Who would have thought 2019 could now seem a distant, former era? For it was then that the UK under Conservative prime minister Theresa May became the first major economy to commit to net zero on greenhouse emissions by 2050.
This huge, radical step is one of the mysteries of recent British history. Before the House of Commons vote, the May government set out no details of the costs or implications, simply referring to an advisory report which talked generally about the need to phase out internal combustion vehicles and gas boilers and the probability that energy bills would rise. But its overall vision was of a sunlit upland of a green industrial revolution creating vast new employment, with the bonus of Britain being able to hold its head high with its ‘global leadership role’ driving momentum for other countries to follow suit and save the planet.
Astonishingly, this vague, starry-eyed plan to up-end Britain generated hardly any controversy. With the entire political establishment seemingly in thrall to the likes of Greta Thunberg, not a single MP opposed May’s legislation. The ninety minutes of House of Commons debate consisted mainly of MPs competing over who was the most enthusiastic for the coming green revolution.
The subsequent prime ministership of Boris Johnson took things further, with the previous climate change sceptic (wind farms were ‘useless’ ‘bird blenders’) suddenly becoming a swivel-eyed zealot evangelising about Britain becoming ‘the Saudi Arabia of wind’. Among his many gestures to display his eco-virtue was radically bringing forward the UK’s phase-out of new petrol and diesel cars from 2040 to 2030 – so he could beat the EU’s 2035. He bears much of the responsibility for the current despoliation of Britain’s lovely rural landscape with increasingly enormous concrete wind turbines and thousands of acres of solar panels. He now admits he ‘got carried away’ with the mistaken idea that renewables could wholly replace fossil fuels.
The main achievements of Britain’s net zero effort have been the world’s highest energy costs for industry, lost jobs, the shunning of vast North Sea oil and gas reserves in favour of imports and unsuccessful efforts to enthuse consumers about electric cars and heat pumps. So Nigel Farage said ahead of the 2024 elections that Reform UK would scrap net zero. The Tories, after much hand-wringing, have now said they’ll follow suit, producing inevitable commentary that the arsonists are now offering building repair services.
The UK has moved from a net zero consensus just a few years ago to a majority opposing it, as measured by opinion poll support for Reform UK and the Tories. Labour’s ideological addiction to soft borders, green fanaticism and other wokery, inter alia, will all but ensure that, no later than 2029, the UK will be under new management and will follow President Trump into dumping net zero.
Meanwhile rebellion also stirs across the Channel against Brussels’ own 2050 net zero commitment for its 27 member-states. This follows two recent revolts against the EU’s eco-pieties. Firstly, it’s been forced into a humiliating backdown on its earlier anti-farming jihad after net zero-driven EU rules decreeing the closure of over 11,000 farms in the Netherlands sparked that government’s collapse and its replacement with a new one sharply to the right. Secondly, the previous green-left government in Germany, after protests from the country’s car industry and trade unions, pressured the EU into modifying its planned ban on new internal combustion vehicles from 2035 into permitting them as long as they used e-fuels (combined hydrogen and atmospheric carbon dioxide).
Before Germany’s elections earlier this year, Christian Democrat leader – now Chancellor – Friedrich Merz described the EU’s 2035 vehicles plan as still a threat to jobs and called for it to be scrapped. But because, to achieve a parliamentary majority, he went into government with the Green-friendly Social Democrats, Merz has been forced to take a less uncompromising position. Nevertheless, with Germany’s second-strongest party, the anti-net zero Alternative for Germany (AfD) breathing down his neck, Merz insists that EU rules be relaxed much more radically to allow continued sales of a wider range of low-carbon emission vehicles than just those designed to use e-fuels.
Merz’s Bavarian ally Manfred Weber, the head of the European People’s party – the centre-right party alliance which is the largest group in the European parliament – is leading Germany’s campaign to revise the EU’s 2035 vehicles plan, which will be reviewed this year. Despite likely resistance from EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen – who won office through deals with the green-left – there’s a high chance the current 2035 plan will be watered down or delayed.
Europe’s right is not only anti-immigration but invariably also anti-net zero. And popular concerns about immigration continue to drive Europe’s relentless shift to the right. A vivid example is that in just the last two weeks, Portugal announced it would become the sixth nation in Europe to ban the burqa and niqab in public, and Italy and Sweden foreshadowed the same step.
European elections with rare exceptions continue to favour conservatives. The Czech right won recent elections and one party likely to be part of the new government is the Motorists First party, whose name provides a clue as to how it views Eurocrat dreams of banning traditional cars. Upcoming Dutch elections will likely see Geert Wilders’ fiercely right-wing Party for Freedom win again. And in France, the chaos of endless collapsing governments could end with fresh elections and Marine Le Pen’s protégé Jordan Bardella possibly heading a National Rally-led government. The National Rally, like Germany’s AfD, takes a Trumpian view of environmental issues, calling the EU’s net zero-driven ‘Green Deal’ ‘climate terrorism’, which it would scrap.
The net zero cult in Britain and Europe isn’t going to collapse overnight, but the direction of travel is clear. And that has big implications for Australia. If Europe, for example, decides that electric vehicles are not the only way of the future, will Labor still persist with worshipping them? And what would it say about the wisdom of the Coalition’s current leadership if, on net zero, it follows the lead of British Labour and the US Democrats, not its traditional friends the Tories and Republicans?
@markhiggie1
You might disagree with half of it, but you’ll enjoy reading all of it.Try your first month for free, then just $2 a week for the remainder of your first year.
