Oil, coal, petrol, and natural gas replacements require obscene amounts of concrete, metal, plastics, electronics, and rare earth metals, all moved by heavy equipment from manufacturing facilities. None of this is possible without coal, gas, or oil. Net Zero, in other words, is another lie.
Like saying you’re going to end child trafficking by trafficking children.
You already knew about net zero, perhaps or suspected, and we’ve hundreds of articles on the topic, research, opinions, and more. So, why bring it up? Because they can’t get around it, or because of the problem of energy security and carbon-free electricity, neither of which is compatible given the current focus (wind and solar) or even with the addition of hydro, thermal, and nuclear. You can’t do those without fossil fuels, either.
There are zero solutions for large equipment, OTR, shipping, or aircraft, so transportation net zero will never happen either—because you can’t make any of those things without fossil fuels, even if you could power them some other way.
A Rose By Any Other Name
The UK may have discovered a way around it. Just don’t tell anyone what Net Zero means. It’s like climate change. They mean global warming (all the concern is about warming, after all), but the globe is a big place, and there are always bits that are not warming. Warm bits eventually get cold. That kept happening, so they rebranded. Net Zero must do the same, and in Britain, the solution, whatever it is, will be based on whatever the government says it is.
If you are wondering what that looks like, look at how large cities lowered crime by simply reclassifying what crime is. The decriminalization of a list of former crimes, theft of property being the most common, results in a dramatic increase in actual crime but a decrease in reported crime.
Another example I love to revisit was during Democrat New Hampshire Governor John Lynch’s tenure. He bragged about reducing dropout rates in public schools to near zero. What he did was rename what a dropout is (they called them early exit non-graduates), made a few other bureaucratic tweaks, and on paper, Lynch looked like a hero.
It was all a lie.
The difference here is that climate change and net zero lies are diverting trillions from productive purposes with actual longevity to feed an agenda whose true purpose is the socialization of the local and global economies. That’s a system where shortages of common goods become more common than the goods. That’s the promise of net zero.
What some industrious, pro-free market, abundant energy politicians should do is redefine net zero to mean net zero spending on this nonsense and then use the savings to do something about the national debt.
