The Net Zero Scandal
Climate Debate UK is one year old today! Help us continue our work into the next year by subscribing to this new project! Here's why...
December 2023. As the latest COP meeting – the 28th – draws to its pointless close, we at Climate Debate UK celebrate our first birthday. But unlike the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its annual ritual, we hope that the 12th of the 12th each year passes without either us or them… Climate politics is a terrible joke at humanity’s expense, whether it is the absurd annual spectacle of the COP travelling circus, or the local council’s car-banning without consultation. If climate change is a problem that requires a policy response, then the making of that policy must be democratic. And the ‘if’ in that sentence can only be decided by debate. The fact that climate politics is neither democratic, nor is ever the subject of meaningful debate in public is the Net Zero scandal.
This Substack is about that scandal in its entirety. It is easy to think that the problem begins and ends in science. But as we have shown in our analyses at climatedebate.co.uk, it is a mistake to either believe that climate politics begins in science, or that it can be challenged merely by correcting it. Our film Why There is No Climate Crisis sets out our argument: ideology, not science, is the driving force of climate politics.
And as we show, it was the failure of society to challenge that dark and weird ideology that led the then chair of the UN IPCCC, the late Rajenda K. Pachauri to believe that it is right and proper to fill children’s heads with stories of eco-doom, to make them instruments of climate ideology. And so insidious is that ideology that, when a UK news crew stumbles across a group of tiny children at a climate protest and hears them reproducing green ideology, it is not an abomination to the broadcasters’ ears. The journalists have nothing to say about these children having no belief in their own future, and no questions about how that happened.
Well, we do. Net Zero has become the slogan of a shameful agenda that aims to cut democracy out of politics and impoverish entire nations. It thinks nothing of brainwashing infants with terrifying stories. It claims that every reduction in living standards and erosion of freedom is ‘progress’ towards a ‘sustainable society’. And ‘science’ is its fig leaf.
Over the last year, we have produced our extensive website, we have published reports, the video above, further video presentations, and we have made numerous appearances on news media to make these arguments. We have been providing journalists and others in the public sphere with information they need to help make sense of the absurdities of climate science and politics. And we have been working with Together and other organisations to help the public understand what the Net Zero agenda means to them. But some of the things we wanted to do, such as continuing our series of livestreams, were not possible because of our very limited resources.
Now, Climate Debate UK needs your help to carry on our project. The content on this Substack is going to be available to subscribers only. As our current website, my previous website, our Twitter/X profiles (CDUK, Ben Pile, Ed Rennie), and my earlier Substack show, we have mountains of research and analyses to share, and much more is in the pipeline. This already amounts to millions of words and years of research, most of which have been produced for no money, or for very limited income, despite conspiracy theories to the contrary.
So what are we going to do?
We are going to put articles here first for subscribers to read. There will also be occasional vlogs and presentations. Some of these will then be made available in some form for free, later on, for example, if they may help to inform the broader debate.
Over the next few months, aiming for a Spring delivery, we are going to make a full-length documentary film about the absolute scandal of wind power in the UK, and how it happened, charting every policy failure under the Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak governments. See our synopsis of the film below, which you can also make a one-off donation towards, which will also give you access to the articles on this Substack.
We are going to continue adding articles and presentations to our website, developing our systematic criticism of the global and national climate policy agenda.
We will continue to work with the Together Association and other organisations to help inform them, and to facilitate such collaborations, and to help in bringing their work, and experts’ contributions to the public and to politicians and journalists.
Some people have donated one-off or monthly amounts via our website’s donate page. If you are one of those people, or if you would prefer to support us through that mechanism, the email address you used to send the donations can be used to log into Substack. Similarly, if you donate to our wind farm documentary film, your email address will be added to the subscribers list. These subscriptions will be valid for up to a year, at the same rate as the minimum subscription.
DEGENERATION
How the eco-technocrats’ dream of green energy became our living nightmare
For 20 years, UK governments’ hopes of being the ‘world leader’ in climate change policy have depended on wind energy. But the promises of the wind energy lobby are now collapsing.
Energy prices have risen: wind farm developers have reneged on their promises of cheaper power, and now demand yet more subsidies.
The ‘green industrial revolution’ that wind turbines were supposed to drive is nowhere to be seen: even wind turbine manufacturers are shutting down.
The much-hyped ‘green economy' is, at best, flatlining: despite the vast subsidies and generating capacity of the UK’s wind farms rising from 5GW in 2010 to nearly 30GW in 2022, the green sector has produced no growth, and is approximately equal in size to green taxes.
All the evidence shows that wind power is too big to fail, too feeble to stand on its own, let alone power a country. But rather than waking up from their dreams, Britain’s politicians are doubling down…
This full-length film will explain the history of Britain’s experiment with wind power, starting with the Renewables Obligation scheme under the Blair government. Against this timeline of different UK governments and their policies, the myths and claims from lobbyists, such as ‘wind power is nine times cheaper than gas’ are debunked and their origins explained.
Historical and explanatory vignettes will serve as stand-alone videos for use in social media, but the full-length film will join them up in a narrative that exposes the tragic excesses of the politics of wind energy.
To support our projects please become a paid subscriber to this Substack, or donate to Climate Debate UK here.
Well done. I’ve been asked to stand as a local
councillor and if I do this and get elected I’ll be all over their net zero garbage and will undoubtedly use your content. Thanks and continued success Ben.
Good luck with this Ben. It's important: we need as many people as possible to engage with this vitally important topic. The consequences of letting our 'leaders' continue with their absurd policies are frightening. One point to which I suggest you give inadequate attention in the above statement is this: even if all the scare stories were true, policies such as Net Zero could not solve them and, far from improving our well-being , would actually make it very much worse.