The Dangers of Net Zero

Against the Thatcherite policy of the Conservative Party that has now been in government pretty much forever, Phil Beavin, a once and future candidate for the Workers Party, writes:

Policies introduced to tackle the threat of climate change as part of the Net Zero agenda are once again in the spotlight following Keir Starmer and Labour’s failure to unseat the Tories in Uxbridge and Ruislip in the by-election which took place on Thursday last week. Starmer blamed the election loss on Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan’s plan to extend London’s Ultra-Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) to the constituency.

The contentiousness of the ULEZ issue was also picked up by the victorious Conservative candidate Steve Tuckwell, who, like Labour, framed the by-election result as to some extent a referendum on the issue and a way of putting “pressure” on Sadiq Khan to change policy.

As the Uxbridge and South Ruislip election demonstrates, climate policy is an electoral issue. The backdrop to the introduction of contentious policies, such as Ultra Low Emissions Zones, is high profile lobbying by climate activist groups like Just Stop Oil, which press for ever more immediate and decisive actions to tackle what they consider to be the existential threat of climate change. In typically moralistic terms, Just Stop Oil has likened the consequences of climate change resulting from continued fossil fuel use to a “genocide”, citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), they argue:

“Licensing new fossil fuels is signing a death warrant for millions, for young people, for whole populations in small island states and for the poor in the global south. It is genocidal. What else can you call planning for the destruction of countless millions of people? As the scale of this betrayal becomes clearer, you and your government will be held to account for the crime of genocide.”

As groups like Just Stop Oil push for Net Zero and beyond, conservative voices like Nigel Farage argue that “under Net Zero the elderly will die colder, poorer and sooner”. Farage has also likened to Net Zero advocates or “zealots” are the same elitists who sneered at Brexit and don’t have to worry about paying their gas bills.

The culture war is well under way, and, if the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election is representative of electoral trends, the “left” has placed itself, or perhaps has been placed, on the losing side of the argument. Climate activists often accuse conservative voices of “climate denial” but what if Farage and his fellow travellers have a point, and it is the “left” that is wrong?

My own point of view

I was once persuaded by the rhetoric of the “Climate Crisis”. When I first encountered Extinction Rebellion, I was supportive. Like many people, my opinion of Extinction Rebellion soured in 2019 when they glued themselves to Jeremy Corbyn’s fence, unforgivably drawing attention to the location of his home after there had previously been an attempt on his life.

Following this, came their disruption of London’s public transport infrastructure, an action that made little sense as an increased role for public transport is essential if emissions are to be reduced. Just as importantly, in preventing ordinary people from getting to work, home or hospital, these actions, like the slow-walking road protests currently being undertaken by Just Stop Oil seemed almost designed to alienate the very people whose support they needed to succeed – an initial sign that the groups was out of touch with the lives of ordinary people.

Then came my own disillusionment with the left more generally, which led me into further investigations and the discovery that Extinction Rebellion is funded by a close partner of the British Government, while seed funding for Just Stop Oil came from the Climate Emergency Fund (CEF), whose co-founder was a member of the CIA-linked and US military industrial complex aligned think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations.

Further to this, I came to understand that climate change became a concern for the West only after the 1973 oil embargo imposed by OPEC countries; ever since, as Trilateral Commission documents show, the West has been seeking to diversify its energy supply to help it gain leverage over oil producers and ensure that oil prices remain low.

These discoveries necessitate questioning the premise of the Net Zero argument, as they suggest a that an ulterior, imperialist agenda may be in play. However, I am not a scientist – my specialism is rhetoric and narrative theory. Therefore, my instinct is not to question the science itself but to consider whether statements by climate activist groups represent the findings of authoritative bodies, such as the IPCC in particular.

Here, it’s important to note that academics, scientists and even narrative theorists like myself are very careful, very specific, with our use of language; we do not say what we do not mean and vice versa. Moreover, in public reports of this kind, the devil is always in the detail, not the summaries or – heaven forbid – press releases.

What IPCC reports actually say

As mentioned above, groups like Just Stop Oil cite the IPCC’s reports to justify some fairly hard line rhetoric, outright stating that the renewal of north sea oil licences is tantamount to a genocide. But is this actually justified? In a word, no.

Take for example, Just Stop Oil’s claim that “the International Panel on Climate Change has said keeping temperature rises below 1.5C, rather than 2C, would mean 10 million fewer people would lose their homes to rising sea levels.”

I have been unable to find this specific claim from the IPCC itself, and Just Stop Oil’s reference is to a BBC’s interpretation of the IPCC’s findings – a secondary source. Whatever its origin, it is an inadequate characterisation of what the IPCC has said in its Special Report 2018: Summary for Policy Makers, which is this: “A reduction of 0.1 m in global sea level rise implies that up to 10 million fewer people would be exposed to related risks, based on population in the year 2010 and assuming no adaptation (medium confidence).”

To unpack this into plainer English, it means that there’s a medium confidence (5 in 10) likelihood that 10 million people will be exposed to problems related to sea level rises caused by Climate change, if no mitigation measures are put in place. It does not say that 10 million people WILL lose their homes should global temperature exceed 1.5C.

