2 April 2024

From the director

Dear Samizdat Subscribers and Net Zero Watch supporters

The big news of the last few days is the Reform Party’s call for a Net Zero referendum.

I’m always in two minds on this idea. The climate scaremongering has been so thorough and all-pervasive for the last three decades that it’s not obvious to me that we would win it a the moment.

That said, you can hardly fault the Reform Party for putting the Net Zero issue at the front of their campaigning. It’s clear that the tide is turning, and there will be a big first-mover advantage here. Tice et al. can now sit back and watch the discomfiture of the established parties as they try to work out how to get themselves out of the positions into which they have entrenched themselves.

And who knows, if a referendum did ever come to pass, the additional scrutiny, and the rules and regulations about fair coverage to both sides would mean the green tendency would be subject to a level of scrutiny that they have never experienced in the past. It could be very interesting.

Andrew

As always, please don’t reply to this email, which comes from an unmonitored mail box.

Reform Party pledges net zero referendum in fresh challenge to Sunak
The Daily Telegraph, 2 April 2024

EU rebuffs solar pleas as sector goes broke, document shows
Politico, 28 March 2024

Met Office uses junk temperature measurements to fill “world treasure” 350-year temperature record
Chris Morrison, The Daily Sceptic, 2 April 2024

I sold my electric car and went back to a diesel – I’d had enough
iNews, 30 March 2024

Editorial: A net zero threat we can no longer ignore
The Sunday Telegraph, 1 April 2024

Ross Clark: Net zero now threatens our national security
The Daily Telegraph, 1 April 2024

Ben Pile: The green energy mess that nobody will admit to
The Daily Sceptic, 31 March 2024

How Europe’s energy crisis boosted fracking prospects in the Middle East
Energy Monitor, 2 April 2024

The detail

Reform Party pledges net zero referendum in fresh challenge to Sunak

The Daily Telegraph, 2 April 2024

Promise is latest move by party to outflank Conservatives on the Right and attract disaffected Tory voters

Reform UK has pledged to hold a referendum on net zero in a fresh challenge to Rishi Sunak.

Richard Tice, the Reform leader, said his insurgent party would support a Brexit-style poll on the 2050 climate target, which he has argued is damaging the economy and voters’ lives.

Mr Sunak ruled out a referendum last summer after facing pressure from Tory MPs, including senior figures in Red Wall seats, to “rethink the headlong rush for net zero”.

In 2022, Mr Tice and Nigel Farage, the honorary president of Reform, were involved in Vote Power, Not Poverty, a short-lived campaign group calling for the public to have its say on green targets first enshrined in law by Theresa May.

Committing his party to the same pledge, Mr Tice told The Telegraph: “We have supported this for two years, but Sunak ruled it out a few months ago. We still support it.”

Lee Anderson, a former Tory deputy chairman who defected last month to become Reform’s first MP, said: “The general election is a referendum on net zero, migration, culture, education, taxation, our Armed Forces, pensioners and the NHS. Vote Reform and sort out the above.”

A Government source told the Telegraph: “Under the Conservatives, we are the first major economy to halve our emissions. We’ve done this in a pragmatic way, whilst growing our economy and shielding families from the unnecessary costs and extra taxes, which Labour want to impose.”

In August, Mr Sunak said there was “broad support” for a “common sense” path to net zero by 2050, despite the Government postponing a number of shorter-term green objectives, including a five-year delay to the ban on sales of new petrol and diesel cars.

YouGov polling from last summer showed that 71 per cent of voters supported the overall net zero target, suggesting Reform would face an uphill battle were a referendum to take place.

The survey found that 63 per cent of Conservative voters backed the target, compared to 29 per cent who opposed, falling to 61 per cent to 28 per cent among those who voted for Brexit.

The existing net zero goal was backed by Boris Johnson at the 2019 election, and the Tory manifesto included a pledge of “reaching net zero by 2050, with investment in clean energy solutions and green infrastructure to reduce carbon emissions and pollution”.

