Throughout my years of campaigning for lower fuel duty for drivers and to demonstrate that Net Zero is not merely a futile goal but also a reckless endeavour that undermines any chance of significant economic growth, Labour’s persistent legacy of short-sighted virtue-signalling, initiated by Tory Theresa May in 2019, remains unabated.
Regrettably, this undemocratic, unconsulted, evidence-starved, purely political target designed to make us all poorer continues to be driven by raw emotion, imposing upon us all the most intense guilt trip imaginable.
A guilt trip that affects the poorest the hardest, whilst the rich global elite will benefit the most, getting more prosperous and more powerful by the day.
It’s not helped when the mainstream media have also bought hook, line, and sinker into net zero. The BBC have a policy that dictates climate crisis deniers must never be interviewed. Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail said: ‘My opponent Matthew Wright asked veteran meteorologist John Kettley if the recent hot spell was down to climate change. NO, said Kettley, it’s called the British Summer weather.’ A small ray of sense in a sea of biased reporting.
And that’s the thing: even if the temperature is a comfortable and at a very welcome 25 degrees centigrade, the media now declare this is a heatwave and the Met Office issues multicoloured warnings.
I find it staggering that the target date for net zero 2050, which appears to have been hastily written on the back of a fag packet, was not based on proven scientific evidence.
Net zero is the internationally agreed-upon objective for mitigating global warming in the latter half of this century. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) concluded that the necessity for Net Zero CO2 by 2050 aligns with a 1.5 °C global warming target.
The obsession with the UK needing to reduce CO2 emissions is purely political, because given that the world’s total CO2 emissions since 2000 have risen by over 50 per cent, here in Blighty, CO2 emissions have fallen by 45 per cent. It makes no sense at all that Ed Miliband can’t see that we don’t have to follow the punitive net zero madness.
Britain is being sacrificed on the altar of an evidence-starved obsession. We need a referendum - Howard Cox
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We’ve done enough. His self-centred efforts should instead be pointed at the mega emitters he is pushing us to buy our energy from.
Even international shipping emits more than twice as much CO2 as the entire UK. Of course, those countries that don’t yield to the anti-CO2 zealots' scaremongering, their emissions are rocketing—China is up 262 per cent, India 197 per cent, and Vietnam 560 per cent.
There is no scientific evidence to suggest that any increase in CO2 is linked to global warming. Nuclear scientist Digby Macdonald stated that politicians need to reconsider carefully what they're doing by condemning CO2.
He also mentioned that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not the primary driver of global temperature changes. “That's the very reason why you put your beer in a refrigerator,” he said.
Nearly everything we have been told about climate change over the past 30 years has come from the well-financed academic world, which is mainly theoretical. But how often have their predictions materialised?
Let me remind everyone, no one voted for net zero either; it has been imposed on us by global state control, closely allied to far-left political dictatorship. And that’s why I believe there should be a full-blown referendum on net zero. This issue is too big, like Brexit, to be left to politicians.
However, there is hope from across the pond: the political hysteria that has compelled most of the world’s countries to adhere to the Paris Agreement like sheep has been disrupted by the new occupant in the White House.
A recent update from a group of academic and non-profit organisations that monitors global climate goals revealed that the impact of President Donald Trump’s decision, announced on 20 January, to revoke America’s net zero target and withdraw the country from the Paris Accord, caused the share of global GDP covered by net-zero commitments to subsequently fall from 93 percent to 78 percent.
The U.S. decision to abandon those goals has led certain countries to dilute their national commitments under the Paris Agreement, which is due to be updated ahead of November’s COP30 summit in Brazil. India, the world’s third-largest emitter, is reportedly unlikely to revise its targets.
Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, states that he is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement altogether, as is New Zealand’s governing coalition.
Everyone knows that China disregards net zero, paying mere lip service to CO2 reduction while constructing another dozen coal-fired power stations.
Fossil-fuelled electricity is used to build wind turbines and solar panels to sell to us. To achieve net zero, the UK government has pledged to provide so-called 'clean' electricity by 2030 by rapidly increasing wind and solar farms, ending the sale of new fully petrol or diesel cars by 2030, and installing 600,000 electric heat pumps each year by 2028.
In our latest public opinion poll regarding net zero and the Road User, nearly 90,000 people participated voluntarily and without compensation, which is hardly an insignificant representative sample.
When asked if net zero is achievable by 2050, three out of four (75.1 per cent) said no chance. Just 4.4 per cent believe it is attainable by or before 2050. Of those, the majority claimed that their primary mode of transport was cycling.
Fuel for thought? Most Western governments are compelling us to comply with the net zero constraints, yet we have yet to see objective evidence that they will enhance our lives. There has been no cost-benefit analysis. Typical of all governments.
When asked in the FairFuelUK survey, “How will Net Zero likely affect you?”, 83 per cent of respondents indicated higher energy costs, 78 per cent cited increased cost of living and decreased disposable income, while an astonishing 69 per cent believed their daily freedom would be adversely affected too.
Rachel Reeves has pledged £80billion to achieve net zero. To cover this substantial cost, there will be much higher taxes, green levies, and stricter bans on fossil fuels. Keir Starmer endorses the 2050 target date as essential for climate action, and it also serves his interests.
He is not backing down, despite considerable economic evidence suggesting that net zero could bankrupt the economy. Reports indicate that the costs of net zero may exceed sensible and achievable funding, with some estimates reaching £1.4trillion by 2050.
Had we been informed in 2019, during Theresa May's two-hour debate on Net Zero, of the actual costs, truths, and ramifications of this journey to achieving net zero, there is no doubt that UK PLC would not be on the brink of a prolonged period of economic decline.
We are sitting on 100 years of oil and gas, sources of cheap, reliable, and secure energy that will help the UK become the world's leading economic powerhouse.
We have already lowered our CO2 emissions faster than any other major economy. So why continue on a pathway to economic poverty?
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