At the behest of the green lobby, western governments are driving full throttle down to arrive at a utopia where state intervention has stopped the permanency of climate change. Net zero refers to reaching a point where all the emissions produced by a nation are negated by the amount that is removed from the atmosphere. This means diverting vast quantities of resources towards green energy, energy efficient appliances etc. It’s a goal shared by both major political parties in the United Kingdom, where only the particulars diverge. Billions of pounds of taxpayer money (and growing) has been allocated by the new Labour government. But who is benefitting?
Political actors like Ed Miliband, the British Business Secretary, love to wax lyrical about how solar and wind are objectively cheaper than fossil fuel energy sources. But how true is this? After all, we know that politicians have a propensity to mislead. Let us accept the claim that solar and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels. We also hear from the same ilk of political actors that companies—especially corporations—are greedy business people whose avarice knows no bounds. So why aren’t they switching to sources of energy that come from solar and wind? They should want to reduce their costs through any means necessary.
People who have bought into the green agenda possess an obvious contradiction. A company cannot, on the one hand, be slashing costs endlessly whilst also continuously using—sometimes lobbying against—solar and wind if they are objectively cheaper. We know that China, a nation focused on cheap energy, is not funneling its resources into solar and wind, so why are there so many studies that contradict the reality? These studies take specific cases where renewables are definitely cheaper and extrapolate that to every situation. Reliability, types of machines, quantity, and other factors have a huge part to play. But politicians have every incentive to not be nuanced.
The Labour government, surfing a wave of green energy support, is putting its foot on the peddle towards extra funding of green energy projects. Electricity prices are extremely uncompetitive in the United Kingdom, both domestically and industrially. The government spends £11 billion on renewable subsidies, £4.6 billion on carbon taxes through Emissions Trading Scheme, £2.5 billion on grid balancing costs, and £1 billion on capacity market costs that are making the U.K. an energy hell. An eye watering extra £112 billion of transmission network costs are in the pipeline to connect intermittent renewables to the grid that will only make things worse. These subsidies have completely warped the British energy market by making these sources a part of the grid when they aren’t yet cheap or reliable. They survive despite massive costs, burdened by taxpayers, due to the almost religious devotion to them shown by the government.
There is something more nefarious at work in the green agenda that dominates both political parties. To libertarians who realize how the state functions, it will comes as no shock that there appears to be cronyism involved. There exists something called Permitted Reduction contracts between energy generators and the de-facto government agency, the Low Carbon Contracts Company. Without going off on a tangent, the normal contract between an energy generator and the LCCC is a Contracts for Difference. However, a maximum of 25% of the original capacity of a project can be withdrawn from its original contract, the Contract for Difference, and rebid under the Permitted Reduction scheme. Hornsea Project Three Offshore Wind Farm was originally given a contract with an original capacity of 2,852MW. In the recent contract bonanza, they were awarded three separate contracts totalling 1,080MW. This figure represents 37.9% of the original capacity which would be in breach of the contract, so why has this company been allowed these permitted reduction contracts? Hornsea Project Three is owned by Ørsted and Hornsea Project Four, also owned by Orsted, and its non-executive director is Baroness Brown, a member of the British House of Lords.
She warned in May that the prices in the latest contract handouts “may not be appealing enough.” She also chairs the Carbon Trust, which used to be headed by Chris Stark, who is now the Head of Mission Control at DESNZ, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Baroness Brown has Chris Stark listed as a member of her staff in her register of interests too, so their relationship appears to be quite close. I am absolutely sure that it is a pure coincidence that the government has allowed Hornsea Project Three to break the terms of its own contract when a director of Orsted just happens to be close with the Head of Mission Control for DESNZ.
The state is using the guise of net zero to create winners and losers. The Iron Law of Oligarchy suggests that the state is always captured by a select group of people who are never representative of the population. Net zero is no different, no matter how compassionate its proponents act. The fact is that the playmakers in government are far more accessible for lobbying by those who can benefit than the average the person who pays no mind to politics but who, nonetheless, is affected. Lobbyists may not care because they genuinely believe they are serving the greater good. (Recall what Gladstone said to Disraeli during their many clashes in nineteenth century Britain: “You, sir, delude yourself.”) Or, more realistically, they have contempt for people who aren’t in their circle. If this can apply to the banking sector and the defense industry, there is absolutely no reason we should expect it not to apply to the green energy industry.
This is not a new phenomenon. The reigns of power have become so far reaching that the potential for benefit through exploitation just keeps reaching new highs. The exploiters ride waves of popular and trendy ideas to disguise their own desire for personal gain. There may be a conscious within them says it’s a nefarious thing to do, but they also have a devil on their shoulder (who they believe to be an angel) justifying their personal gain for the greater good. Maybe politicians who make personal gains from government support of the green agenda do believe they are saving countless communities from imminent collapse. But the effect is still pernicious.
Net zero is just another policy proposal that impoverishes millions whilst those who implement it either laugh because they have swindled the people or stick their fingers in their ears as society crumbles around them.
