The farmers’ net zero revolt has come to Britain

About time, says The Telegraph. Similar farming rules are expected to follow for England. Pursuit of impossible climate dogmas is running into the ever-pressing need to earn a living, with predictable results.
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There are demonstrations in Cardiff. Ministers are being pelted with food. And there are marchers with banners complaining that traditional livelihoods are under threat.

Welsh nationalists and the Labour establishment would probably prefer that it was the English, and the wicked Tories, who were facing a wave of popular protests.

But the action by farmers across Wales is directed at the devolved administration, and against its reckless imposition of fanatical net zero rules.

Britain to harness power of Sahara solar farms using world’s biggest cable-laying ship

‘The project has already been declared one of “national significance” by Claire Coutinho, the Energy Secretary, who has also set a team of civil servants to work on it’, says the story. A claim of ‘near-constant’ electricity supply from one of the project team sounds a tad optimistic. Sandstorms are not unheard of in the Sahara region, for example. [Click on image to enlarge]
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A project to power Britain using solar farms thousands of miles away in the Sahara is moving a step closer to fruition as its backers prepare to commission the world’s biggest cable-laying ship, says The Telegraph.

The 700ft vessel will lay four parallel cables linking solar and wind farms spread across the desert in Morocco with a substation in Alverdiscott, a tiny village near the coast of north Devon.

Once completed, the scheme is expected to deliver about 3.6 gigawatts of electricity to the UK’s national grid – equating to about 8pc of total power demand.

Government climate techno-fixes raise ‘grave doubts’ among UK’s civil servants

Net zero policies and plans of climate-obsessed politicians looking threadbare and unrealistic yet again, this time in court. They can never admit that their goals are unachievable at any price, even supposing their methods had some merit.
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British civil servants have grave doubts about their government’s favoured techno-fixes for climate-polluting industries like meat production and air travel, new documents show.

In risk assessments made public because of an ongoing court case, officials warned that technology to reduce methane emissions from cow burps is “nascent” and there might not be enough plants or hydrogen available to power the world’s planes more sustainably, says Climate Home News.

Yet despite the uncertainties surrounding these and other climate solutions like carbon dioxide removal, the UK government is relying on such technologies to meet a big chunk of its climate plans.

‘Our old way of life will be gone forever’: The tenant farmers targeted by solar developers

Just 0.1% of farmland is currently taken by solar panels – similar to the area claimed by Christmas trees (says Sky). But if solar developers get their way, backed by climate-obsessed politicians, tenant farmers could be facing a fate like the notorious Highland clearances when crofters were forcibly evicted from their smallholdings to make way for sheep farming. Goodbye to the bother of rent collection, hello bigger profits.
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It’s a frosty morning on Kidsley Farm in Derbyshire, a rare thing in this unusually warm winter, says Sky News.

Andrew Dakin’s beef herd is housed in the old brick barns, their breath steaming in the chill air. Alongside scuttling chickens and tractors of varying vintages, this is the very image of a traditional farmyard.

But for how long? Andrew is a tenant farmer and his landlord, who owns the land, wants to turn his pasture into a solar farm.

Labour to ditch £28bn green prosperity plan – Sky News

Maybe the vast scale of anti-net zero protests around Europe has given them cold feet, plus the general lack of enthusiasm for such extravagant so-called climate policies among UK voters battling the fast-rising cost of living.
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Labour is ditching its policy of spending £28bn a year on its green investment plan, Sky News understands.

The policy will not be dropped altogether, but the party is ditching the financial target to spend £28bn a year on environmental schemes.

Labour will put this down to uncertain public finances and is also likely to say that this is the outcome of finalising ideas for their manifesto for the next general election, expected later this year.

Face It: The Energy Transition Ain’t Happening — Manhattan Contrarian

Wind power and EV sales stalling or in retreat, while coal, oil and gas advance. Things are not going according to the climate alarm script, despite assorted government interventions.
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If you are at all interested in matters of climate and energy, you have probably read hundreds of articles over the past few years about the inevitability of the coming energy transition, says the Manhattan Contrarian.

A piece of the claimed inevitability is that all good and decent people support this transition as a matter of moral urgency; but it’s not just that.

Nor is it just that government backs the transition with all its coercive powers, from subsidies to mandates to regulations. No, most importantly, the transition is said to have become inevitable due to unstoppable economic forces.

