You reap what you sow

It’s official: we just got the energy transition experiment we have been calling for. Labour won the UK elections with the predicted landslide and is chomping at the bit to put its energy plans to the test of reality. Heartfelt commiserations to the British.

The party, comically referred to as “center-left” by several news outlets covering the vote, has pledged to raise windfall profit taxes for the oil and gas industry, end new exploration licences for the North Sea and boost wind, solar, and storage deployment. There doesn’t seem to be a shadow of a doubt that it would all work.

You know, despite my gradual ascent from early to late middle age I find the world still keeps fascinating me. The UK is not the first transition experiment we have had the dubious pleasure of witnessing in the past five years or so. The experiments keep failing but the experimenters keep trying.

First, there was the Sri Lanka case, where the government decided to ban all synthetic fertilisers in a bid to become an organic farming superpower. It ended with riots, starvation and suffering.

Then we had Germany, which is on the road to complete deindustrialisation thanks to its government’s determination to replace cheap and reliable hydrocarbon energy with wind and solar—even as it keeps using those hydrocarbons because it shut down its nuclear power plants.

Now, the UK has joined that very select club of energy quarterwits, determined to become “a clean energy superpower”, per the Labour manifesto, which says that “Labour will work with the private sector to double onshore wind, triple solar power, and quadruple offshore wind by 2030. We will invest in carbon capture and storage, hydrogen and marine energy, and ensure we have the long-term energy storage our country needs.” If I had to read it, you will, too. Misery loves company.

In a text that sounds like it was written by a fourteen-year-old high on epic dreams, the party that will rule Britain for the next five years (if it survives that long) has promised low energy bills “for good”, 650,000 jobs by 2030, and energy independence. Of course. And it plans to do that by killing its actual energy industry, like Sri Lanka killed its essential farming industry and like Germany is currently killing its heavy industry, by the very same means.

We have talked about this doubling-down on policies that not only do not work but have devastating effects on people and the economy before but it continues to be an amazing phenomenon. Granted, you could explain it with the desire of a rich minority to get even richer and the equally strong desire of various transition gravy train riders to keep riding that train for as long as possible but this explanation lacks an important element: the fact that the gravy will run out eventually.

This is perhaps the most worrying aspect of the transition — its champions’ utter inability to think ahead and consider the possibility that their plans might not pan out the way they want them to. Let’s forget about wishful thinking reports and so-called forecasts taken as gospel. Let’s focus on simple reason and rationality.

A rational mind would consider all outcomes of a plan, not only the desirable ones. That mind would analyse the probability of each outcome materialising. It would then plan accordingly, seeking to minimise the undesirable outcomes’ chances and maximise the chances of the desirable outcome.

What we see with the UK right now — and what we saw with Sri Lanka and Germany — is the opposite. They want to make an energy transition happen and use oil and gas money to that end. But at the very same time they are removing every single incentive oil and gas companies might still have left to remain in the country and keep doing business there — and paying taxes.

Instead of fleecing energy companies, the new UK government will be skinning them alive and the practical problem with skinning someone alive is that they won’t remain alive for very long — the hypothermia and the shock will stop the heart quite fast, leaving the clueless skinner wondering what went wrong when everything was going so well.

Yet while the ones who won the UK election — like the ones who presided over Sri Lanka’s collapse and Germany’s slow economic death — are not the only ones responsible for the situation. The ones who voted for them are equally responsible. When you make decisions singurlarly on the basis of illusions or even hopes, you fully deserve to see those shattered, which is exactly what will happen to those millions of Labour voters before long. Ignorance, as tax inspectors like to say, is not an excuse for breaking the law — or in this case ruining your own life.

Ignorance of facts is no excuse for believing the propaganda, especially when the propaganda is so obviously untrue and there is physical, palpable evidence of its untrue-ness. I mean, is there a country where the massive buildout of wind and solar has led to lower electricity bills? No, there isn’t. Does anyone ask themselves why this is? Not anyone voting for the people leading the buildout, I expect.

Ignorance may have been an excuse a hundred years ago when information was hard to come by for the majority of us. Now, when all the information you can digest, and more, is at your fingertips, it cannot be an excuse for buying the hype and then getting shocked when the bill comes. With some luck, the bill will come sooner rather than later, before too much irreparable damage has been done.

I leave you with a wish for strength to those Brits who know the difference between fantasy and fact in the coming years, a wish for continued luck to everyone else who’s not facing a new government that’s even more deranged than the last one, and the news that we here in Bulgaria are about to vote for the seventh time in three years because no party in parliament is willing to support a government proposed by any other party. And that’s good because while we’re in a state of permanent parliamentary crisis, it would be harder to push all the transition trash through. Just one of life’s little paradoxical joys.