On Belief in the Tooth Fairy: The Battle of Britain’s Climate 2021-2030
Iain Aitken
Back in the 1970s Britain was routinely described as ‘the sick man of Europe’. As we enter the fourth decade of the twenty-first century it seems germane to look back and ask how Britain managed to come to a point, in just a decade, of once again routinely bearing that sad appellation. Today we see the beleaguered, devalued Pound pegged at 2.3 Chinese Yuan and once again see rampant stagflation, with inflation at 12.6% (from less than 1% at the start of the decade) largely thanks to escalating energy, food and commodity prices and 3.6 million unemployed (double that at the start of the decade) largely thanks to the collapse of the steel, cement, aerospace and car manufacturing industries. We also see deep social unrest across the country resulting from the steadily falling standards of living, coupled with peoples’ inability to heat their homes adequately or affordably with heat pumps, coupled with regular blackouts, coupled with regular food shortages – and permanent restrictions in our freedoms, such as how we may heat our homes, what type of car we may buy, how many miles we may drive it and how many flights we may take. And all this ‘Green Austerity’ and misery as a result of, of all things, Britain’s arcane battle to deliver net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
How could the people of Britain have chosen such a disastrous path? Perhaps the answer is ‘thoughtlessly’. For they surely would never have elected to go down the road to ruin if the destination had been spelt out to them back in 2021. And each step on that road was relatively small and incremental – so the costs and impacts crept up on the population by stealth. As former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak put it in his recent memoirs With the Best of Intentions, ‘Each step we took on the path to net zero appeared sensible and responsible at the time, and anyway was necessitated by the legally-bound commitments of successive British governments to achieve net zero by 2050. But we never stood back and asked fundamental questions such as, ”How reliable is the science behind all this?” or “Is the adverse socioeconomic impact on our citizens acceptable?” or “Would it actually be more cost-effective to adapt to the warming?” or “Will Britain achieving net zero actually have any detectable effect on anyone’s climate?” – or even “Is net zero actually technologically possible?” Being perceived to achieve global climate leadership came to dominate our thinking and our energy and economic policies and, although perhaps subconsciously we knew that these policies made little or no socioeconomic sense and that even achieving the net zero goal would have no detectable effect on anybody’s climate, we chose simply not to think about it.’ Later he points out, ‘The UK Climate Change Committee kept telling us that net zero was “achievable” and “affordable” – but the fact is that nobody knew how to run an advanced economy, or even keep the lights on, without fossil fuels. And the cost kept escalating, first £1 trillion, then £1.4 trillion, then £2.3 trillion, then £3 trillion and so terrifyingly on. Basically we were on a runaway train and the only way to stop it would have been to repeal, or at least suspend, the Climate Change Act. But that would have been political suicide. It was not just the Green and youth vote that would have gone – the wider electorate believed in the climate emergency. After all, we had been the ones to tell them that it existed.’
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/11/18/on-belief-in-the-tooth-fairy-the-battle-of-britains-climate-2021-2030/