French farmers express net zero nausea as ‘siege of Paris’ begins

The tractors are out in force. Wrestling with onerous climate regulations, squeezed by supermarkets and pressured to give up land, many farmers have had more than enough, and not only in France.
Update: Farmergeddon! – (Daily Mail)
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Why the farmers don’t like the EU’s environmental policies – BBC News.

At the heart of the European Green Deal, which sets out how to make Europe climate-neutral by 2050, is a scheme called the Farm to Fork Strategy.

The approach aims to:

— Halve pesticide use by 2030
— Reduce fertiliser use
— Devote at least 10% of agricultural areas to non-agricultural uses (for example by turning it into fallow land, planting non-productive trees or creating ponds)
— Ensure 25% of the total EU agricultural land is used for organic farming
by 2030

These targets are seen by many farmers as unrealistic and expensive.

The Green Deal itself also includes legislation aimed at reducing emissions.

Agriculture accounts for around 11% of the EU’s total greenhouse gas emissions, so farmers will be very affected by efforts to reduce emissions.

Already in 2019, protests erupted in the Netherlands over proposals to dramatically reduce livestock farming in order to lower emissions.
. . .
‘Just impossible’ to be a farmer in France

There’s a line of tractors behind me which is blocking one of the main motorways into Paris, near Charles de Gaulle airport.

We were driving along with one man who is here with his son-in-law, who has been driving a tractor. His son-in-law has a horse stables not too far from here.

He says things are just impossible for farmers here in France, and that it’s very hard for them to compete with other countries in the European Union, which he says have lower standards.

On top of that, he was complaining about the low cost of food being sold and the challenge that the green agenda is posing for production.

Full report here.

Finance problem for Labour’s ‘green power by 2030’ pledge

Cost won’t be the only problem, as weather dependency increases with the percentage of renewables in the electricity generation system, alongside the reduction of thermal power plants. Ploughing on with ‘net zero’ type policies in the face of all the costs and risks seems to have broad appeal in UK political circles.
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Ed Balls has predicted that Sir Keir Starmer will ditch Labour’s flagship £28 billion green pledge, says The Telegraph.

The former Labour shadow chancellor said that the party will need to make a “big U-turn” on the figure to shut down the Tory attack line that Labour will be irresponsible with Britain’s finances.

Sir Keir initially pledged to borrow £28 billion annually to fund green projects from year one if the party were to win power, but has repeatedly watered down that commitment over recent months.

Net zero setback: UK decommissioned onshore gas field fails hydrogen storage safety check – ‘numerous barriers’

Eco house with hydrogen heating technology. [Image credit: emergingrisks.co.uk]

Sounds like game over for that site. Back to the drawing board for the climate obsessed UK government.
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A study exploring the potential of a decommissioned gas field in Scotland as a major hydrogen store has highlighted concerns over potential leaks and recommended that it shouldn’t be used, says the University of Aberdeen (via Phys.org).

Research led by Professor John Underhill at the University of Aberdeen and Malcolm Butler at the UK Onshore Geophysical Library (UKOGL) concluded that the Cousland gas field in Midlothian fails to meet the criteria for safe subsurface storage.

The site near Dalkeith in Midlothian, which was decommissioned in the 1960s, has been highlighted by other academic studies as a potential contender for large-scale hydrogen storage to help meet national net zero ambitions.

French ‘rubbing their hands’ as Britain forced to import £1.5bn of electricity

Another expensive and wasteful result of ‘net zero’ climate obsession in government, as the much vaunted renewables policy continues to prove fatally flawed, no matter how much is spent on it. One obvious problem with wind power is that the times of peak electricity demand and the times of optimal wind conditions rarely coincide. In other words, variable weather, not properly factored in by policymakers. Relying on averages won’t work either.
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Britain imported a record amount of electricity from Europe last year as solar and wind farms struggled to generate sufficient energy in the wake of coal and nuclear power plant closures, says The Telegraph.

The UK forked out £3.5bn on electricity from France, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands last year, accounting for 12pc of net supply, according to research from London Stock Exchange (LSEG) Power Research.

According to official data, France accounted for around £1.5bn of power sold to the UK in the year to November 2023 while Norway earned around £500m.

Mind the Gaps: How the UN Climate Plan Fails to Follow the Science

Image credit: livescience.com

That old nebulous concept is invoked again: ‘the science’. It aims to sound like infallible authority, but that’s not what real science is. Talk of “uncharted territory” reminds us that most of Earth’s climate history also falls into that category. Made-up temperature limits based on the use of global averaging have little meaning in reality, as some politicians appear to have noticed.
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Climate negotiators meeting in Dubai last month pledged to chart a course for stabilizing the climate system using good science, says Fred Pearce at Yale Environment360.