Mr Tice’s promise on Monday marked the latest move by Reform to outflank the Conservatives on the Right. Other policies include a “one in, one out” immigration plan, leaving the European Convention on Human Rights and sweeping cuts to taxes.

Reform is currently polling as high as 16 per cent, within a handful of percentage points of the Tories, as it bolsters its support among voters who backed Mr Johnson in 2019 but have become disillusioned.

Hostilities between Reform and the Tories have escalated in recent days, with Mr Tice telling a Tory MP who was critical of his candidates to “pipe down”, leading Richard Holden, the Conservative chairman, to accuse him of being a “threatening bully”.

It came as a poll by the Legatum Institute found more than two in five voters currently planning to vote for Reform were more likely to opt for the Conservatives if they promised a national referendum on immigration.

Full story

EU rebuffs solar pleas as sector goes broke, document shows

Politico, 28 March 2024

BRUSSELS — Goodbye and goodnight. That’s the European Union's veiled message to its dying solar manufacturers in a draft declaration seen by POLITICO.

Chinese mass manufacturing has brought Europe's solar makers to their knees and had prompted them to turn to Brussels for help. But while the European Commission, the EU's executive, is set to back increased EU funding for the solar sector and consider relaxing some state aid rules, it won't commit to the urgent support measures industry leaders want, according to the upcoming “European Solar Charter.”

The approach will inevitably disappoint manufacturers who have already begun laying off hundreds of workers, even as it tries to craft a long-term plan to revive the industry.

The EU's module producers — which assemble the final solar panel from parts made elsewhere — have warned for months that China’s dominance over manufacturing globally was causing a supply glut in the bloc that’s seen prices tumble and left them unable to compete.

Full story

Met Office uses junk temperature measurements to fill “world treasure” 350-year temperature record

Chris Morrison, The Daily Sceptic, 2 April 2024

In Climate: The Movie, William Happer, the former physics professor at Princeton, describes the Central England Temperature (CET) record as a “world treasure” since it provides continuous recordings from 1659 – over 350 years. It shows a rise just over 1°C from the depths of the Little Ice Age to the present day. These days, the CET is under the control of the politicised Met Office, keen to catastrophise weather and climate in the interest of promoting Net Zero. Recent revisions have retrospectively cooled the near past and boosted readings from the last 20 years. In addition, the Daily Sceptic can reveal that two of the three measuring stations currently used to add to this scientific treasure are taken from near-junk class 4 sites that come with official ‘uncertainties’ of up to 2°C.

Class 4 site Pershore College was added in 2006 and joined Stonyhurst, also class 4. The other site Rothamsted is a pristine class 1 site and is deemed to provide an accurate reading of the surrounding air temperature away from natural and artificial heat corruptions. Classification and ‘uncertainties’ by class are set by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Quite why the Met Office can’t find three class 1 sites in the whole central England area is a bit of a mystery, although a clue might be provided by the recent freedom of information request the Daily Sceptic made to the organisation. We discovered that nearly eight out of 10 Met Office measuring stations across the United Kingdom were sited in near-junk class 4 and junk class 5. The latter class comes with WMO prescribed ‘uncertainties’ up to 5°C. Class 1 sites number just 24 and make up only 6.3% of the total.

At the very least, given the scientific importance of the CET, the Met Office could at least move the stations to more suitable nearby locations away from the disqualifying heat corruptions.

But if adding near-junk figures to the collection is not bad enough, the investigative science writer Paul Homewood last year discovered considerable tampering in 2022 with the recent CET record. He initially found that in version one, the summer of 1995 had been 0.1°C warmer than 2018. In version 2, the two years swapped places with 1995 cooled by 0.07°C and 2018 warmed by 0.13°C. Alerted to these changes, Homewood then analysed the full record from version 1 to 2, and the graph below shows what he found.

