That Britain has become a poster child for the stupidities of the current state of climate policy does not say much for its governing (if that’s the word) Conservative party. That all Britain’s other major parties would push the climate agenda in roughly the same direction does not change that fact, or the increasing possibility that the Tories, having squandered their great victory in 2019, are headed for defeat in 2024.
Writing for the Daily Telegraph, David Frost, a senior Conservative now sitting in the House of Lords, has a few things to say about where things are going:
The Government must realise that it faces a crisis. In the short run it must keep the lights on or pay a heavy price. It should then drop the mad dash for medieval wind power technology and focus on the only acceptably low-carbon form of power available – gas. Get shale gas extraction going, commit long-term to the North Sea, put in place proper storage – and build some new gas power stations. By all means commit to nuclear, too – but only gas solves the problems in a meaningful time frame.
Of course I don’t think this will happen. We will muddle along, and then, one day soon, when we realise we don’t have the energy our economy needs, whoever is in power then will resort to rationing.
Frost knows, but is, perhaps, too polite to mention, that it was power rationing that, more than anything else, destroyed the Tory government led by Ted Heath from 1970-74. In terms of personality or superficial political style, Boris Johnson could not be more different than Heath even if, at a deeper level, there are some interesting similarities. Nevertheless, there will be a certain irony if the prime ministers who, respectively, took Britain into and out of the EU (or in Heath’s case, what became the EU) are destroyed by energy rationing.
Read on, however, to find this:
I fear a different world view is now deeply embedded across politics. It’s one that sees industrial civilisation as damaging to the planet and low energy use as desirable. It’s one that thinks some form of original sin was committed in this country by James Watt and Richard Arkwright, for which we must now expiate – a view shared by the Prime Minister, to judge by his comments in Glasgow at Cop26.
There is no rational reason that climate policy had to go in the direction that it has, but one key reason has been the persistent power of a pre-modern millenarian fantasy that has, in one form or another (Marxism is one variant), existed for a very long time.
And such millenarian fantasies are often (although not in the case of some of Marx’s immediate heirs, a good number of whom shared a Promethean vision of a world reshaped by technology) accompanied by an urge to abandon technological advance. That’s one reason why so many of the solutions that would, as presented, solve the problems caused by a supposed climate “crisis” are rejected.
Lord Frost, however, is having none of it.
Modern civilisation needs energy, and lots of it. Abundant energy powered the Industrial Revolution and everything that came with it – proper housing, enough food, scientific and medical advances, economic growth that frees up time to do things you like doing as well as working.
I don’t like poverty, I don’t like artificial limits on human aspiration and potential, and when you don’t have enough energy you get a lot of both. That’s why we need to change tack now. We need an energy policy that delivers power, at acceptable cost, whenever we need it – because an advanced economy without that will not stay advanced for long.
Indeed.