Around the world, for some time now, climate scolds have been demanding that we sacrifice much of our modern lifestyles on the altar of climate change. Now, the climate has always changed, and it always will, whether or not we surrender our air conditioners, dishwashers, SUVs, and cheeseburgers. The scolds, however, have in recent years grown accustomed to being the squeaky wheel that gets some grease.
That may be changing now. China, while paying lip service to the whole "Net Zero" game, is building coal-fired power plants like madmen, and here in the United States, we have a president who made "drill, baby, drill" a central tenet of his campaign. People are, as we used to say back in the '70s, getting hip to the scam, and the concerns about Net Zero are fading slowly away. The Daily Sceptic's Environment Editor Chris Morrison has some details - and some numbers.
In 2021, President Xi Jinping promised that China would “strictly limit the increase in coal consumption over the 14th five-year plan period (2021-2025) and phase down in the 15th five-year plan period (2026-2030)”. Perhaps something got lost in the translation of “strictly limit” or should we just limit ourselves to the appropriate response – hahahahaha. Net Zero is dying around the world, no more so than in China where the appropriate lip service goes hand in hand with the full service manufacturing and sale of dud windmills and solar panels to subsidy-seekers reliant on dwindling bands of deluded politicians.
China is, of course, building more coal plants than they are decommissioning. In 2024, China commissioned 66.7 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired power plants. The Middle Kingdom is increasing, not decreasing, its use of coal. And why wouldn't they? It's an established technology, China has coal to use - literally, to burn - and they need electricity. And China is increasing its industrial footprint, in no small part to keep up their takeover of a lot of consumer manufacturing, using coal-fired electricity to do so and allowing European climate scolds to point approvingly at their claims of reducing carbon emissions by exporting them.
All this hypocrisy is necessary of course as deindustrialising Greens indulge their luxury beliefs and pretend to save the planet by outsourcing to China all the goods that they have lost the will to make for themselves.
Here in the United States, President Trump was elected to restore American energy independence, and he's looking at natural gas and oil to achieve that.
In the United States, Net Zero is stone dead. The election of Donald Trump is sweeping away any official concern about the invented climate crisis – the majority is swiftly coming around to the view that the science backing up the scare is mostly produced by garbage in, garbage out computer models, the ‘tipping points’ never tip, the temperature data are often a creative invention of state-employed meteorologists and the claim of ‘settled’ science is a political reaction to the scientific process that would have drawn admiration from a medieval Pope. Trust in mainstream media is falling off a cliff – people are genuinely pissed when they discover that there have been three years of record growth on the Great Barrier Reef at a time when mainstream media kept telling them that if they continued eating meat the coral will all be gone within a decade.
People are, yes, starting to get wise. But mostly - and this is a key point - people are getting tired of paying $3 or $4 a gallon for gasoline. They are tired of seeing their home heating and cooling bills keep rising, along with their electrical bill.
See Related: Utterly Daft: Climate Committee Demands Brits Radically Alter Their Lifestyles to Achieve 'Net Zero'
People in the United States clearly have had enough. We've had enough of high energy costs, which translate, as most people know, to higher costs for everything. We've had enough of the finger-wagging scolds like John Kerry, he of the yachts and private jets. We've had enough. That's one of the reasons Donald Trump won reelection, and because of that, people are hoping to start seeing these costs come down - and, if that causes the scolds to screech a little more, well, then we're willing to deal with that.
In the United Kingdom, though?
No such luck in the UK where the activists on the Climate Change Committee have informed the citizenry that within 15 years they will need to eat less meat and dairy, install noisy, expensive and inefficient heat pumps, pay much higher air fares and remove 80% of their popular internal combustion cars from the road. The Guardian is the mouthpiece for these lunatics and Fiona Harvey spins it as giving up two doner kababs a week. How convenient for Fiona and her comfortable chums in the North London wing of the governing elite.
Sooner or later, our Brit cousins will have to get wise as well. It's either that or they will have to go outside and gather dead branches to build a fire to brew their tea - if the government hasn't banned hatchets to split up kindling with and prohibited brewing fires. The British people, we can hope, will soon enough to where they have had enough as well - enough of morons gluing themselves to roadways and throwing tomato soup on priceless artworks.
We can hope, at any rate.
