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Environmentalism has a difficult relationship with democracy. Claims that the planet can only be saved by a radical transformation of society rarely, if ever, state the need to persuade voters of the case for such changes. Consequently, there is no real culture of democracy within the green movement.

According to an article (now removed, but referred to by the Daily Sceptic here) by Eric Heyman published by Deutsche Bank Research,

If we really want to achieve climate neutrality, we need to change our behaviour in all these areas of life. This is simply because there are no adequate cost-effective technologies yet to allow us to maintain our living standards in a carbon-neutral way. That means that carbon prices will have to rise considerably in order to nudge people to change their behaviour. Another (or perhaps supplementary) option is to tighten regulatory law considerably. I know that “eco-dictatorship” is a nasty word. But we may have to ask ourselves the question whether and to what extent we may be willing to accept some kind of eco-dictatorship (in the form of regulatory law) in order to move towards climate neutrality.

Similarly, in an article called ‘Democracy is the planet’s biggest enemy‘, Professor of Politics at Cambridge University, David Runciman flirted with Chinese Communist Party authoritarianism to save the planet…

If electoral democracy is inadequate to the task of addressing climate change, and the task is the most urgent one humanity faces, then other kinds of politics are urgently needed. The most radical alternative of all would be to consider moving beyond democracy altogether. The authoritarian Chinese system has some advantages when it comes to addressing climate change: One-party rule means freedom from electoral cycles and less need for public consultation. Technocratic solutions that put power in the hands of unelected experts could take key decisions out of the hands of voters.

Runciman rules this out as impractical (rather than merely abhorrent) in favour of ‘deliberative democracy’, which could reconcile the putative antagonisms between the interests of young people (and future generations) and older voters, who Runciman believes vote in their own interests rather than in favour of pro-climate policies. But Runciman believes that the young are a single political constituency, who are all aligned behind and spoken for by Greta Thunberg, and who require deep transformations of conventional democratic processes, including extending the vote to children, in order to be properly ‘represented’. This view is as patronising as it is anti-democratic.

Many other candid comments from green activists of all kinds reveal that representative democracy is incompatible with the climate agenda. Below are six facts that show that the green movement has already created an unbridgeable democratic deficit.

1. The cross-party Westminster consensus on climate policy. Since the 2000s, the UK’s major political parties have been marching in lockstep on the climate change agenda. Just five MPs voted against the 2008 Climate Change Bill, and the 2019 Net Zero amendment to the Act was debated by MPs for just 90 minutes and passed with no vote. In 2015, the consensus was cemented by the leaders of the three largest parties, who signed a pledge put to them by green lobbying organisation, the Green Alliance, to “work together, across party lines, to agree carbon budgets in accordance with the Climate Change Act“. In this way, the cross-party consensus excludes the public, and the public’s interest from policymaking.

2. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Each year since 1995, nearly all of the world’s governments meet to try to negotiate a global climate agreement, under the UNFCCC process, known as Conference of Parties (CoP) meetings. The 2021 COP meeting was held in Glasgow, in the UK. But though countless green NGOs attend, seemingly representing the views of non-governmental ‘stakeholders’, including the world’s poorest people and ‘indigenous peoples’, there is no discussion about the democratic legitimacy of the UNFCCC process and what it intends to achieve. World governments may ultimately strike a deal between themselves, but this will likely only be a ‘deal’ that suits the interests of the financial and political elites, not the world’s population of ordinary people.

3. Net Zero policies. During the Covid pandemic lockdowns, urged on by incentives offered by the UK government, many local governments began imposing restrictions on the use of roads in a number of cities. Known as Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs), these restrictions either block the roads, or impose fines on motorists who use them without a permit. Local authorities and mayors are committed to LTNs, Low-Emissions Zones, congestion charging, and other anti-private transport policies despite overwhelmingly negative polling and consultation responses, and have stated their intention to ignore them. Typically local governments are elected on extremely low turnouts, and are dominated by political parties that are part of the cross-party consensus described in point #1, and have accordingly agreed between themselves to put the climate agenda before the voters’ wishes. This means that only new parties can reverse the policies.

4. Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG). In the 2010s, a new system of ‘ethical capitalism’ emerged to replace the earlier fashion for Corporate Social Responsibility, to incorporate deeper commitments to social justice and environmental concerns. ESG has taken a number of forms, including shareholder activism, divestment, and both voluntary and increasingly mandatory financial reporting requirements, supported by governments, their financial ministries, central banks and other financial regulators. One major effect of this has been to push capital investment away from hydrocarbon energy production, for example, by forcing financial institutions to withdraw services to energy companies, helping to trigger the energy supply crisis in Europe and the UK, and causing energy prices to skyrocket. But critics have pointed out that this is governance and regulation by the back door: it turns financial markets and financial institutions into a form of government, which is not subject to democratic control. This gives financial elites — corporations, banks, and large investment funds — extraordinary power over people, that governments used to protect people from.

5. Technocracy. The 2008 UK Climate Change Act created, and required Parliament to take the advice of UK Climate Change Committee (CCC), which would set ‘carbon budgets’, stating how much CO2 the country is allowed to emit in each budget period through to 2050. But in passing this act, and creating a new climate bureaucracy, MPs agreed to defer to this superficially ‘independent’ panel of experts, rather than to represent the interests of their constituents and to scrutinise policies. Though Parliament remains sovereign, in practice this puts many legal obstacles in the way of democratic representation, and creates the opportunity for private interests and undemocratic green campaigning organisation to use the courts to force the government to implement policies that are impractical, and do not serve the public’s interest or wishes. Similarly, the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is conceived of as the ‘scientific consensus’ that drives the UNFCCC process — global climate policymaking. But both the CCC and the IPCC have serious flaws, are not subject to any meaningful oversight, and deference to them creates the possibility of corruption by ideologies and special interests. Although panels of experts might seem like a good idea, science proceeds by debate, so assigning policy-making functions to scientific committees risks turning a scientific institution into a political institution. Evidence-based policy-making soon becomes policy-based evidence-making.

6. The exclusion of non-conforming views from academia, civil society and the media. The climate policy agenda is much more driven by pressure from civil society, academic research and news organisations (all of which often emphasise worst-case scenarios in their commentary) than it is driven by democratic will. And the alignment of these institutions with the climate agenda has arguably been driven by money, power and exclusion, not be debate. Following complaints from green activists about climate sceptics appearing on its news programmes, the BBC committed itself to advancing the green agenda, and refusing airtime to critics of climate policy. Academics who have spoken out against alarmist interpretations of global warming have faced censure, censorship and loss of their jobs. And the many civil society organisations that lobby for green policies turn out to have been founded, or funded wholly or in large part by a small number of “philanthropic” foundations that are committed to climate politics. The effect of this has been to silence researchers, journalists and would-be political campaigners who might take a different view of the green agenda to the organisations that should be the homes of free and independent research and investigation. There is no place within mainstream academic research, news media or third sector organisations for individuals who disagree.

The voter has never been given an opportunity by any of the UK’s political parties to express a view on the climate policy agenda. And it would seem given the evidence above that, if democracy ever has been a consideration in green policy-making, it was an afterthought. It is hard not to conclude that politicians’ major determination is to mitigate democracy rather than global warming.

Green comments in response to the recent crisis in UK domestic energy prices have claimed that the ‘gas market’ is responsible.

The CarbonBrief blog, for example (which is also the origin of the false claim that “wind power is nine times cheaper than gas“) claims that “An 11-fold increase in UK wholesale gas prices since 2019 explains 96% of the increase in household energy bills”, and that,

According to a 2011 “factsheet” from energy regulator Ofgem: “Higher gas prices have been the main driver of increasing energy bills over the last eight years [since 2003].”

At the LSE, green campaigning academic Annushka Ahuja writes that,

The energy crisis has been building up over the past year, as increased demand during the post-Covid reopening of economies coincided with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a subsequent squeeze on gas supplies into Europe. Consequently, a steep rise in the wholesale price of gas has driven up the amount that energy providers pay for gas and electricity – and that cost is now being passed on to the consumer – though recent policy interventions have somewhat helped cushion the extent of this impact.

