OPINION:
While the United States discusses compensation for slavery, last week the U.K. Parliament agreed to Prime Minister Theresa May’s request to increase Great Britain’s reparations for bringing industrialized manufacturing into the world and all that nasty CO2 going into the atmosphere.
Britain is responsible for just one per cent of global emissions, so any reductions it makes alone are insignificant, but Mrs. May hopes this “leadership” will inspire other nations to follow suit.
One trillion pounds is the conservative estimate for the costs involved in reducing CO2 emissions to net zero by 2050, and that is bound to rise further. I wonder how many countries will want to follow that kind of example?
The U.K. was already legally committed to an 80 percent cut in greenhouse gasses by 2050, and Mrs. May has now increased it to 100 percent. Unlike Brexit, this passed through Parliament unopposed — so far so good in building a new legacy for her brief time in office.
But a major problem with having legally binding targets for anything within a relatively short timeframe is that huge sums of public money suddenly get thrown at off-the-wall thinking or, in the case of slashing emissions, on-the-wall cladding.
In 2010 the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) advised local authorities to reduce emissions by installing new boilers and insulation in social housing. Grenfell Tower was one of those.
A small fire in one of its apartments in June 2017 grew to consume most of the block and claimed 72 lives. The likely reason for the fire spreading so quickly is that its one-year-old wall cladding acted as an accelerant. A better choice of cladding could have had a very different outcome, but I wonder if it would have been cladded at all without the climate change law?
The Climate Change Act of 2008 also led to the commissioning of Hinkley Point C low-carbon nuclear power station. This was funded by Chinese investors and with costs now at 30bn and rising, Liberium Capital has described the deal as “economically insane as far as we can see this makes Hinkley Point the most expensive power station in the world.”
To put this in context, it required money from the nation that produces 28 percent of global CO2 emissions (the largest “offender”) to reduce the 1 percent of total that Britain creates. Before Mrs. May signed off on that deal in 2016, did she ask how much CO2 those Chinese companies generated to make the money that went into their investment?
Her government did make it harder for the U.K.’s much cheaper, nascent fracking industry to grow through punitive environmental restrictions. Production now gets stopped for 18 hours every time a tremor of just 0.5 on the Richter Scale is detected, which is miniscule. Such constraints led the commissioner for shale gas, Natascha Engel, to recently resign in protest.
With at least 13 more Hinkley Points now needed and huge energy price rises on the way, plus untold other miserable hardships for UK citizens, May’s new legacy will certainly be remembered.
Twenty years ago, I was commissioned by two of the big banks to make warning videos about the alleged dangers of the “Millennium Bug” — remember that?
One featured Tony Blair and all sorts of horrible things were predicted, including rusting Cold War Russian subs in Vladivostok harbor independently firing their nukes. That scary nonsense stopped when the clocks struck 12 and this century began Y2K bug free.
Looking back, it bares striking similarities to the climate change scare. Panic of imminent doom consumed intellectuals and then politicians, mainly in the West. This led to vast sums of mainly Western money, because “it was most to blame”, being spent to save the world. As to failed predictions, wasn’t New York City supposed to be underwater by 2015?
Mr. Blair moved on to the “dodgy dossier” which tried to prove Saddam Hussein’s WMDs were really real, and then the “Grim Reaper” of climate change. Now he is fixated by the dangers of Brexit. He worries a lot.
And what of the children who are now pushed out of their schools onto the climate front-line? David Reed, the director of Generation Change, feels that “activism is more important than grades. Any responsible teacher should be encouraging their pupils to walk out.” Some do.
Parents in the U.K. can be jailed if their kids play truant. The Department for Children, Schools and Families states, “We make no apology for using tough measures to protect children’s right to education.” So why are teachers allowed to encourage climate absenteeism?
To avoid these extreme cures for alleged anthropogenic global warming killing the patient, leaders are needed who have enough chutzpah to tell their expert advisors, “No, the collateral damage will be too high” Some might even add, “and the science sucks.” Now, wait a minute. America already has one of those.
• Andrew Davies is a U.K.-based video producer and scriptwriter.
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