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By Paul Homewood – Not A Lot Of People Know That
Thank you Ross Clark, for the best exposee yet of this charlatan:
The future, according to Chris Skidmore as he announced his resignation as an MP on Friday, “will judge harshly” anyone who supports the government’s Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill. Sorry, but it will be even more severe on Skidmore, as the man who committed Britain to economic suicide and failed miserably to inspire the rest of the world to do the same.
It was Skidmore, lest we forget, who drove the 2050 net zero target through the House of Commons in 2019 – without, it now seems, the faintest idea of how it was going to be achieved. All he did appear to know was that it was going to stimulate a huge economic boom for Britain.
In Skidmore’s fantasy world, the net zero target is going to create 480,000 green jobs by 2030 and boost the economy by £1 trillion – figures he trotted out in his review of his own policy commissioned by Liz Truss. Presumably, if it means homeowners having to pay many thousands for heat pumps and motorists being priced off the road, well that is just tough because – in that familiar assertion – the costs of not doing net zero will exceed the costs of doing it.
Net zero is creating “green jobs” alright. Skidmore has already landed himself one: professorship at the University of Bath, focussing on, er, net zero policy. But many of these green jobs seem to have one thing in common: being in campaigning, PR or regulation. As for the industrial jobs actually making, inventing and developing things, we don’t seem to be doing quite so well as some might have thought. How many wind turbines do we make in this country – which is supposed to become a “wind superpower” at some point?
However, we do seem to have stimulated a boom in green jobs elsewhere. China has around 40 per cent of the world’s renewable energy jobs and produced, according to 2021 estimates, 44 per cent of the world’s electric cars. But here is the thing: China doesn’t even have a legally-binding net zero target of its own. Under Western pressure it has set a vague aspiration to eliminate net emissions by 2060, but there isn’t much more than that.
It is doing very well out of the commitment to net zero made by Britain and other Western countries without taking the plunge itself. How come? Cheap energy, for one thing. China is building plenty of wind and solar farms itself but not at the cost of trying to live precariously on intermittent green energy alone. Even now, a majority of power generation in China – perhaps the power being used to manufacture our wind turbines and electric car batteries? – is from coal.
The world is a far messier place than Skidmore’s student-level politics would have it. Rishi Sunak has opted to grant licenses for new oil and gas extraction in the North Sea because he can see, as can anyone with a clear head, that it will take decades for the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. Other countries have come to the same conclusion, expanding their oil and gas production even while muttering platitudes about net zero.