Typically, attempts from green lobbyists cite the rising cost of gas to argue for more “investment” in renewable generation.

But these claims only tell half the story. Gas prices have risen, but the volatility of gas market prices is not mysterious. Campaigners and politicians who claim that the market is beyond their control are trying to avoid responsibility for their own actions.

First, the historic price of gas shows that low prices are technically feasible. In the past, and until the lockdowns and before countries’ sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, gas prices were much lower than they are now, and far lower than the price of wind power.

Second, the EU and many member states and the UK have produced legislation that either limits or prevents new gas exploration. Spain, Germany, France, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and the UK have all imposed limits on hydrocarbon energy production in recent years, despite being gas consumers. This has increased dependence on imports, most controversially from Russia, but also from undemocratic regimes such as Qatar. European countries have also put financial restrictions on energy companies. [H/t to John Dodders for the info].

Third, the UN and G20 central banks have pushed for ESG targets, in collusion with green financial lobbying interests, to mobilise shareholder activists to put pressure on financial institutions to withdraw services, such as finance and insurance, in order to prevent further gas exploration. Furthermore, those same lobbying interests have stated their intention to use the legal process to prevent new licenses being granted to energy companies, continuing the campaign of lawfare to undermine oil and gas companies’ share value by trying to hold them liable for damages they claim will be caused by global warming. ESG, divestment and lawfare campaigning organisations have been extremely successful in raising the costs of oil and gas projects, thereby limiting the supply and increasing costs to consumers in Europe.

Fourth, citing climate concerns, international agencies such as the World Bank have stopped financing oil and gas projects in developing economies. This has reduced the economic outlook for some of the world’s poorest countries, in the most dire need of development and reliable sources of energy. This has led to well-founded criticism that the World Bank is in fact anti-development.

Fifth, despite claims that there is a “global market” for natural gas, the effect of different policy regimes can be clearly demonstrated by a comparison of natural gas prices in Europe and the USA. The USA, which has permitted shale gas exploration has markedly lower natural gas prices, and has not been exposed to recent energy prices to the same extent as Europeans. Domestic energy production, nearly banned in Europe, has allowed American industries and its economy to be relatively unaffected, and even to be advantaged by recent events.

The claim that gas is driving the current crisis is therefore entirely disingenuous. It is green policy that has driven gas price rises.

According to the World Economic Forum, China is a global leader in investment in “energy transition investment”:

China increased its overall energy transition investment by 60% from 2020 levels, further cementing its position as a global leader. The country’s wind and solar capacity increased by 19% in 2021, with electrified transport also accounting for a large portion of the investment.

This claim echos many western approvals of China’s apparently booming green sector. But how true is it?

China’s energy demand has skyrocketed in recent decades, and most of this has been met by coal.

How does this compare to the UK?

The UK has virtually eliminated coal use.

Though China’s coal use has increased in absolute terms, as a proportion of its energy mix, it has slightly diminished.

But the UK has significantly more renewable energy

	UK	China
Wind	8.85%	3.95%
Solar	1.70%	1.97%

China produces slightly more solar power as a proportion of its total energy mix, but the contribution of wind to the UK’s total energy mix is more than twice as much as China’s.

But a more interesting picture is revealed by the UK’s total energy demand.

The UK’s energy demand has been falling because it is deindustrialising. Meanwhile, energy demand has been growing in China because its government has focused policy on industrialisation. Labour and energy (mostly coal) is much cheaper in China, and so manufacturers have been leaving the UK and Europe and setting up in China. Meanwhile UK and European green policies, which increase the costs of industry and manufacturing, merely create a market for Chinese manufacturers.

According to a report by John Constable for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, China is now a global leader in technologies the demand for which is created by European policy.

In the wake of the recent natural gas price crisis, politicians and campaigners have claimed that wind power is “nine times cheaper” than power produced from gas plants.

