On the edge of a cliff

Of all of the issues that this election won't fix, "Net Zero" policy is the most dangerous.

WHAT A TIME to be alive in Britain: incontinent immigration and attendant, triumphant cries of “Allahu Akbar!” in our polling stations; the cancerous spread of a sinister sex-based cult in our schools; the corruption of our society by a ruthlessly authoritarian ideology of uniformity, exclusion, and inequality masquerading as “diversity, inclusion, and equality”; ruinously expensive food and energy; collapsing and now frequently non-existent public services and customer care; confiscation of the savings of the hard working for disbursement to the feckless; and everywhere, the signs of a once-thriving nation visibly falling apart.

There’s an election next week. Under normal circumstances, we’d have a chance to put a stop to all of this rot. But these aren’t normal circumstances. On any of these matters, most of us can’t detect any meaningful difference between the main parties. Instead, we’ve a grim choice between “horrifying” and “horrifying”.

And the policy on which there is perhaps the least difference is the one that is the most horrifying. It’s the one that’s going to cause the most damage to us, to our children, and to our children’s children. It’s the determination to shut down, in-flight, the jet engines propelling the 747 of our economy, and to crash-land us in the world of 18th Century energy levels — when cold, poverty, disease, and squalid living conditions produced a life expectancy of around 35.

It’s the energy policy of “Net Zero”.

In this newsletter, I want to show you exactly where this calamitous attempt to replace with sun beams and occasional breezes the abundant, dense, inexpensive energy source with which everything you know has been built will take us. As with many of these matters, it requires a little thought, but not more than high school maths, to understand what’s going on. I think you’ll find it worth the effort.

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The problem is simply stated: it takes energy to get energy. For every hundred units of energy our civilisation produces, some units must be set aside to get the next hundred units. It’s the energy that’s needed to mine, refine, build, operate, maintain, and replace the energy system itself. We live off — literally, we eat, keep warm with, pump clean water with, pump away sewage with, and make medicines with — whatever is left over after we’ve set aside that energy.

Why have you probably never thought about it? Because, with the hydrocarbon and nuclear energy systems that have powered us since the 19th Century, energy is so dense that you haven’t had to. For most of that time, it’s cost about 1 unit of energy to obtain the next 100 units of it. We built and maintained the global energy system and its conjoined twin, the global industrial manufacturing system (more about that in a moment), with that 1 unit. We built the rest of the modern world with the 99 units of energy “profit”.¹

All of that changes with unreliable “renewable” energy systems — the catastrophically expensive Heath Robinson collection of diffuse energy scavenging devices proposed by both parties under the so-called “Net Zero” energy policy to relieve us of the risk of a 0.0 degC increase in earth’s temperature in 100 years’ time.²

Wind and solar energy is so diffuse that you have to set aside a much larger fraction of its output to maintain the system. How much more, and with what consequence? Much more and, as we’ll see, with ruinous consequences. But first, a little bit of maths to help you get your eye in on this:

Look at the top graph. It’s just the maths of what happens to our share of energy as we set aside an increasing amount of it for the energy system’s own replacement. The X-axis is the amount of energy returned for a unit of energy spent getting it. Remember I said we used to get 100 units back? Well now it’s around 30 (on average). The Y-axis is the split between us and our energy system. Red is what has to go back to keep the energy system going. The green is what we get to keep for food, warmth, clean water, and medicines.

As you travel right on the graph, you are replacing the fuel source with successively inferior ones. Which is to say, blowing up your cheap, reliable coal fired power stations and replacing them with expensive, unreliable windmills made in China with energy obtained from (…checks notes…) coal fired power stations.

At a return of 30 units, it doesn’t make much difference. In fact, down to a return of around 8 units, not much changes. But below around 8 units, each additional unit of degradation causes an exponentially decreasing amount of energy left over for us. An energy cliff, if you like. To think about it another way. Imagine paying £1 in £30 of your income for food. Now £1 in £8. Now £1 in £7, £6, £5, £4, £3, £2, … £1.

We can’t just let our energy system contract like that. At the most basic level (i.e. ecological), the number of frogs in a pond is proportional to the amount of energy in the pond. Increase the amount of energy, and the population of frogs goes up. Decrease it, and the population goes down.

Today, around 7 billion humans are only here because we inject continuously a vast amount of energy — from oil, gas, coal, and nuclear — into our global frog pond. “Net Zero” is, above everything else, a program entailing the mass die-off of our species. Compassionately, of course. And with an eye fixed sternly on the need to inhibit as much as possible our recovery from the recent ice age.

So. If destroying our reliable, affordable energy system and replacing it with an unreliable, unaffordable one leaves us with a smaller fraction of the energy pie, and we need the original amount of energy to keep everyone (including ourselves) alive — what must we do?