The IPCC also explains that a measure of sea level rise is most likely inevitable: “Projections of multi-millennial global mean sea level rise are consistent with reconstructed levels during past warm climate periods: global mean sea level was very likely 5–25 m higher than today roughly 3 million years ago, when global temperatures were 2.5°C–4°C higher than 1850–1900 (medium confidence). Further examples of unavoidable changes in the climate system due to multi-decadal or longer response timescales include continued glacier melt (very high confidence) and permafrost carbon loss (high confidence) [my emphasis].”

There are similar discrepancies between Just Stop Oil statements on other possible climate change impacts. Specifically, Just Stop Oil talks of the cataclysmic consequences of “climate breakdown” in a register of terrifying certainty:

“New oil and gas licensing in 2023 will kill hundreds of millions of people, adding to the already mounting global death toll from climate breakdown. It will push our climate, oceans and the living world beyond the point of no return, triggering runaway global heating and setting in motion an unstoppable process of global societal collapse. To know these facts and still encourage drilling for UK new oil and gas is reckless and immoral. There can be no greater crime.”

But what is the veracity of these claims? Specifically, what does the IPCC say? For one thing, the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report doesn’t speak of certain societal collapse. The report is clear about the dangers associated with climate change, including increased risks of dangerous heat humidity, biodiversity loss in the oceans, low-lying coastal ecosystems to submergence and loss (medium confidence)” and increase in “ill health and premature deaths from the near- to long-term”.

However, it also explains that, “The level of risk for humans and ecosystems will depend on near-term trends in vulnerability, exposure, level of socio-economic development and adaptation (high confidence). In the near-term, many climate associated risks to natural and human systems depend more strongly on changes in these systems’ vulnerability and exposure than on differences in climate hazards between emissions scenarios (high confidence).”

The IPCC is also clear that the most extreme consequences of climate change would likely only occur due to “warming substantially above the assessed very likely range for a given scenario”. To express myself mildly, according to the IPCC, an apocalypse caused by climate change alone, as predicted by Just Stop Oil, is not a likely outcome.

This is something of a bombshell because it means that Net Zero is not the most effective response to the consequences of climate change, the biggest determinant of which is not the differences between emissions scenarios but the adaptation of human society to changing trends. In other words, the taking extensive action to cut carbon emissions may matter less than taking measures to mitigate changes, such as sea level rise, which are likely already in train anyway, at least partially as a result of long natural processes and which anthropogenic climate change is speeding up or exacerbating but not ultimately causing.

The climate activists are wrong

The net zero agenda may in fact be counterproductive to human wellbeing. Certainly, achieving “Net-zero GHG [Green House Gas] emissions requires deep and rapid reductions in gross emissions” and this is not risk free.

As the IPCC has also made clear, growth facilitated by the use of fossil fuels has improved food production significantly since the 1960s, “Since 1961, food supply per capita has increased more than 30%, accompanied by greater use of nitrogen fertilisers (increase of about 800%) and water resources for irrigation (increase of more than 100%).

It should be noted that the Nitrogen based fertilisers that have played such a significant role in the recent increase in food production are created from green-house gases fossil fuels, in a process that, “uses large amounts of natural gas and some coal, and can account for more than 50 per cent of total energy use in commercial agriculture. Oil accounts for between 30 and 75 per cent of energy inputs of UK agriculture, depending on the cropping system.”

According to the Energy and Climate Intelligence unit, “Chemical fertilisers require significant energy inputs – making fertilisers uses 1.8% of the world’s energy. The process runs at very high temperatures of 500°C and extremely high pressures. Fertiliser production also accounts for around 1.8% of global greenhouse gases and is one of four major industries (along with cement, steel and ethylene) contributing to climate change.”

Again, according to the IPCC, “Given the current food system, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that there is a need to produce about 50% more food by 2050 in order to feed the increasing world population (FAO 2018a) […] Responding to climate change through deployment of land-based technologies for negative emissions based on biomass production would increasingly put pressure on food production and food security through potential competition for land.”

A sharp reduction in fossil fuels, and corresponding decline in their use in agriculture, as is required for Net Zero, could thereby make it impossible to produce adequate amounts of fertiliser to feed the world. Simply stopping oil – even if that is just preventing the awarding of new oil licenses at a time when the global population is growing and food production is already under strain due to the war in Ukraine – will cause the price of fertilizer to sky-rocket further. This could, in turn, cause shortages and even lead to the kind of mass starvation that Just Stop Oil is erroneously predicting will result from climate change.

This is not to say that chemical fertilizers are environmentally sustainable and studies have shown how “excessive use of chemical fertilizers has led to several issues such as serious soil degradation, nitrogen leaching, soil compaction, reduction in soil organic matter, and loss of soil carbon. In addition, the efficacy of chemical fertilizers on crop yield has been decreasing over time.”