As can be seen, the adjustments up to 1970 are small with ups and downs offsetting each other. Homewood then found that the years from 1970 to 2003 had been cooled markedly, followed by significant rises to 2022. Homewood concludes that “unfortunately it is part of a much wider tampering with temperature globally – and the tampering is always one way, cooling the past and heating the present”. Given that we now know that the Met Office has been using class 4 statistics for two thirds of its database since 2006, the recent higher adjustments would seem to call for clarifying explanations from the state-funded Met Office.

But explanations from the Met Office are thin on the ground. It continues to promote a 60 second spike to 40.3°C at RAF Coningsby at 3.12pm on July 19 in 2022 as a U.K. temperature record, despite the known presence of three typhoon jets attempting to land around the same time. The record has become a national joke, even more so after the Daily Sceptic revealed that Coningsby is a class 3 site with an ‘uncertainty’ of 1°C. All that can be said is that at least Coningsby replaced the previous class 5 record set at Cambridge Botanic Gardens in 2019.

Last month, the Daily Sceptic analysed all the heat records declared by the Met Office since 2000 and found that all bar two should be disqualified. Many of them had been set in junk class 5 and most of the rest were in class 4. Using its highly compromised data with massive ‘uncertainties’ rife throughout the database, the Met Office publicises precision down to one hundredth of a degree, declaring, for instance, that last year was only 0.06°C cooler than the ‘record’ year of 2022. Paul Homewood suggests that if the Met Office wants to continue using its existing station measurements, it should show a warning that the margin of error is so great, “that they have no statistical significance at all”.

Full post

I sold my electric car and went back to a diesel – I’d had enough

iNews, 30 March 2024

Drivers are finding there are plenty of reasons for stalling on electric cars, from broken chargers and rising insurance costs to battery degradation and reduced range in cold weather

The maiden voyage of Guy Stenhouse’s new Jaguar I-Pace in 2019 did not go well. His 145-mile route from Glasgow to Sedbergh in Cumbria was lined with charging points – but most would not charge his car, meaning a trip that should have taken about 2 hours 45 mins took seven hours.

“I stopped at every charging station I could, hooked the car up to the charger only to find it wouldn’t work,” he says.” It meant I was only able to use slow chargers and I could only get about 13 miles of charge each time. I got home at midnight.”

Many electric vehicle (EV) drivers will have heard versions of this story, or even had a similar misfortune themselves – as I did when charging problems elongated a drive between London and Cornwall in an electric car last year. It seems, five years ago, that perhaps Stenhouse was too far ahead of his time, and suffered at the hands of an under-developed charging network that is still evolving.

Stenhouse has since switched to a diesel car. That might sound surprising given that he was an early adopter of a fully electric car, as well as solar panels and a small wind turbine (he even had a hybrid car back in 2016). But he’s not alone in turning his back on EVs. According to the UK-wide independent car supermarket Motorpoint, 56 per cent of EV drivers part-exchanged for an alternative fuel type in 2023, with petrol dominating the choice at 30 per cent.

Mark Carpenter, chief executive of Motorpoint Group, says: “It’s clear that some have found an electric vehicle isn’t right for them. There doesn’t seem to be one reason. Instead, it tends to be a range of factors, for example, moving to a property without a home charger, a new job with a longer commute, or the high price of public chargers.”

There have been other warning signs across the industry, too. In February it was reported that Apple had scrapped its plans to move into the EV market. Tesla’s sales and shares are also dropping, as is the value of second-hand EVs compared with their internal combustion engine (ICE) counterparts. There have also been alarming news reports of incidents when EV brakes failed to work.

Harry Metcalfe, a motoring journalist and co-founder of the car magazine Evo, has also made the swap. After two years leasing an EV and two-and-a-half years with a hybrid electric as the main family car, he’s swapped to a diesel Range Rover Sport (though as a car fanatic, he does have an extensive collection of other cars too). On his popular YouTube channel, Harry’s Garage, he gets into the details of why, and explains he’s “not someone who doesn’t like electric cars”, and he’s another early adopter of green energy, using solar panels and heat pumps. He says that at the moment an EV isn’t suitable for their big drives or for towing a trailer.

