Not Interested in Net Zero

Earlier this week, I wrote a post featuring abbreviations such as NZIA and NZAM. A reader and, I daresay, a friend, wrote to me joking about a typo I’d made, writing NIZA instead of NZIA.

I like NIZA better, he said. It stands for Not Interested in Zero Assets. That, of course, immediately gave me the idea of creating a group or alliance, as it is now trendy to call it, of people for whom net zero is not the top concern. I’m calling it Not Interested in Net Zero, or NINZ, which, you’ve got to admit, has a really nice ring to it.

Even better, NINZ can also mean Non-Indoctrinated Net-Zerophobes or Naturally Inquisitive Non-Zeroists. It could mean a dozen other good things as well, so feel free to unleash your imagination.

NINZ or any actual formal or informal grouping of sane individuals has become necessary, urgently so. Because we are now at the stage where everyone who’s anyone in the transition camp can say absolutely anything they want, however outrageously wrong it is, and many would take them seriously.

The cup of my patience got tipped over yesterday, when I saw this lovely snippet of an interview of John Kerry, who said that because of climate change farmers are about to see their crops being ripped away. Because of “intensive weather events”. He also referenced “lack of air quality” as the cause of death for millions of people every year.

Here we have a man who cannot even speak properly but he’s good enough to scare us into an energy transition that would cost tens of trillions if not more, cause poverty levels to balloon, and cripple millions mentally — because it already is doing all that.

The John Kerry snippet came to my attention a day after the EU took its latest — potentially colossal — step towards self-destruction, which, needless to say, did not help with my patience.

On Tuesday, the EU officially signed off on a set of measures aimed to advance its emission reduction plans. Said measures include extending the emission trading system to maritime and air transport, reducing the availability of free carbon permits, starting the countdown to their complete phaseout, and starting another countdown to the further expansion of the ETS to cars and buildings.

All these measures, whose ultimate aim, by the way, is cutting the EU’s emissions by 62% from 2005 levels by 2030, come down to own extremely simple and extremely unpleasant thing. Life is about to get a lot more expensive in the European Union, I mean Borrell’s Garden.

We can all blame clueless, corrupt and/or brainwashed politicians and bureaucrats until we’re hoarse but it won’t do any good. Because we let it happen by not questioning these policies at all.

On the contrary, we — and by we I mean the majority of people — eagerly embraced them because they sounded like something that would be good for the planet. Because we don’t know better. And we don’t know better because we are not exposed to anything better.

Do you know what the Wikipedia snippet for Professor Ian Plimer, which appears on Google’s front page when you launch a search for the name, says? Here’s what it says:

Ian Rutherford Plimer is an Australian geologist and professor emeritus at the University of Melbourne. He rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. He has been criticised by climate scientists for misinterpreting data and spreading misinformation.

But Wikipedia is not reliable, blah. I know it isn’t but it is the first search result that appears and it makes an attention-drawing appearance, I assure you. This is what we get — a constant flow of indoctrination instead of information. We need a counterbalance.

We’re getting some, no doubt about it. From Doomberg, Robert Bryce, David Blackmon, Roger Pielke and the hundreds of other sane minds on a mission to counter the narrative to all the thousands who read what these people write, we are all some counterweight. But it’s not enough. Not when someone like Kerry or Guterres, or Birol is allowed to talk absolute rubbish with no consequences whatsoever.

Did you hear Birol’s latest, by the way? He told Bloomberg OPEC+ should be very careful with all those production cuts because if it’s not careful, the price hikes will only accelerate the transition.

I’m not joking. And neither is he: “They have to be very careful. If the oil producers try to push prices up, this will only accelerate the electric cars’ penetration.”

Watch it, OPEC+, or you’ll be digging your own grave. Apparently. Meanwhile in Wyoming, “The driver of an electric truck from California learned the hard way over the weekend that Wyoming’s difficult terrain creates challenges to driving an electric vehicle here, and what works in California doesn’t always go as smoothly crossing the Cowboy State.”

The divide between transition fantasies and reality is becoming deeper by the day. I honestly think it’s reached Grand Canyon proportions already.

There are some signs of hope, such as that survey in Germany that showed more than half of the people were against the closing of the nuclear plants. A little more than half but still more than half.

Or this survey, which found, per Singularity Hub, that “Americans believe climate change is happening, but they’re not terribly worried about it, and are mostly not willing to spend money or go out of their way to help fix it.”

Or how about this article, which suggests it’s not only Americans who don’t particularly care about climate change. That and the website are a beacon of hope.

Perhaps the whole catastrophe cult will die a natural death when people start getting poorer because of it. Perhaps I’m being melodramatic because I really have no truck with blatant lies. I mean, at least try for some plausibility, that’s insulting. And also try to not contradict yourself too obviously.

Did you know that our very own UN top geezer Guterres said just two years ago that we need to do away with mining? “Digging our own graves” is how Mr. Highway to Hell put it. Here’s the full quote because it’s beautiful:

“Enough of treating nature like a toilet, enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves.”

The next sentence, by Mining.com’s Frik Els, is even more beautiful in case you couldn’t be bothered to click on the link:

“Who’s going to tell him?”

Sadly, the joke turns sour because the answer is “Nobody”. Nobody is going to tell Guterres his pet project will require a massive increase in mining activity.

Nobody is going to tell Ursula von der Leyen Europe is hopelessly late to the metals and minerals party and will forever remain reliant on outside suppliers of everything except perhaps food. For a while, that is, until someone decides it’s time to take a page out of the Netherlands’ former government’s book and ban fertilisers.

Western energy politics has become one giant echo-chamber with a side-order of large-scale language revisionism in an attempt to disarm sane people from undermining it with facts.

They speak about science when they mean speculation, computer modelling, and data cherry-picking. They speak about consensus, when they mean a largely shared opinion, which is only largely shared because dissenting opinions are being actively silenced. And they speak about misinformation and disinformation when they mean facts.

How do you fight this? With actual facts. With actual evidence. With information without emotion-triggering prefixes. And we do it out in the open, not in echo chambers. Are you in?