The answer, of course, is that we must build a larger energy system. How much larger? Well, for example, if our net energy halves, and we need the same amount of energy, then we need two energy systems. That’s the bottom of the two graphs in figure 1. If the UK’s energy system gets down to energy returns below 2, we’ll need to build 4 or 5 UK’s worth of energy systems. Just to get back to where we were with a hydrocarbon and nuclear system.

That will collapse our financial system.

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And the million (well, multi-trillion)³ dollar question: what can we expect from a “Net Zero” system?

There’s no point in asking your politician, or any of the Civil Servants advising her. They don’t even realise that this problem exists.

When you examine the academic literature produced by well paid “renewables” enthusiasts that attempts to calculate energy returns, you’ll notice that they work very hard to try and show that wind and solar systems produce energy returns higher than 8. Now you understand why. They don’t, and not by a long way. So how do they claim they do? Easily — by excluding vast quantities of the energy required in the manufacturing process.

At the start of the essay, we noted that one of the systems we got for the one unit we reserved from our hundred units of energy was the global industrial manufacturing system. That system is globally extensive, and so fantastically energy intensive that it can only run on hydrocarbon and nuclear. The manufacture, operation, and continuous replacement of “renewable” energy gadgets requires its enormously sophisticated mining, transportation, supply chain and manufacturing subsystems.

That rivet in the side of the container ship carrying the lime for the cement in the wall of the factory refining the oxygen for the smelter producing the steel for the computer on which the windmill’s gearbox was designed? That was made with energy obtained from hydrocarbon. In a factory built 50 years ago with energy obtained from hydrocarbon. That will have to be rebuilt, with energy obtained from hydrocarbon.

The food in the policeman’s lunch, without whom the rule of law collapses and you can’t build a factory or write a contract? 50% of all of the food in the world is produced with industrially manufactured fertiliser — made from hydrocarbon.

They ignore all of that. Their academic papers start with the invisible sentence: “Assume my wind turbine was delivered by a stork and found under a gooseberry bush: the energy returned for every unit supplied is eight”. The more sophisticated ones start: “Assume my global industrial manufacturing system was delivered by a stork and found under a gooseberry bush”, and try and calculate the energy in the components of the turbine.⁴ And when you press them, they’ll slice and dice it all up in the hope that you don’t notice that, since the global industrial manufacturing system emerged rather than was designed by us, we’ve no idea how it works as a whole, or what energy flows where, or where all of its millions of single points of failure are. And after all their hand waving and misdirection, “renewables” fatal and insurmountable flaw has not changed: the manufacturing system required to produce them is vast, it’s largely uncharted, and critical sections of it can’t be made to run on electricity.

And when you account for the energy required continuously to maintain and replace the global industrial manufacturing system that renewable gadgets are the product of — that a fully “renewable” energy system would have to power — an energy system built around these contraptions doesn’t even appear on our graph. It lies somewhere off to the right, in the region of physically impossible energy systems that require as much or more energy to sustain than they produce. A bit like a power extension cord plugged back into itself.

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And where does that leave us, the victims of this policy disaster? Standing on the edge of the net-energy cliff. A cliff that every single vote for one of the mainstream parties will help push us over.

Every successful energy transition in human history has been up that net-energy curve, to energy sources of higher returns. History is littered with dozens of civilisations that fell down the net-energy curve — and collapsed. Rome is a prominent example.⁵ Almost invariably, their collapse was the result of them exhausting their energy supply. Our country is unusual in that the bovine Islington metropolitan elite and their regional counterparts are inflicting it on us deliberately so that they can enjoy a brief moment of scientifically illiterate virtue signalling.

Happy voting.

1. Energy profit and financial profit are fundamentally different. There is no financial profit without energy profit. I refer here to energy profit — the units of energy you get back for each unit of energy you spend.

2. See, for example: Lindzen, R et.al. ‘Net Zero Averted Temperature Increase’, 11 June 2024. Using basic physics, they estimate that the effect of the United States eliminating CO2 emissions will be the avoidance of around 0.0084 degrees Centigrade of warming effect.

3. PwC estimates that the global climate catastrophe industry is worth around $6 trillion per year.

4. One of the most cited papers takes an even bolder approach. Extending the boundary to include the manufacturing system is to be avoided, we learn, because doing so would produce a result that is inconsistent with all the other studies that exclude the manufacturing system. I am not making this up. See: Raugei, Marco, Sgouris Sgouridis, David Murphy, Vasilis Fthenakis, Rolf Frischknecht, Christian Breyer, Ugo Bardi, et al. ‘Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) for Photovoltaic Solar Systems in Regions of Moderate Insolation: A Comprehensive Response’. Energy Policy 102 (1 March 2017): 377–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2016.12.042.)

5. For a readable survey, see: Tainter, Joseph A. ‘Social Complexity and Sustainability’. Ecological Complexity 3, no. 2 (June 2006): 91–103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecocom.2005.07.004.