From 1958 to 1964, Chinese leader Mao Zedong aimed to rapidly transform China through high-speed societal change, establishing large publicly run enterprises, and remodeling energy policy in a new structure of production and consumption centred around the utilisation of back yard furnaces.
The policy outcomes were, sadly, disastrous – poor planning
and unrealistic targets, along with the dismantling of the established means of
energy and food production in a short period of time, led to significant
inefficiencies, a subsequent widespread drop in output and – ultimately and
tragically – a massive famine that led to the deaths of 50 million people.
On a completely unrelated note, Ed Miliband has just been
appointed Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero.
I’ve said this before, long before the right wing nutjobs
got hold of the idea and decided that opposing it was a core part of their
theology – but Net Zero is going to be wild. Unfortunately, left wing
nutjobs have decided that whatever the opposite of the right-wing position is,
is now a core part of their ideology. So the odds of us navigating our
way successfully through the next few decades have decreased significantly.
We are now however, essentially, aiming to be the first
country in the world, since the Upper Palaeolithic revolution 40,000 years ago,
to try and successfully increase living standards by decreasing energy production. Ed
Miliband is at the forefront of this now, our new Assistant Glorious Leader: a man who
lost an election because he couldn’t eat a bacon sandwich normally now wants us
all, for example, to reduce meat consumption. I assume this is not a
co-incidence.
Now, the economy is, to a certain extent, a derivative of
the energy market. A very good book by Vaclav Smil (ok, it is a bit dense: “Energy
and Civilization - A History”) shows beyond any reasonable doubt that there
is, essentially, a correlation between energy consumption and civilisation:
it’s about 0.99 in fact. Reduce energy consumption, reduce civilisational
standards of living (by quite a lot, as we’re going to find out).
You can either be a net energy exporter – and produce that
energy yourself as a country, which is good, or you can be a net energy
importer, and buy it in from abroad – which is fine, but you need to earn money
to buy it: ie have a trade surplus. [As an aside: you can be the issuer of a
reserve currency and just print money to buy it from abroad, but we Brits can’t
do that since we all went on holiday to Suez by mistake in 1956.]
What you can’t do is buy energy in from abroad, whilst
simultaneously having a trade deficit. Which is what, since 2005, we have been
trying to do: for that’s the year the oil and gas from the North Sea started to
dwindle, and we became a net energy importer again for the first time since
the 1980s (when we started our last period of growth) – and consequently, since
2005, living standards have stagnated. This is simple physics.
This process will now accelerate: under Net Zero, it is explicit government
policy to get rid of our existing hydrocarbon energy sources, and most of our
reliable base load power, as fast as possible (ie 73% of current energy
production) and therefore reduce energy production in toto (great band) - and try and replace it, somehow, we're not sure how yet, with intermittent renewables. The massive,
whopping lie is that this will reduce our dependence on imported
hydrocarbons, which would obviously be a Good Thing during a time of global geopolitical
instability: this is, demonstrably, a clear lie as these renewables will themselves
require vast amounts of carbon emissions to produce in the first place – except
now we won’t be able to do it ourselves, as we will have shut down the domestic hydrocarbon sources that would otherwise have been used.
Eh? Whaddya mean?
Well, a wind turbine, for example, is mostly steel. How do
you make steel? Well, really, you need coking coal, as that’s the only
cost-effective way of getting the energy intensity required – even “green steel”
not using coal has massive carbon emissions – as even without the coal bit you
need to pump oxygen in to transform the pig iron into steel, which creates…carbon
dioxide. Big, fuck off amounts of it. Except we won’t be using our own coal,
because Coal Bad, and we won’t be producing our own steel, because Carbon
Emissions Bad, but despite the fact it’s 2024 we still want to power ourselves
using fucking windmills for some reason - so we’ll instead just import the steel
we need from China, where they’ll happily burn anything they can dig out of the
ground (including far worse lignite coal).
So as we dwindle down our own reliable energy sources before
their time, we’re going to have to instigate large-scale rationing, all whilst
killing growth. We’ll print money for a while to try and hide it – as I’ve said
on previous posts, we might even get a bit excited in the process and have a
sugar-boom - but ultimately physics will win.
What’s even scarier is reading government papers on this
stuff (it’s well worth reading the Sixth Carbon Budget, which is now in law,
btw: https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/sixth-carbon-budget/)
- as they basically say the above, but in coded language. They talk about
demand management: but they mean, shortages and rationing. They talk about managing
mobility demand: but they mean, you can’t travel where you want to travel. Go
and eat ze bugs.
I should add that I am not a “climate change denier”. My
Doctoral research is on Sustainability and Building Climate Resilience and Lots
of Other Buzzwords I Thought Sound Good in a Dissertation Title, and I
spend my spare time researching engineering strategies to mitigate hurricane activity
in the Caribbean - activity which is, beyond doubt, increasing as a direct
result of Climate Change (although I did mainly choose this area of research
because I get to go to the Caribbean).
However, wind down our existing reliable base-load hydrocarbon
energy sources too fast and we will, definitely, without doubt, have a Great Leap:
just not fucking Forward.