He also cites the rising cost of EV insurance, along with depreciation: the value of second-hand EVs has dropped 23 per cent in the past year, according to research from the online marketplace Auto Trader. One reason for this is the Government’s Zero Emission Vehicles mandate, which requires that 28 per cent of all new vehicle sales must be EVs by 2025, increasing incrementally to 100 per cent by 2035. It means manufacturers are pushing new EVs on to the market faster than demand is rising, and that buyers of those can benefit from tax breaks that don’t apply to used cars.

Full story

Editorial: A net zero threat we can no longer ignore

The Sunday Telegraph, 1 April 2024

Would our attitude towards Beijing’s aggression be inhibited in the future were we reliant on them to power our “green” economy?

Critics of net zero have long worried that the project will have consequences beyond the financial. That while decarbonisation might be a worthy ambition, moving too quickly towards a zero-emissions future would undermine our security and supply.

In a Sunday Telegraph interview today the Energy Security Secretary has drawn attention to the nature of this threat, warning that Labour’s plan to bring forward decarbonisation of the power network to 2030 will leave Britain at China’s mercy. It would be complacent, however, to believe that this is not already a serious risk under the current framework.

China has funnelled vast sums into manufacturing the cheap electric vehicles which politicians consider central to lowering emissions from road transport. It is already the world’s largest producer of copper – a vital substance not just in EVs but the wires that carry electricity and solar panels.

Despite its dominance in green technologies, however, Beijing remains the world’s largest polluter. While the UK is responsible for less than 1 per cent of emissions, China is belching out more carbon than the US and EU combined. Voters would be forgiven for questioning the logic of meeting net zero targets by compromising our self-sufficiency in order to consolidate Beijing’s supremacy.

It is feared that these products may also contain a digital Trojan horse. A single compromised device somewhere in the wider network could be used for cyber attacks. Moreover, the risks of relying on an autocracy for energy were laid bare in 2022, when our security was threatened by Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. One study indicated it had cost UK energy suppliers an additional £1,000 per adult while the Government also spent £23 billion subsidising bills. Would our attitude towards Beijing’s aggression, for instance in the South China Sea, be inhibited in the future were we heavily reliant on them to power our “green” economy? How might it shape our response to China’s growing “soft power”, or instances of state-sponsored cyber espionage such as those uncovered this week? Even setting aside geopolitics it would be unwise for Britain to become dependent on a monopoly supplier, particularly one which is being subsidised in order to gain market dominance. What will happen, sooner or later, is that prices will go up.

Evidence continues to mount that British politicians have rushed into an immensely significant policy agenda with little detailed idea of its practical implications. Whilst Rishi Sunak has, during his premiership, taken welcome steps towards loosening some restrictive energy targets by, for instance, delaying the 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars, Labour politicians appear too willing to meet the scale of the decarbonisation challenge by plucking yet more deadlines from thin air with scant prospect of success. Politicians of all stripes will need to be much more honest about the ramifications of their policies – not least the gift they may hand to Xi Jinping’s China.

Ross Clark: Net zero now threatens our national security

The Daily Telegraph, 1 April 2024

The Energy Secretary has warned Labour is moving too quickly. But Tory plans are hardly much better

Energy Security Secretary Claire Coutinho is quite right: Labour’s promise to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 is “dangerous”. It threatens to plunge UK households and businesses into the dark while boosting the Chinese companies on which we will be mainly reliant for supplying all the cables, batteries and other kit we will need to get anywhere close to achieving the target.

But why does she think it will be much different to the Government’s own policy of decarbonising the grid by 2035? Coutinho seems to be asserting that between the years 2030 and 2035 will magically spring up a UK-based steel, copper and battery industry which will somehow undercut the Chinese. Dream on.

The Chinese have already built an insurmountable competitive advantage in building batteries. They have bought up a lot of the mines in Africa and elsewhere which supply the rare metals required to manufacture them. They, along with India, have expanded their steel industries where we have run ours down. Where’s all that steel going to come from, now that the Tory Government has handed the owners of Port Talbot a bung to close down both their blast furnaces and build in their place – eventually – an electric arc furnace which will only be able to do half the job of making the metal?

