system was only ever going to have one result, and will not be fixed in a hurry. But how did we end up here? Why did we let it happen? The answers lie in the two great tricks that have been played on the public.
Firstly, the man in the street has been led to believe that global warming is a crisis. Make no mistake, this is a lie. That’s because, in the official view of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, unabated global warming might lead to 3.6°C of warming and result in a loss of just 2.6% of GDP. Yes, those figures are correct; the worst that the climate might throw at us will only cause a small loss of wealth. That makes sense when you understand that by far the biggest impacts of climate change – sea-level rise and flooding – can be addressed through simple and relatively cheap adaptation measures. Nevertheless, relentless scaremongering by green activists and hate campaigns launched against naysayers have done the trick, to the extent that the idea of a ‘climate emergency’ is now received opinion, despite the lack of supporting evidence.
The second trick has been played by the renewables industry and green activists, which have together persuaded most people that an energy transition is possible. To do this they have engaged in a 20-year campaign of disinformation about the costs of wind and solar power and about the availability of storage technologies for when the wind stops blowing and the sun isn’t shining. So, for example, while the green blob shouts that offshore windfarms are bidding very low prices to supply to the grid, serious analysts – including in the peer-reviewed literature – point out that their audited accounts show that their costs remain high, that they are refusing to take up their contracts at the agreed price, and that the whole exercise is, in essence, a scam to fool the politicians into keeping the renewables boondoggle going.
Read More: The Headlong Rush to ‘Net Zero’ Makes a New Great Depression a Racing Certainty