But many scientists say these promises are at best ill-defined and at worst a travesty of good science — vague and full of loopholes.

The U.N. climate conference in Dubai agreed on an action plan for two key objectives: to keep the world on track to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F), and to stay below this threshold by achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Negotiators pledged that both objectives would be pursued “in keeping with the science.”

But neither of the objectives have agreed definitions that would allow a judgment on whether they have been achieved.

Latest energy policy announcements show that the UK Government has gone Insane

By David Turver at his ‘Eigen Values’ substack blog

Introduction

Back in the summer, there were signs that the consensus around Net Zero policy was starting to crack. The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak then made his speech that watered down some Net Zero commitments and promised “a more pragmatic, proportionate, and realistic approach that eases the burdens on families.” However, in the run up to Christmas, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) made several announcements about various aspects of energy policy that can only add to consumer costs. These included various announcements about their hydrogen policy, a statement on carbon capture usage and storage (CCUS) and an update on the business models for greenhouse gas removal (GGR) and power from bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).

This article explains that unfortunately, the announcements mark the end of any serious fightback against the Net Zero insanity and demonstrate that the Government has no idea about economics, thermodynamics or energy and has gone completely insane.

Trillions being wasted on climate emergency – reader’s letter to local paper

Commonsense from a citizen objecting to the vast sums being frittered away on futile and unachievable dogma-driven objectives in the name of somehow ‘correcting’ the global climate.
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With reference to your article Sit For Climate Protests At Station, I would like to point out an alternative view.

So begins a reader’s letter in the Newark Advertiser.
. . .
The reader concludes:
By focusing on C02 we are spending trillions on inefficient renewables and EV vehicles rather than using the money for real environmental issues and adapting to changing climatic conditions.

Source: Reader’s letter [pdf].

Another ‘net zero’ tax: UK to implement carbon tariff on imports by 2027

The government’s war on a vital trace gas in the atmosphere ratchets up yet again, burdening everyone with more pointless bureaucracy and costs. That includes importers of renewables and electric vehicles.
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Britain said on Monday (18 December) it would implement a new import carbon pricing mechanism by 2027, with goods imported from countries with a lower or no carbon price having to pay a levy as part of decarbonisation efforts, reports Euractiv.

The government said the carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) would apply to carbon intensive products in the iron, steel, aluminium, fertiliser, hydrogen, ceramics, glass and cement sectors.

The charge applied will depend on the amount of carbon emitted in the production of the imported good, and the gap between the carbon price applied in the country of origin – if any – and the carbon price faced by UK producers.

‘Weak tea’: dismayed climate scientists push back against COP28 cheer

No ‘meaningful progress’. Needless to say, climate alarmists wanted more alarm than was delivered. One wailed: “With every vague verb, every empty promise in the final text, millions more people will enter the frontline of climate change and many will die.” Shouldn’t that already have happened according to previous COP, and other, forecasts of doom? If not, the next claim is that ‘the window is closing’. The melodrama limps on.
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A UN climate deal that approved a call to transition away from fossil fuels has been hailed as a major milestone and a cause for at least cautious optimism.

But many climate scientists said the joyful sentiments of world leaders did not accurately reflect the limited ambition of the agreement.

‘Weak tea at best’
Michael Mann, a climatologist and geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania, criticized the vagueness of the fossil fuel statement, which has no firm, accountable boundaries for how much countries should do by when.

“The agreement to ‘transition away from fossil fuels’ was weak tea at best,” he told AFP.

‘Hydrogen village’ plan in Redcar abandoned after local opposition

Eco house with hydrogen heating technology. [Image credit: emergingrisks.co.uk]

People power 1, ‘net zero’ 0. Government attempts to browbeat the public into accepting even a trial based on its flaky climate obsessions prove fruitless, on this occasion at least. As for the ‘insufficient local hydrogen production’ excuse: who would want to produce large amounts of hydrogen on spec and then hope to find a buyer nearby?
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A plan to test the use of hydrogen to heat homes in a village in the north-east of England has been abandoned after months of strong opposition from concerned residents, reports The Guardian.

The government said the Redcar “hydrogen village” scheme, which had been expected to start in 2025, would not go ahead because of insufficient local hydrogen production for the trial to replace the home gas supplies with the low-carbon alternative.

The decision ends months of protest against the scheme locals feared could raise energy bills and prove unsafe.

