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UK serves as example of self harm resulting from aggressive targets
By Resource Works
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Five years ago, the Trudeau government, along with about 150 other governments around the world, made a promise it surely knew it could never keep.
In less than 30 years, under the Net Zero Emissions Accountability Act, Canada would have to be carbon neutral. That was the pledge.
The act included an interim target: a 40% to 45% reduction in GHG emissions below 2010 levels by 2030.
This was always clearly unachievable because it basically meant cutting our use of fossil fuels nearly in half within a single decade.
We persist with the Net Zero facade, despite growing evidence that aggressive attempts to achieve its targets will not only fail in the first instance, but also can have devastating economic consequences, as the examples of Germany and the UK are demonstrating.
Success looks like failure through a Net Zero lens
Since signing the Paris Agreement ten years ago, Canada has managed to reduce its overall GHG emissions by about 9% from the baseline year of 2005.
That’s not nothing, and much of that would have come from phasing out coal power in Ontario and Alberta.
But when viewed through the Net Zero lens, a 9% reduction looks like failure.
As reality sets in, the Canadian government has revised its interim targets from 2030 to 2035. So, we now have 10 years to achieve another 31% reduction in our total emissions, instead of five years.
Does anyone believe Canada — a country so cold and vast that we necessarily need fossil fuels to get around and keep warm — can achieve a further 31% reduction in emissions in just 10 years?
Canaries in the coal mine
The UK and Germany are good case studies for the folly of net zero and energiewende-style energy policies.
In both cases, aggressive climate policies have resulted in crippling energy prices that are now leading to deindustrialization.
Even before Net Zero became a mania, the UK had set aggressive reduction targets.
The UK’s original Climate Action Act set a target of an 80% reduction in GHG emissions below 1990 levels by 2050.
As if that wasn’t aggressive and unrealistic enough, the UK then doubled down with Net Zero by 2050, along with most other signatories to the Paris Agreement.
Last year, the UK marked a major milestone when its last coal power plant shut down. The UK has achieved a 53% reduction in greenhouse gases since its baseline year of 1990.
That is a truly impressive number, although it still puts the UK short of achieving Net Zero targets.
But as Roger Pielke Jr. points out in a recent piece in Dispatch Energy, a sizable chunk of the UK’s emissions reductions have come from deindustrialization.
“A closer look shows that the U.K.’s headline numbers are not quite as impressive as might be thought, as the country has relied on offshoring energy-intensive economic activity and other actions that take emissions off the national scorecard,” Pielke writes.
Indeed, the UK government itself notes that emissions reductions in the energy industry in the UK is “largely the result of plant closures.”
“Between 2023 and 2024, there was a 7% decrease in greenhouse gas emissions from industry, largely due to blast furnace closures in the iron and steel industry and lower coal use across the sector.”
The UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) reports the output of paper production, petrochemicals, and other energy intensive industries and manufacturing has fallen by one-third since 2021.
Great Britain’s de-industrial revolution
The Industrial Revolution that gave us the modern world started in Great Britain with coal, steel and steam power. And now the UK appears to be leading the way to deindustrialization, thanks in no small part to crippling energy costs.
“Electricity prices for UK industrial users were almost 50% higher than in France and Germany and four times higher than the United States and Canada,” the ONS notes.
When your industrial electricity costs are even higher than Germany’s, you’re in serious trouble, because Germany has some of the highest electricity costs in Europe, thanks to its Energiewende policies.
The UK now gets about 30% of its electricity from wind, 36% of baseload power from natural gas and 19% from nuclear.
The problem for the UK is that it does not produce enough of its own natural gas, and must rely on foreign imports – pipeline gas from Norway and LNG imports from the U.S. and Qatar.
And we know what happens when you become overly reliant on other nations for primary energy like oil and gas: You become vulnerable to disruption from things like war.
The UK has put itself in a precarious situation because, although it does have oil and gas in the North Sea, it has chosen not to exploit it.
Production of the UK’s North Sea oil and gas has been declining, partly due to crippling windfall taxes on oil and gas production that has deterred new exploration and drilling.
The UK government has responded to this decline, not by encouraging exploration and increased production, but by actually banning new North Sea oil and and exploration licences. This is Net Zero at work.
Germany tells a similar tale of woe. In its zeal to be a climate change leader, it is becoming an economic loser.
Since 2000, Germany invested roughly 250 billion Euros ($400 billion Canadian) in wind and solar, shut down all of its nuclear power plants, banned fracking, and tied itself to Russia for gas imports.
We all know how that story ends – with heavy industry, chemical and manufacturing plants shutting down or curtailing due to crippling energy costs.
The Canadian advantage
Canada is less vulnerable to the kind of energy starvation that is now afflicting Germany and the UK because we have energy security. We have plenty of oil and gas, and abundant, clean, and relatively low-priced electricity.
Do we really want to squander this advantage in pursuit of Net Zero? These targets have real policy consequences.
“The Net Zero commitments affect policy even if people believe they are futile, especially spending schemes,” said climate policy critic Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph.
“One potential harm from governments pretending to believe in the climate emergency and the need for Net Zero is that at some point the courts will hold them to it. It has already happened in the EU.
“Also, belief in the Net Zero worldview was sufficient to stop a new west coast pipeline and to seriously delay LNG facilities. What a missed opportunity for us after the Russian and Iranian wars.”
The Mark Carney government has been ditching some of the Trudeau era’s policies, like a consumer carbon tax. But Net Zero is still on the books as part of our official climate action strategy.
Clearly, the energy transition is going to take longer than anyone thought, because fossil fuels are just so damned necessary to modern civilization.
There are things we can still do to reduce our emissions intensity without trying to meet impossible targets: reduce methane emissions from oil and gas production, electrify systems when it is affordable and practical to do so, incentivize electric vehicle and heat pump adoption, developing nuclear power, and carbon capture.
But this should be a marathon, not a sprint, and Net Zero requires it to be a sprint.
Just this week, the B.C. government announced that it is reducing its 2035 zero-emission vehicle mandate target from 100% of sales to 75%. Clearly, 100% was unrealistic, but I’m not sure 75% is all that realistic either.
This is just one example of a policy driven by Net Zero that is both unrealistic and which can have real economic consequences.
It’s time to get real. Net Zero is not real – it’s science fiction.
Nelson Bennett’s column appears weekly at Resource Works News. Contact him at [email protected]
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