Chris Stark, the former head of Britain’s “quango” Climate Change Committee, just told the Telegraph that: “if you’re a person going about your day-to-day life in Britain right now, I don’t think your day-to-day life will be that different in 2050 when we hit net zero. …There’s not a huge shift here.” Meanwhile according to Euractiv “Researchers urge Europe to ‘embrace’ deindustrialisation”. So no big deal. People like us tried to warn that the Energy Transition would not turn out like the Jetsons but like the Flintstones even if politicians appeared to think they could restructure the global economy based on a ride through the Epcot Centre “Spaceship Earth”. And then when we were shown to be right, when instead of ushering in a gleaming, fragrant future they destroyed affordable energy and devastated the industrial economy, their next suggestion was that we should simply “embrace” the ruins. No thanks.

Stark’s full claim was:

“if you’re a person going about your day-to-day life in Britain right now, I don’t think your day-to-day life will be that different in 2050 when we hit net zero. You will still be driving your car, you’ll still be warming your house, you’ll have a job which is probably very similar in its nature to the one you have now. I wonder if the way into this is to say this is just the normal course of things, it’s not frightening, you can still fly off on holiday each year, and you can have a steak if you want to. There’s not a huge shift here.”

Which suggests that Stark, despite being up to his clavicles in this stuff, hasn’t read any of his own memos. Which doesn’t stop him now moving to a job as head of a lucrative consultancy called the Carbon Trust, created in 2001 with a £50 million public grant and “conceived as a business-led, publicly funded organisation operating at arms length from the UK government.”

Their latest Annual Report is shy about how much of their “commercial income” is from, er, various governments, it doesn’t list executive salaries and, incredibly, it appears to be a scanned non-searchable PDF. But in 2005 its boss created a scandal by pocketing a £50,000 bonus atop a £138,000 salary.

So yes, Stark’s life won’t change. He’ll still be driving a car, warming his house, having a high-flying job like the one he just left, flying off on holiday and eating steak when he feels like it. And having no idea what’s really going on in the British economy, including the ridiculous idea that you can get rid of the reliable energy that has powered it since the Industrial Revolution and not have people’s lives change for the worse.

All of which is bad enough. What’s worse is when it becomes obvious that Net Zero as a bagatelle, or a positive job-creating escalator to a brilliant future of fun, high-tech, high-paid jobs (for instance Canadian deputy PM/finance minister Chrystia Freeland’s recent hallucination “Canada is leading the charge towards a job-rich, net-zero economy — thanks to our trade agreements with every G7 nation, a skilled workforce, and our natural resources”) is fantasy, they don’t go sorry, we got it wrong, our bad, better change course. Instead someone like Euractiv says learn to like it, you proles, your betters have spoken.

Regular readers know that our hackles rise every time some left-wing journalist puts “experts say” or “scientists say” or some equivalent into a headline. And naturally the researchers who urge here turn out to be a left-wing climate outfit, specifically the “Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research” which, you’ll be astonished to hear, is lavishly funded by governments who by sheer coincidence are then told what they want to hear:

“PIK is a non-profit and a member of the Leibniz Association and is funded to a roughly equal extent by the Federal Republic of Germany and the Federal State of Brandenburg. In 2020, the institute received around 12.4 million euros in institutional funding. Additional project funding from external sources amounted to around 14.4 million euros, mostly from public sources such as European Union research programmes or the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).”

How unbiased and credible is this body? Why totally. It even manages to blame COVID-19 on climate change and totally exonerate the Wuhan Institute of Virology, saying (in #100 in its “Numbers” series in case the page has changed since we visited):

“Over the past century, global greenhouse gas emissions have led to a sharp increase in the number of bat species in the southern Chinese Yunnan province. Bats in this area have been suggested as the original carriers of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Scientists from Cambridge, Potsdam and Hawaii showed in a study that climate change caused shifts in the natural vegetation of the region, which allowed c. 40 bat species, carrying around 100 coronaviruses, to expand into newly suitable habitat. This process would have likely created new opportunities for viruses to be transmitted or evolve, potentially facilitating the eventual spillover to humans. In this way, climate change may have played an important role in the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2.”

Yeah, that or it was a lab leak from totally irresponsible biowarfare research by the Chinese Communists, partly funded by the US NIH which then covered up its complicity along with much of the political and scientific establishment in one of the great confidence-destroying scientific malpractice episodes of all time. Just saying. But we don’t get €14 million a year from governments to make that kind of comment. No indeed.

Nor are we subsidized to point out that Euractiv totally boots the economics:

“Faced with global competition from countries with cheap renewable energy, the EU should embrace a partial deindustrialisation rather than subsidise uncompetitive industries, according to a new report from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research published on Wednesday (24 April).”

Incredibly, or perhaps not given the standards of modern journalism, they do not link to the paper. But we ferreted it out and its press release says:

“Countries with limited potential for renewables could save up to 20 percent of costs for green steel and up to 40 percent for green chemicals from green hydrogen if they relocated their energy-intensive production and would import from countries where renewable energy is cheaper, finds a new study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).”

OK. But what countries have “limited potential for renewables” if, as we’re constantly told, they’re now cheaper and more reliable than fossil fuels? And what country can’t build safe, efficient, modern nuclear reactors? Not, we would have thought, the former economic giants of Western Europe.

Also, related, where are renewables cheaper and easier to install? Mali? Would you trust, say, an Algerian nuclear reactor? What does this gibberish even mean?

Well, according to the paper:

“Prominent candidates for RE-scarce importers are the European Union (EU), South Korea or Japan… Obvious candidates for RE-rich exporters include industrialized countries, such as Australia, the United States and Canada but also countries located in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, most of which are classified as low-income economies.”

OK, that’s clear and precise… not. Even once you realise RE is insider-speak for Renewable Energy. But here’s the thing in the news story that had us laugh so hard coffee nearly came out our nose:

“while EU politicians want to maintain existing domestic supply chains and nurse new green value ones in the face of international competition, researchers warn against creating industries that depend on subsidies to survive.”

Yeah. Like wind and solar? Heck no. Just all your manufacturing. Let China have it and Russia and hope they don’t develop dangerous geopolitical ambitions to go with their biological warfare research and generally irresponsible attitudes.

Do these researchers who urge really not know that it is government meddling in energy markets to push shiny trendy but hopelessly inefficient industries that is making everything else inefficient? That if we got rid of subsidies almost nobody would buy EVs or solar panels?

The bottom line: it’s all a bunch of state-funded propaganda for the fact that everything they told us was wrong and we should be happy anyway even if our economies are crumbling instead of flourishing.

No thanks.