The Green Titanic Hits the Iceberg of Reality
by Dr Gwythian Prins 13 May 2026 9:00 AM
This is the first in a series of 12 articles challenging climate change orthodoxy commissioned by Dr Prins (who has authored this article and one other himself). We will be publishing the articles at a rate of one a week over the next 12 weeks. The hope is that they can be collected into a book for Sixth Formers and university students.
On Britain’s political voyage today, the opulence of the first-class passengers – who are the rulers now – is not exhibited in furs and jewels as it was in their predecessors’ day, but in their flaunted luxury beliefs. As night falls on the Starmer Government, steaming unceasingly onwards, only one Minister seems to stand erect, glassy-eyed and untouchable on the bridge, and it is, unfortunately, Ed Miliband. He alone seems to believe in something, and that something is ‘decarbonisation’.
The British ship of state is slicing through the political seas swiftly and blindly towards a terrible collision with reality – with the laws of thermodynamics, engineering and, insofar as economics has constant principles, economics too – and with the consequences of petulantly ignorant denial of the same. Thomas Hardy observed in his lines on another famous collision – that of the Titanic with the iceberg – that at the moment when nemesis for the pride that made her became unavoidable, “the Spinner of the Years said – ‘Now!’” That fateful freezing night of April 15th 1912, other captains on the North Atlantic had prudently changed course, slowed down or stopped – but not Captain Smith; nor now, by the same token, our Energy Secretary, as he rings up the civil service engine room for full ahead to ‘Net Zero by 2030’ and orders his loyal long-time ally and helmsman – his equally deluded ‘mission controller’ Chris Stark – to hold course.
There is still time to avoid shipwreck, but not much. Others have changed course, slowed down or stopped the scientifically illiterate and politically dangerous rush into so-called ‘renewable’ energy. So too must we. Remember, what sank the Titanic was also an immutable law of physics: that the energy of a moving mass increases as the square of the velocity. The 60,000-ton Titanic, at 21 knots, represented an energy of 1,161,000 foot-tons. At 10 knots, her energy would have been reduced to 290,250 foot-tons. Collision at that speed would have damaged her but would probably not have ripped out half her length underwater, and she might well have survived. Bear that in mind.
https://dailysceptic.org/2026/05/13/the-green-titanic-hits-the-iceberg-of-reality/
