Net Zero Cure Worse Than Climate Change Disease
My talk for Sacred Cows, slaying the Net Zero myths and Government approach to climate change.
David Turver
Feb 09, 2025
Last week, the Government gave its response to a petition calling for the repeal of the Climate Change Act and for Net Zero targets to be rolled back. The response could have been written by a Just Stop Oil activist and can be summarised as “the earth is warming, build more windmills.” I was going to draft an article rebutting their claims, but as luck would have it, the video of the talk I gave for Sacred Cows last month is now available and goes into more detail than I could in a single article. I would be grateful if you could share this article and video far and wide.
The slides accompanying the talk can be downloaded on the link below.
Sacred Cows: Net Zero Worse Than Climate Change
What if the Net Zero cure is worse than the Climate Change disease?
My argument can be summarised as follows.
Climate Change Exaggerated
Although people like Antonio Guterres have made the foolish claim we have entered the era of global boiling, we have to acknowledge that the world has warmed a bit since pre-industrial times. The alarmist response to this is Net Zero which is an example of a so-called mitigation strategy that calls for everyone to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide to save the planet.
Mitigation Can Never Work
The trouble with this approach is that it can only work if two conditions are met. First, mitigation can only work if CO2 is the only climate control knob. But we know this to be wrong, because the IPCC’s first report showed marked temperature fluctuations over thousand-, ten thousand- and million-year timescales when CO2 levels in the atmosphere were pretty constant. Second, mitigation can only work if everyone else follows the same strategy. But we know that global emissions of greenhouse gases are rising sharply even though ours have fallen into insignificance. Global consumption of coal, oil and gas are at record levels. Neither condition is met, so the UK’s Net Zero mitigation strategy can never work.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/net-zero-cure-worse-than-climate-change-disease
