Claptrapping

One of the marks of helplessness is the frequent use of a specific word or a group of words to describe a situation you cannot change, which fact invokes the feeling of said helplessness.

I know this because I frequently use the word stupid and synonyms to describe the people leading us into the energy transition. This is in part because they are, indeed, stupid, and in part because I cannot do anything to stop them. On a positive note, it seems some of the most devout transitionistas are also feeling quite helpless.

In a commentary piece for the FT on Wednesday, its business columnist and associate editor Pilita Clark called out Elon Musk and Donald Trump for what she described as “misleading, misinformed or just plain baffling utterances that continue to gush forth in the face of an increasingly evident problem.”

She also described the pushback against the climate change narrative as “claptrap”. A total of seven times. In an 800-word piece. Ms. Clark was not a happy associate editor when she wrote that piece.

The European Commission wasn’t happy either when it discovered sales of heat pumps were falling, and they were falling at a concerning rate. Neither was the German government when it discovered it didn’t have the money to “incentivise” the purchase of millions more heat pumps. Odd, when Ms. Clark informs us that all the criticism poured over poor heat pumps is, to diversify away from claptrap, hogwash.

“In Europe,” Clark wrote, “newspapers have published so many rubbish claims that heat pumps (a greener alternative to gas boilers) are too feeble, too noisy and too awkward to install that a minor industry of technical and research experts has now emerged to debunk them.”

Imagine that — a whole industry springing up whose members’ mission is to debunk legitimate complaints by people who have tried heat pumps and have been disappointed, and people who are familiar with how heat pumps operate and what limitations they have, so they don’t want one. How dare you?

Also, how dare so many people not want to buy an EV to help “rush to stem carbon emissions” because “they must now come down rapidly to avoid irreversible changes in an array of natural systems that humans rely on.” And yet they dare, which clearly causes frustration in those really, really worried we are all going to die unless we reduce the amount of a trace element in our atmosphere.

At least one government, however, is forging ahead, money or no money — which in the case of a quarter of its population is no money. The UK cabinet is going after the oil and gas industry, it is building lots and lots of wind and solar, and financing them with oil taxes, and it’s absolutely going to work even though oil and gas companies are planning to move abroad.

That’s the gist of a couple of reports from this week, in one of which the CEO of Serica Energy, one of the largest independents in the North Sea, was perfectly blunt and said his company was considering a move to Norway to avoid the exorbitant taxes that the Starmer government has prepared for the industry.

Ms. Clark’s very own FT reported that other companies are also considering leaving the UK North Sea shelf to survive. The report quoted one investment banking analyst as summing up the situation quite succinctly.

“If the government implements the kind of windfall taxes they are talking about, then you end up with a cliff edge in UK energy production because the industry will be taxed into uncompetitiveness,” Chris Wheaton from Stifel said. “That is going to cause a very dramatic decline in investment and therefore production and jobs, and a big hit to energy security.”

No matter, though, because there will be lots and lots of wind and solar… or not because there will be no oil and gas tax money to fund those lots with. Apparently, no one in the cabinet is thinking about this. The other thing they are not thinking about is how Britons are struggling to pay their electricity bills.

A report by consumer group Citizens Advice out yesterday warned that as much as a quarter of UK households may be forced to turn off their heating and hot water in the winter because they would not be able to afford it if Ofgem, the gas and power regulator, again raises the cap on household bills in October, which most expect it will, because, you see, electricity suppliers have seen their wholesale costs rise by 20% in the past few months and such market behaviour cannot go unanswered.

I guess those low-income Brits should just suck it up and buy a heat pump because we have a planet to save. Or sit in the cold, which is an instructive experience and makes you more resilient to the many challenges that life throws our way. Besides, showering every day is bad for your skin, so there’s that added benefit, too. Ms. Clark will approve.

Yet while she dutifully listed all the horrors of human-induced climate change in her story, Bloomberg broke rank. In an article about record Texas electricity demand, the authors probably got distracted for a second because they wrote that “Thus far, the summer of 2024 hasn’t been as intense from a heat perspective as 2023, when power demand shattered all-time highs on 21 occasions.” You gasped, right? Wait till you hear about the 33 hurricanes one individual predicted for this year, of which only five have materialised. But there’s time.

You should have gasped because climate change reporting does not allow any suggestion that the changes in the climate may be anything other than a straight upward line in terms of temperatures, horrors, wildfires and all the rest of it. And here comes Bloomberg, one of the most dedicated mouthpieces of the transitionistas, and says that this summer was better than last summer. This is inconceivable and it should be penalised — I suggest extradition to the UK.

Australia, meanwhile, did a thing. That thing is an approval and that approval is certainly worthy of the standing ovation of transition fans because the approval is for a 4,300-km subsea cable that will carry solar power over from Australia to Singapore. After they build the 6 GW of capacity, that is.

It’s funny, because initially the planned capacity was between 10 GW and 20 GW. Then, it seems, the dreamers that made those plans woke up. They also broke up — Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes and Andrew Forrest of former mining and currently green hydrogen fame — and put their solar cable company into administration.

The breakup, it seems, was over ballooning costs, which Forrest last year described as follows: they “just kept rising by 10%, 50%, 100%. That isn’t sustainable. That’s what I would expect with inexperienced management and a board of directors who have never done large projects.”

At the time, the price tag of the cable thing had swollen from $13 billion to $24 billion and Cannon-Brookes whose faith in the project remained unwavering was looking for outside investors. Now we get the news that the federal government of Australia has approved the project… with a price tag of $13.5 billion. It must be the mysterious case of shrinking costs when all other costs around are rising — or it’s because of the sharp revision in capacity from 10-20 GW to 6 GW. I don’t know, they’re shy about it, as shy as they are about how they would finance the thing.

“SunCable will now focus its efforts on the next stage of planning to advance the project towards a final investment decision targeted by 2027,” SunCable Australia Managing Director Cameron Garnsworthy said in a statement, which did not provide details of its financing plans,” per Reuters.

“One day, climate change will no longer generate all this misleading bilge. But it is very hard to know when, so in the meantime it’s best to keep a close eye on the most egregious effluent producers,” Ms. Clark concludes in her column.

To that, all I can say is that one day, people will wonder what possessed so many of them to plunder the earth for metals and minerals in order to cover vast swathes of it with solar panels, destroy forests to erect wind turbines, and disturb marine ecosystems to lay cables thousands of kilometers long… in order to save the planet.