Thank goodness Richard Tice understands net stupid zero

ONE OF REFORM‘S GREATEST STRENGTHS is its no-nonsense, down-to-earth approach to policy. Nowhere is this robust common sense more visible – and more necessary – than on the question of catastrophic manmade global warming.

At the Great British Business Council’s packed-out side event at Reform’s annual conference in September, Richard Tice wowed the audience with his concise dismissal of the notion that we should continue to destroy both our manufacturers (who face the costliest electricity prices on the planet) and our households (whose electricity prices are second only to those of Germany) in the name of what he justly called “net stupid zero”.

Richard, a successful businessman who knows how many beans make five, has been quietly talking to all the subsidy-farmers who have been milking the taxpayer for exorbitant subsidies for their solar panels (which emit more CO2 in their manufacture, grid connection and costly, environmentally disastrous disposal than they save in their short and useless lifetimes) and their windmills (13th century technology that fails to address a 21st century non-problem). Richard has been telling these fat cats that their subsidies will be cut off within days of Reform’s forthcoming general election victory.

Here are some straightforward numbers essential to any rational policymaking on the question of global warming. Let us begin with a statistic so striking, so obvious and yet so artfully concealed by the climate Communists and the unspeakable Bolshevik Broadcasting Commissariat that it has not hitherto been published in Britain.

There is no point in installing on our national grid more wind and solar nameplate generating capacity (the total amount that these unreliables could generate if the wind were blowing and the sun were shining just right) than is needed to meet the entire mean hourly demand on our national grid. Yet already the installed nameplate capacity of wind and solar power exceeds that entire mean hourly demand by almost 50 per cent.

“constraint payments” – payments for not generating electricity – are already costing £2 billion a year, or £100 for every household in the land.

That is why, when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, your electricity bills soar because the madcap policy of the “Conservatives”, eagerly adopted by their Communist successors, is to pay the subsidy farmers to turn off their wind and solar arrays. These lunatic “constraint payments” – payments for not generating electricity – are already costing £2 billion a year, or £100 for every household in the land.

Since there is already far too much wind or solar power on the grid, one should not install any more. Yet the Communists are busy vastly expanding the network of wind and solar arrays. The inevitable result is that the constraint payments will increase ever more rapidly as more and more pointless over-capacity of wind and solar power is eagerly plugged into a grid that does not want it, does not need it and cannot afford it.

But surely, you may ask, the Communists have been telling us that wind and solar power are cheap because we do not have to pay for the sun to shine and the wind to blow. It’s free energy, isn’t it?

Well, no, it isn’t. The levelized unit cost per megawatt-hour of wind and solar power is about thrice that of natural gas and five times that of coal.

There are many reasons for this absurdly excessive cost. First, the energy density of wind and solar power is pathetic compared with coal, gas or nuclear power. Vast acreages produce very little electricity. What is the point of installing solar panels in a nation that gets less sunshine per hour than almost any other on the planet?

Second, the grid must always be able to meet demand, even when the wind is not blowing or is blowing too hard (which happens three-quarters of the time) and the sun is not shining (which happens every night). Therefore, every wind and solar installation is superfluous from the grid operator’s point of view. The grid needs continuous, base-load power at all times. Unreliables such as wind and solar power cannot provide it.

Third, to provide the backup battery power to keep the grid running for up to three months at a time during a cloudy, windless summer would increase the cost of electricity 100-fold. It cannot be done.

Fourth, the exasperating and unavoidable intermittency of power delivery from bird-blending, bee-blatting windmills and feather-frying solar panels means that coal, gas and nuclear stations have to be kept running all the time at grossly inefficient and expensive spinning reserve so that the load can be taken up instantly and the grid kept stable when the wind drops or a cloud hides the sun.

the now-nationalized grid operator is actually required by law to prioritize wind and solar, the costliest form of generation

Fifth, the costs to the grid of trying to keep the grid stable given the variability of the power delivered by unreliables are enormous.

Sixth, the lunatic regime prescribed by the scientific illiterates in Parliament requires that the now-nationalized grid operator, instead of buying the cheapest electricity at any moment, is actually required by law to prioritize wind and solar, the costliest form of generation.

Seventh, the EU, with which the Communists wish to realign us in defiance of the referendum result, is about to introduce a monstrously complex system of accounting for the “carbon-intensity” of every raw material, good or service, depending on how much arises domestically and how much from overseas. This daft regime will bankrupt Britain’s few remaining manufacturing industries.

All of which raises the question that the Marxstream media will not ask. Do we actually need to worry about global warming anyway? No, we don’t.

Though global population has quadrupled over the past century, climate-related mortality has declined by 99 per cent. One reason is that cold weather kills ten times as many people as heat. The Marxstreamers maunder on about excess deaths in a warm summer, while remaining culpably silent about the fact that warmer winters cut deaths from cold ten times faster.

CO2 fertilization of trees and plants (CO2 is plant food) has increased the growth-rate of all green things by 15-30 per cent in 25 years. Cereal crop yields have tripled in 60 years, though that good news is now threatened in this country by the excessive cost of industrial electricity: the two largest fertilizer-manufacturers in Britain have had to shut down and move production elsewhere. Your food will be a lot more expensive from now on.

Globally, the output of roots, fruits, oil crops, vegetables, sugar crops and cereals has risen by more than one-third since 2000. Nearly all staple crops yield more with doubled CO2 in the air. Unsurprisingly, therefore, deaths from famine have declined markedly in the last 50 years.

These facts raise another question. Is “the science” right? We now know it isn’t. Previously, climate Communists argued that warmer worldwide weather was driven by CO2 because they could not explain the warming any other way. But then, in 2000, the CERES satellites were sent up. They show that for more than 25 years global cloud cover has been declining. More sunshine is warming the surface. That naturally-occurring reduction in cloud cover explains the entire observed increase in global temperature.

What did they get wrong? In 1984, a Communist at NASA published a paper saying that, although direct warming by all the CO2 we might emit until coal, oil and gas ran out was just 1 degree, feedback amplification by extra water vapour in the somewhat warmer air would add 2-4 degrees to global temperature.

If the whole world were to go to net zero by 2050, the warming prevented by then would be just 0.1 degree

The climate Communists had forgotten that temperature-feedback processes in the climate do not respond solely to changes in temperature. They respond to the entire temperature. The clue is in the name “temperature feedback”. In effect, they forgot that the Sun is shining. Thus, they overstated tenfold the warming caused by feedback amplification. Take away that gross error and the warming we can expect will be small, slow, harmless and net-beneficial.

Finally, why have I mentioned Marxism and Communists so often? The former director of the disinformation directorate of the KGB, who came out to the West in 1978 and told us everything, revealed that, after his time, the directorate had seized on the climate narrative because the Kremlin wanted to get Europe to stop burning coal, so that Russia could increase Siberian-gas sales and gas prices.

One more fact should nail it. If the whole world were to go to net zero by 2050, the UN’s target year, the warming prevented by then would be just 0.1 degree. Since Britain accounts for only 0.8 per cent of global emissions, our contribution to that pointlessly minuscule “achievement” would be less than one-thousandth of a degree of cooling.

The bottom line? Richard Tice was and is right. The Conservatives still witter on about the need for nut zero, but say they would get there a little more slowly than the Communists. Only Reform will junk the whole nonsense – and save at least £100 billion a year in costs and opportunity losses. Junking net stupid zero is the fastest way to balance the budget and get Great Britain making great things again.