As for the assertion that the Government’s policy of decarbonising the grid by 2035 will, unlike Labour’s policy, keep the lights on, I wouldn’t count on it if I were you. True, it gives us an extra five years to build the hydrogen plants or other forms of mass electricity storage which would be necessary to support a grid which is fed mainly by intermittent wind and solar.

But given that hydrogen electrolysis plants don’t yet exist at commercial scale, and that battery storage is still horrendously expensive, it doesn’t bode well for the cliff edge the Government has created for itself in 2035. The same is true of the carbon capture and storage plants which the Government has touted as an alternative means of decarbonising the grid – the plan being to fit it to gas power stations. That technology doesn’t yet exist at scale in Britain, either. As with energy storage, it promises to add huge costs and lower efficiency even if it can be rushed through by 2035.

Maybe our Energy Security Secretary has calculated that the Government’s plans don’t really matter because the Conservatives are highly unlikely to win the election anyway. Decarbonising the grid will become Labour’s millstone, so why shouldn’t the Tories spin the conceit that their slightly more relaxed decarbonisation policy would have succeeded where Labour’s is destined to fail?

I’ll tell you why not: because voters are not stupid, and they can work out that what is totally unachievable by 2030 is not much more achievable by 2035. They can see that all these net zero targets are going to push up bills and threaten Britain’s energy security. If the Government wants cleaner energy it should invest in promising technologies, not ban our existing energy infrastructure. Labour and the Conservatives are both doomed if they think they can magic an entirely decarbonised grid into existence over the next few years without imposing huge cost penalties on homes and businesses.

Ben Pile: The green energy mess that nobody will admit to

The Daily Sceptic, 31 March 2024

Reports in newspapers this week revealed that Britain’s domestic production of energy has reached a new record low. The news comes from trade group, Offshore Energies U.K. (OEUK), whose analysis, far from unexpected, details the pressures on investment in conventional energy production, such as the windfall tax on oil and gas companies. Since the turn of the century, U.K. production of energy has fallen by two thirds, whereas consumption has fallen by a third. The difference has been met by an increased dependence on imports. Yet neither the report itself, which is at best agnostic about renewables, nor the stories that cover it, seem to have taken seriously the harm that Net Zero and adjacent agendas have done to our industries, businesses and economy – and are set to do worse.

The U.K. ceased being a net energy exporter in 2004, amid a flurry of green policymaking, culminating in the Climate Change Act 2008, and its increased ‘Net Zero’ target adopted in 2019. Over the duration, coal-fired power stations were demolished, but not replaced with equivalent (i.e. reliable) generating capacity, shale gas exploration was abolished before it had even started. Energy investors in the U.K. and across the continent, lured to attractive guaranteed profits by subsidy regimes, and dissuaded from conventional energy by rising costs of capital, lost interest in oil and gas. Despite promises of ‘green jobs’, a ‘green industrial revolution’ and ‘green economic growth’ and lower prices being the constant chorus of energy ministers of all governments and their so-called ‘opposition’ counterparts, domestic energy prices tripled. So if these new data on Britain’s energy production do not prove the expensive and dangerous folly of more than two decades of U.K. climate policy, what could?

It is as if the entire political establishment had at once decided to forget that there exists a relationship between scarcity and price. Yet, the effect of abolishing coal is just that: it creates scarcity. So too, do policies that either restrict the exploration of oil and gas, or increase the cost of capital, create scarcity. Politicians, lobbied by green billionaires’ ersatz ‘civil society’ organisations who pump false claims into the public sphere, then claim that the problem all along was ‘dependence’ on oil and gas. Green energy will lower prices and diminish the power of dictators, who turn energy into a ‘weapon’ that terrorises Europe, they claim. So successful are they in their policymaking that, since 2019, the Government has capped energy prices – a policy they stole from Ed Miliband in 2017, before taking us into Net Zero. If ‘green’ means anything at all, it means acute cognitive dissonance.