The origin of the claim is the green-billionaire funded eco-propaganda blog, Carbon Brief, which published an article in July 2022 comparing wholesale electricity prices with “strike prices” offered by wind power developers, under the Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme — the main element of the UK’s electricity generation capacity market.

But there are many problems with Carbon Brief’s claim.

High natural gas prices were caused by the following factors:

• Long term green policy throughout the EU and UK prohibiting or restricting natural gas exploration and extraction, including fracking.
• Lockdowns had caused gas production to be ramped down.
• The rising cost of capital for hydrocarbon energy projects, caused by, among other things, divestment and ESG campaigns aimed at financial institutions and investors, causing a collapse in investment over the 2010s. This also had the effect of compounding the problem of capital cost when lockdowns ended, making it harder to increase production.
• EU and NATO member states’ sanctions against Russia. The green agenda had caused EU members to make themselves dependent on Russian energy exports.

The first observation to make is that, not coincidentally, Carbon Brief’s own funders, and its sibling campaigning organisations, were instrumental in creating some of those problems, which caused natural gas prices to spike far above their historical average prices. They are campaigning organisations that have lobbied hard for policies to close coal and gas production and generation in Europe and the UK, and who proudly boast about their successes.

However, as the following chart shows, the above factors caused a massive spike above the cost of natural gas from a historic low in 2020.

The second observation to make about Carbon Brief’s analysis is that it was produced in July 2022, and updated on the 24th of August. The significance of this date is shown on the following chart of gas prices, which is zoomed into the year to date…

Carbon Brief’s analysis was made as European and British gas prices were peaking, from which the price fell significantly. If it was true that ‘wind power is nine times cheaper than gas’, it would only be true for a matter of days. It makes no more sense to compare the price of wind power to gas at such a peak than it would comparing wind power to the price of gas on May 24 2020, which was £8.34/therm — just 1/77th of its peak price in 2022. It is historical average prices that count. Moreover, the true potential cost of gas is much lower in a scenario in which more exploration and extraction had been permitted — fracking for example — rather than banned.

The third observation is that whereas natural gas prices were real, which is to say that the charts above indicate what traders were buying and selling gas for on the European markets, the Strike Prices offered by wind farm developers have never been achieved. Offshore wind farm operators have offered extremely low Strike Prices for power since 2017, driving many claims that the costs of the technology were falling. The first of these wind farms were due to start selling power to the grid this year. But rather than committing to the prices they had seemingly agreed to, they simply sold power at the market price, which Carbon Brief correctly reports as at the time £446/MWh. This reneging on their agreements has led to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to accuse wind farm operators of not acting “fairly”.

Finally, as Net Zero Watch have pointed out in their rebuttal of Carbon Brief’s claims:

Onshore wind is more than twice the long-term cost of gas-fired power and the cost is going up. Offshore is between three and four times as expensive, and is at best only coming down slightly.

The simple term for Carbon Brief’s claim that “wind power is nine times cheaper than gas” is untrue.

Low-lying island states have become a major symbol of the urgency of global climate talks. In 2009, Mohammed Nasheed, President of the Maldives, held an underwater cabinet meeting as a stunt to highlight what he believed the perilous situation his country faced, ahead of that year’s UNFCCC COP meeting in Copenhagen.

But evidence that sea level rise, driven by global warming and climate change, is impacting such small islands is far less robust than activists claim. A 2021 study of satellite images and survey of the scientific evidence found that, in fact, the Maldives and other island states had increased in area in recent decades.

Despite concerns of erosion driven by sea level rise, no published evidence exists of pervasive erosion of atoll islands at a global scale. Existing studies of atoll island change have been based on small, temporally sparse samples of islands on a limited number of atolls. As a result, the global response of atoll islands coincident with sea level rise remains uncertain. Using rich collections of Landsat imagery, this study analyses changes in land area on 221 atolls in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Results show that, between 2000 and 2017, the total land area on these atolls has increased by 61.74 km² (6.1 %) from 1007.60 km² to 1069.35 km². Most of the change in land area resulted from island building within the Maldives and on atolls in the South China Sea. Since 2000, the Maldives have added 37.50 km² of land area, while 16.57 km² of new islands have appeared within the South China Seas Spratly and Paracel chains.