UK climate minister mocked for 6,313-mile round trip by plane for ‘crunch’ Rwanda vote

Airport scene
[image credit: Wikipedia]

From one so-called crisis to another. Net zero CO2 obsession takes a back seat to pressing political needs.
– – –
The UK’s minister for climate will make a 6,313-mile round trip to take part in the government’s crunch vote on Rwanda, Number 10 has confirmed.

Graham Stuart has been in Dubai for the COP28 summit, where leaders from around the world have been discussing the best ways to tackle the climate crisis, says Sky News.

But key talks have stalled over commitments to phase out fossil fuels, with negotiations carrying on through the night to try and find agreement between different nations.
. . .
NGOs (non-governmental organisations) at COP have accused the UK of going “AWOL” at a key time, claiming the British government had let millions of people down.

Confirming the decision to summon Mr Stuart, the prime minister’s official spokesman said: “Ministers have a number of roles, the negotiations continue and he will return to COP.”

The return flight is the equivalent of travelling from London to Edinburgh and back 10 times, and will emit around two tonnes of CO2, according to environmental charity Treedom.

Asked about the carbon emissions from the flights, the spokesman added: “This government is not anti-flying.” [Talkshop comment – especially if it’s illegal immigrants to Rwanda].

“We don’t lecture the public to that regard. The most important thing is the outcomes of COP, which minister Stuart is obviously leading for the UK on.”
. . .
The return of Mr Stuart was the subject of ridicule from shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper as the debate began on Mr Sunak’s bill.

She told MPs: “The climate minister called back from the Dubai COP before the vote?

“Well, I guess they can say at least one flight has taken off as a result of this legislation.”

Full article here.

The Oil Demand Outlook COP28 Leaders Would Hate

The 28th UN-sponsored attempt to reduce global ’emissions’, in line with its pet climate theories, stares its own failure in the face as emissions keep going up. The renewables industry is running fast to stand still in terms of making a global dent in oil usage, for example. Imposition of ‘net zero’ policies may impact some countries, but oil marches on as demand from the many aspiring – but less developed than the ‘net zero club’ – countries boosts business.
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->> The International Energy Agency said in its recent oil report that oil consumption is close to peaking, thanks to transition efforts and energy efficiency gains.
->> Goehring and Rozencwajg: In 12 of the past 14 years, the IEA has underestimated oil demand by an average annual of 820,000 barrels per day.
->> Goehring and Rozencwajg: “If the IEA’s error were a country, it would be the world’s 21st largest oil consumer”.

This week, a report from a climate organization warned that emissions from the combustion of hydrocarbons are set for a record this year, says OilPrice.com.

Vast village heat pump tests one route to net zero for rural Britain

At £12 million per village, what would the national cost of such devices be for all the other villages that might want one? If it ‘shows how the costs of the energy transition can be made more manageable’, we could ask: more manageable than what?
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In a quiet field in eastern England a vast heat pump generates enough warmth to supply houses throughout a historic village, a pilot project is testing ways to spur renewable energy use in a country that is falling behind its net zero targets, says Reuters.

Resembling a large agricultural site, with gleaming silver water vats, the heat pump produces water hot enough to feed existing domestic systems, removing the need for costly home retrofits. A 60-year funding scheme removed upfront costs.

Supporters say the network, the first of its kind in rural Britain, not only shows one way for the UK to catch up with Europe on heat pump adoption, but addresses how it can fund the wider net zero transition when household finances are tight.

Rishi’s Empty ‘Net Zero’ Rhetoric – NZW

Photosynthesis [image credit: Nefronus @ Wikipedia]

Net Zero Watch summarises: ‘Rishi Sunak’s recent speeches on Net Zero are long on rhetoric, but the decarbonisation juggernaut rumbles on uninterrupted.’ — Pursuing climate obsession at a slightly slower rate still doesn’t work. Carbon dioxide isn’t a pollutant.
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Over in the Spectator, Fraser Nelson is inviting us to welcome a change in Rishi Sunak’s tone on Net Zero, says Andrew Montford @ NZW.

His interest has been piqued by the PM’s speech at COP28, which he says shows that Sunak has “started the difficulty work of moving the UK climate agenda from fantasy to policy”.

There will be no more precautionary-principle daftness, we are told, and attention is drawn to the Prime Minister’s claim that from now on decarbonisation will be pursued “in a more pragmatic way, which doesn’t burden working people”.

Nelson is quite correct that the whole drive for Net Zero is a fantasy. It is the triumph of political posturing and bureaucratic trickery over rational decisionmaking.