Alternatives to chemical fertilizers are needed at scale and, as the IPCC, has explained, alternatives are available it should be possible to phase them out over time in favour of new methods for boosting crop production. However, to transition through a sudden shock by shock as is implied by Net Zero or even simply not increasing the oil supply as the global population grows, as Just Stop Oil advocates, will have horrifying consequences.

Given that it is unlikely that we will invent a new, more equitable, system of food distribution or replace greenhouse gas based fertilizers with “green” equivalents by either 2030 or 2050, it seems Net Zero really is likely to plunge parts of the world into famine to the possible cost of millions of lives, if it is ever realised.

In a further grim twist -- as readers of my previous articles will recall – climate activist groups like Just Stop Oil are funded by foundations backed by the same people and institutions who bankrolled the Eugenics movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which legitimised the genocide of Africans on grounds of racial pseudo science and paved the way the slaughter of European Jews in the holocaust. Moreover the populations most likely to be worst affected by a collapse in fertilizer production will be the most vulnerable communities who rely on them most for improved crop yields. 

As I wrote previously, “The same nexus of interests that surrounds the Rockefeller fortune, which backed the Eugenics movement, as well as the extension of Anglo-American imperialism advocated by the likes of Cecil Rhodes and Winston Churchill in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, continues to push the climate agenda today […]

“Whatever their intentions, the fact that foundations with historic links to the global Eugenics movement are engaged in population control initiatives is deeply troubling, especially as Gates was a known associate of known Eugenics enthusiast, former Trilateral Commission member and paedophile Jeffery Epstein. Worse still, population control for the purposes of a racialised agenda of exploitation and domination has been a key plank of Anglo-American Imperial power projection for centuries.”

Given the likely “genocidal” (to use Just Stop Oil’s own terminology) outcome of their policy prospectus, however unintentional, and the historic background of institutions and people who back their activities, the following accusation by Just Stop Oil rings darkly absurd:

“Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi, at his trial in Jerusalem, sought to defend himself by saying that he never killed any Jews as he was only in charge of transporting them to the death camps. The judges overruled this obscene defence and he was hanged.

“Similarly, when those in charge today go to court in the coming years, they will claim that they only facilitated the continued use of fossil fuels. They never actually killed the starving poor of Sudan and Pakistan. And likewise the judgement will be the same – you knew what you were doing and you did not stop it. Justice will be done.”

I suspect that voters can detect the register of hyperbole in Just Stop Oil’s claims. Perhaps this explains the result we saw in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election, where voters were unpersuaded of the need to make financial sacrifices for Ultra Low Emissions Zones and in the service of an agenda which, at best, is tilting at wind turbines, and, at worst, could cause famines in “the global south”. 

The greater risks we face

Adding to risks associated with a radical “Just Stop Oil” agenda is that the greatest threat to human life at present is not climate change alone but “situations of conflict”, such as the avoidable war in Ukraine, one of the world’s most important grain exporters. Many scientists also recognise that the most severe danger to our climate and indeed life on earth in general is posed by nuclear war, which given the crisis in Ukraine, is a very real and immediate danger.

To be clear, now and in the future, nuclear war is a bigger threat to life on earth than anthropogenic climate change, whose outlook is uncertain and whose worst impacts can, if the IPCC is to be believed, be mitigated by human preparation through development and increased food security, both of which will require the use of at least some fossil fuels. More than anything else, these solutions can only be realised the through peace and investment.

The most significant threat to human life and wellbeing is war and a major driver of emissions inequality, and Ultra Low Emission Zones contribute nothing to combatting either. So perhaps it is time to scrap these policies and deemphasise other aspects of the at best questionable Net Zero agenda, so that we can focus on peace and equality instead.

A better way forward has been shown by China, which, unlike the UK, is on course to meet, or even overshoot, its emissions targets. As I have previously argued, China is not pursuing a Net Zero strategy in the sense of “deep and rapid reductions in gross emissions”. Rather, it is increasing fossil fuel use in the near term to power the transition to a more sustainable future.

It can do this because it runs a planned, socialist economy. China’s example illustrates that a massive redistribution of the wealth to ensure structural equality, nationalisation of resources and production infrastructure, involving a planned economy that integrates environmental policy into an agenda equally committed to improving the living standards and life expectancy of ordinary people is the only sensible way to tackle climate change.

This also demonstrates a more fundamental point: if climate change policy is to be successful, it must have public support. To have this support, such policies would have to benefit ordinary people, economically and personally. ULEZ, like many other policies in the Net Zero prospectus, is the opposite of this and irresponsible, hyperbolic rhetoric from climate activist groups will not change this demonstrable reality. Rather, we need sensible public policy based on a measured, empirical assessments of the real risks of certain climate policies in comparison to the actual likely consequences of climate change itself.

Is Net Zero worth the risk? Given that it could impose starvation on millions of people by reducing the availability of essential fertilizers, I don’t think so. Whether its new policies for crop production or flood defences to protect settlements against rising sea levels, we need the time and the space to develop, plan and implement effective mitigations for the impact of climate change, some of whose effects are likely to be with us regardless of whether we hit out climate targets by 2030 or 2050.