Just two of the island states studied showed loss of area.

A slightly earlier study suggested that due to the nature of the way they are formed, many islands of this kind may not be vulnerable to sea level rise at all:

…emerging data suggest that different island types, in contrasting locations, have formed under different conditions in relation to past sea level. Uniform assumptions about reef island futures under sea level rise may thus be inappropriate.

It seems that fears about islands sinking beneath the oceans does not have the backing of strong evidence.

Many politicians and activists claim that enforcing Net Zero compliance on households will ultimately reduce their energy bills.

But retrofitting homes with insulation and heat pumps, and other “energy efficiency” measures is not cheap. According to the UK Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee of MPs, the current government has significantly underestimated the costs of making homes compliant with Net Zero:

19 million UK properties need energy efficiency upgrades to meet EPC band C, and the EAC heard in evidence that it can cost on average £18,000 (before a heat pump installation). Therefore, the cost is likely to be far greater than the Government’s estimate.

And this may be an underestimate. In a policy experiment run by Kirklees Council, eight houses were retrofitted. According to the local authority,

Initial results have shown a reduction in carbon emissions by 50%-75%, saving tenants between £190-£350 a year on their energy bills.

This experiment has been highlighted by the Labour Party in their new policy agenda. But what neither they nor Kirklees council explained was how much this retrofitting cost. This was revealed by an investigation for the Daily Mail newspaper.

The Opposition Leader praised a Labour council’s green energy housing scheme to cut fuel bills in his conference speech – but failed to mention the eye-watering cost.

He said the pilot project to retrofit eight council houses in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, with the latest energy-saving insulation and fittings had saved residents ‘over a grand’ on their winter fuel bill.

But retrofitting each house cost around £60,000. It means doing the same for the nation’s 1.6 million council houses would cost £96 billion. 

This is consistent with estimates produced last decade by the now defunct Energy Technologies Institute (ETI), which found that,

Although very deep retrofits are technically feasible, their cost could potentially be similar to the cost of rebuilding the entire UK housing stock (in excess of £2 trillion)

At the time of writing, the average interest rate on a five year fixed-rate mortgage was 6.36%. This means that the interest payments on a £60,000 loan on a home would be £3,816 per year — more than ten times the savings achieved by the Kirklees experiment.

Assuming the EAC’s estimate plus the cost of a heat pump is equivalent to half that cost (i.e. £30,000), interest payments on such a loan would still be five times the reduction in energy bills. And, of course, repayment at that rate means the debt will never be repaid.

Net Zero is not going to reduce energy bills — the exact opposite.

Natural disasters are one of the least significant mortality risk factors in the world.

But is the problem getting better or worse?

There has clearly been a significant fall in the number of deaths caused by natural disasters, including extreme weather, over the 20th Century.

The number of people killed by natural disasters today is a tiny fraction of the number killed 120 years ago.

Claims that storms, hurricanes or tropical cyclones are becoming more frequent or intense are made very often, but have no basis in observations.

As the data compiled by Dr. Ryan Maue shows, there is no increase in the frequency of major (category 4 or 5) or minor hurricanes in the Atlantic. Since we can see no increase in the ratio of major hurricanes, it is clear that there has been no increase in intensity either.

The same is true of storms at the global scale.

And the measure of Accumulated Cyclone Energy also shows that there is no evidence of a climate change signal.

A recent study published in the journal Nature Communications found that

… there are no significant increases in either basin-wide [Atlantic hurricanes] or [major hurricane] frequency, or in the [Atlantic hurricane]/[Major hurricane] ratio for the Atlantic basin between 1878 and 2019 (when the U.S. Signal Corps started tracking [North Atlantic major hurricanes]).

and that,

The homogenized basin-wide [Atlantic hurricane] and [major hurricane] record does not show strong evidence of a century-scale increase in either [major hurricane] frequency or [Atlantic hurricane]/[major hurricane] ratio associated with the century-scale, greenhouse-gas-induced warming of the planet.

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Read more in our article about storms.

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