PART I
This is above all an emergency and not just any emergency. This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced. This is not something you can like on Facebook – Greta Thunberg
The Prince of Wales (is to issue) a warning that the world has only “100 months to act” before the damage caused by global warming becomes irreversible – Guardian, March 2009
The world must act now to slow global warming otherwise there will be a climate catastrophe – COP26 President Alok Sharma
Nearly half the British public said that climate change was their top issue, as quoted by the New Statesman from a poll last November, beating even the pandemic. The BBC, most of the media and the government had hyped up global warming in advance of COP26, the international conference on climate change, that took place the following month. At the event the British government widely touted its solution to ‘runaway’ global warming, the zero-carbon economy which is enthusiastically supported by most institutions and NGOs, though with far more scepticism by the public.
A note on why I have plunged into the shark-infested waters of climate change; it seems to me that ‘zero-carbon’ policies are wrong-headed and will prove to be costly in capital, operating costs and even lost opportunity costs. Already we hear of electricity bills, even for families reliant on foodbanks, doubling and tripling to over £1,000 per year, and this is just the start. For now, the Ukraine war will take the blame, but this disguises an energy shortage chiefly driven by a rush to shut down domestic fossil fuel generation, refusal to develop nuclear power, and a reliance on Russian gas and imported electricity to overcome the created shortage. Scarcity means price rises, and natural gas spot prices rose to around $400 per therm as opposed to $50 a year ago. Naturally the price increase will be passed on to the consumer, both domestic and commercial.
The government is already claiming that it is market forces as well as the war that are to blame, rather than its energy strategy that was nobly and carefully designed to save the planet. The response from Greens is that we should wear more sweaters and learn to love weekly cold baths. The IPCC and the IEA long ago suggested that natural gas was a ‘transitory’ or ‘bridging’ fuel as it has a far lower carbon footprint than coal, and natural gas can be burnt while coal is phased out and renewables (and nuclear) developed. Instead, the UK government ran down domestic natural gas as well as coal, effectively banned fracking, and has dragged its feet on nuclear. To mix metaphors, it has put all its eggs into the less reliable wind power basket.
I’m only discussing energy policy as an example of how climate change mitigation is going to make life very expensive for most people and limit their basic freedoms. For example, the government intends owning a car to be almost impossible, unless you are rich enough to buy an electric car and afford the charging station. Transport is a major generator of carbon dioxide emissions, and it is an open secret the government wants to reduce domestic travel by both fair and foul means; meat-eating is also another one on the government’s bucket-list as animals emit methane and carbon dioxide.
What is going to be the UK’s sources of natural gas and petroleum by 2030?
The more outlandish measures only make sense if you believe that global warming is an existential crisis that threatens the extinction of humans and most life on earth. Then nothing – conquest, war, famine and death, economic collapse, personal freedoms, democracy – matter as much as mitigating climate change. As Extinction Rebellion state on their website: “Life on Earth is in crisis. Our climate is changing faster than scientists predicted and the stakes are high. Biodiversity loss. Crop failure. Social and ecological collapse. Mass extinction. We are running out of time”. The danger is that many luminaires in the British establishment are swallowing climate catastrophism; Boris Johnson has said the world is at “one minute to midnight” on global warming, a statement usually associated with nuclear war.
The trolls will undoubtedly yell at me that I’m a climate-denier. I’m not. Global warming is happening, the evidence is very strong from satellite measurements to ice-cores, and the earth has warmed 1°C since 1850 and is continuing to heat up. IPCC projects 4°C warming by 2100 taking the average of their climate models. While that amount of energy pumped into the atmosphere is bound to have some impact in terms of extreme weather, on warming, on moisture and sea-level rises, it will be unequally distributed and although highly unpleasant for many, it is most unlikely to create a global extinction, nor result in a second Venus. Instead, mishandling of the geopolitical process, the global economy, and even dictators resurrecting the old phantom of limited nuclear war is a much greater threat, as we are starting to see.
I accept climate change or global warming is happening, and a four-degree heating is going to be grim and even dangerous for some regions of the planet, and we need to mitigate where possible, and adapt where we cannot. But to paraphrase Dad’s Army that “we’re all doomed” is a wild and dangerous exaggeration, which is already distorting government policy and causing great harm.
The other criticism will be that I’m not a climate scientist and I should shut up and accept the word of my betters. However, I’m a graduate geologist and mining engineer, a chartered engineer, and have spent many years trained to read graphs, numbers, numerical analysis, reports and even some physics and chemistry that control the behaviour of atmospheric gases and fluids, and in my university days the study of paleoclimates. In addition, there is excellent and detailed information put out by the IPCC, the Met Office, the IEA, the World Bank, the IMF, and many universities that can be cross-referenced and checked. In fact, I’m often flabbergasted how many journalists and even government ministers who cannot understand the information given by a graph or a table of numbers, and instead listen to and paraphrase other people instead of their own fact-checking.
I’m hoping in Part 2 to explain some basics of climate change and why the apocalyptic version of climate change is becoming predominant – and even perilous. Part 3 will look at the impact climate change politics is having on the mining industry and on its sustainability policies.
Laurence Morris CEng