At stake, argues the OEUK report, is immense value that could be unleashed from the North Sea. But investment is being held back by policies, “having big impacts on the profitability of U.K. offshore energy”’ worth one trillion pounds of exports and £450 billion domestically “within the next 15 years”. However, though the bulk of that potential lies in oil and gas, the report includes in its analysis, wind power, CCS and hydrogen. Even oil and gas executives, it seems, have swallowed the green Kool-Aid. And that is a missed opportunity to reflect on the failures of the green agenda, as well as a disappointing failure of an industry to properly stick up for itself, and to defend industry in principle.

And it needs defending. The fig leaf that has concealed Britain’s shameful industrial decline, and blinding politicians to reality in recent years has been the notion that green policies have successfully caused GDP growth to ‘decouple’ from fossil fuel use. However, this conceit requires us to believe, in turn, that the 79% increase in GDP that coincided with the halving of emissions over the same period was not driven by funny money, tricksy policies and analytical sleights of hand, and that the deindustrialisation underpinning it has left us better off. Does anybody, other than green energy hustlers, actually feel better off? Who? How?! What better position can we claim to be in, now that we know that we produce less and import more at a higher price? How much of that ‘growth’ is just higher prices?

Full post

How Europe’s energy crisis boosted fracking prospects in the Middle East

Energy Monitor, 2 April 2024

A new era of fracking has emerged in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Across the region, countries are looking to boost production from shale or tight gas formations to supply energy products to Europe.

This investigation looks at how European energy policy is driving governments in North Africa to frack for gas. Meanwhile, experts and front line communities are warning that fragile water supplies in the desert are being threatened by the water-intensive fracking process.

Fracking involves drilling wells thousands of feet below the surface, then drilling directionally horizontally for up to two miles, before pumping a mixture of water, sand and chemicals (which are typically carcinogenic) into the formation. Countries including France, Germany and Scotland have banned fracking because of its environmental impacts, which include risks to the water supply, health risks related to the chemicals used, and potential seismic activity related to the intensity and depth of drilling.

Renewed interest in fracking for gas in the MENA region is being driven by two key factors: the accelerating energy transition and the need for new cleaner forms of energy, and Europe’s need to divers its gas supply following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

With respect to the first reason, gas offers oil exporters in the MENA region the prospect of continuing to generate export revenue by producing a fuel that is less carbon-intensive than coal or oil, and still considered a ‘transition fuel’, before lower-carbon energy options are adopted in some policy circles.

It also offers the prospect of producing ‘blue’ hydrogen fuel: hydrogen gas produced by steam methane reforming, where waste carbon dioxide is captured by carbon capture and storage. This gas produces only water vapour when burnt, and has many real-world applications including in the production of steel and cement, as well as in the transport sector.

The opportunity presented by Europe’s energy crisis

Meanwhile, the past two years have seen European policymakers develop policies to dramatically alter where countries get their gas from, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Norway and the US have supplanted Russia as the EU’s largest gas suppliers: Norway supplied 30% of its gas in 2023, while imports of US liquefied natural gas (LNG) tripled in 2023 compared with 2021, with the US now meeting 50% of EU LNG demand.

These shifting dynamics present an opportunity for the MENA region too, particularly via the Medgaz pipeline, which runs from Algeria to Spain, and the TransMed pipeline, which runs from Algeria to Italy via Tunisia. Last year saw a significant rise in natural gas production in Algeria, from 132.7 billion cubic metres (bcm) in 2022 to 136bcm in 2023. Miloud Medjelled, the director-general of prospection at the Algerian Ministry of Energy, has forecast an annual increase of 1.4% in natural gas production until 2028.

Full post

Support us

If every reader of this newsletter sent us just £10 per month, it would transform our ability to campaign for the changes to energy policy the country so desperately needs. Please think about it!

Subscribe here.