Not Zero: How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won't Even Save the Planet)

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A rich, Western businessman or politician gets to fly in their private jet and carry on as they were – and then they pay a bit of money to offset it. He is right that electric vehicles at the low end of the market can have ranges of less than 100 miles under such conditions, and that the charging infrastructure is far from adequate, but most car journeys are much shorter and less burdened. In a Telegraph comment piece titled, “Myopic politicians are wilfully blind to the truth about green energy”, Clark wrote: 42 Ross Clark. Clark regularly questions climate science in columns for the Spectator, arguing, for instance,that while “climatic observations” should be trusted, predictions should be taken with “a pinch of salt” because “the only near-certain thing is that they will all be wrong”. He also described plans to install 600,000 heat pumps per year by 2028 as “just the latest indication of the massive costs that are going to be dumped on ordinary people.

Is it sensible to commit to a policy that can only be achieved on the basis of technology that does not exist at the moment and might never exist at the scale required, or even at all? Notwithstanding these rare pieces of useful advice, Clark’s book is further confirmation that the fringes of British conservatism are stuck in an intellectual cul-de-sac, unable to accept fully the science and economics of climate change for fear that it threatens a rigid adherence to free-market fundamentalism. Alternatively, Britain will have to commit an economic suicide and all its energy hungry industries will have to be abandoned.

The Daily Mail published an article by Clark titled: “We all want to save the planet but the Government’s barely debated and uncosted fantasy of achieving net zero by 2050 will leave us all poorer, colder and hungrier”. Writing for Spectator Life, Clark disputed whether the oil industry would be supplanted by renewable energy, questioning its efficacyin achieving carbon neutrality in comparison to carbon capture and storage ( CCS). We will look back to the prophecies of climatic doom being made today in the same way that we now look back at the 18th/19th century economist Thomas Malthaus’s predictions of mass famine, or the warnings in the 1960s and 1970s that a new ice age was on its way. They still expect us to believe that GM crops will make us ill and ruin the environment – in spite of the vast weight of scientific work establishing that they are safe.

In a column for the Spectator, Clark argued that Extinction Rebellion is “not a mass movement for better environmental policies – it is a wannabe Marxist revolution in disguise. He added: “it won’t mean ‘climate chaos’ if some of these fall – it will simply be an inevitable result of ‘record temperatures’ having become a debased currency”. We are, of course, in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’ and the ‘sixth mass extinction’ of life on Earth. He devotes a chapter to a revisionist account of the relevant science, including selective quotes from the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). With little regard for many accepted facts, the author exercises the freedom to make his own predictions about future technological progress.

He also wrote that if MPs were to follow the demands of the protest group, they would “ruin the economy while simply exporting Britain’s carbon emissions to countries which have not burdened themselves with legally-binding targets”.

Brendan O’Neill: The eco-elites love to lecture people about their emissions, even as they fly around the world on private jets.

He concluded the article by suggesting that blaming oil and gas companies for climate change is an attempt to “palm off responsibility”: 27 Ross Clark. However, the report stated that while “region-wide hard coral cover” had recovered and reached “the highest level recorded in the past 36 years of monitoring” in two regions of the GBR, the reefs “continue to be exposed to cumulative stressors”, and that “while the observed recovery offers good news for the overall state of the GBR, there is increasing concern for its ability to maintain this state”.