As I write this, the outside temperature languishes at four degrees below zero. Londoners describe the weather as “bloody freezing out there”, which proves yet again that material things are all relative.
This sort of temperature in mid-January wouldn’t even qualify as cold, never mind bloody freezing, where I come from. As Messrs Napoleon and Hitler could testify, Moscow’s climate can be rather inclement in winter.
However, there’s a salient difference between the Moscow of my childhood and the London of my dotage: when it got cold, Muscovites talked about their climate, whereas Londoners are only allowed to mention weather.
The weather sections of our newspapers issue this injunction in no uncertain terms. Some of you ignoramuses out there, they explain (if not in so many words), think the sub-zero temperatures give the lie to the noble concept of global warming.
They don’t, and if you still persist in your subversive ignorance, you risk getting done for global warming denial. What we are having at the moment is merely a cold snap, which has nothing to do with the issue in hand. It’s weather, you moron, not climate.
The more obdurate naysayers among us may remark that, whenever we have a heatwave, the same papers insist it’s invariably climate, not just weather. Still, I’m happy to know that global warming is still on. Otherwise we’d have to think our energy bills are skyrocketing for no good cause.
Ed Miliband never doubts the cause. For our Secretary for Energy Security and Net Zero, to spell out his title in every excruciating detail, his position isn’t just a job. It’s his sacralised ideology, the very essence of his being, his soul totally dedicated to wreaking as much destruction on his hated ‘capitalism’ as he can manage.
In what passes for his mind, Ed sees no upper limit for the number of wind and solar farms carpeting Britain. Cover every square inch, see if he cares: every farm strikes a blow for ‘our planet’, and Ed doesn’t care how much misery he has to cause to save that heavenly body from capitalist depredations.
After all, all those turbines cost an awful lot to build and install, up to £70,000 each. But then we’ve always known that. What we – well, I – didn’t know is that those turbines also cost millions to turn off, £400 million last year, to be precise.
This reminds me of a rude but true story involving Marilyn Monroe. One location shoot was dragging on and on, and the star was getting exasperated. Finally, she called her agent and asked: “Who do I have to f*** to get off this picture?”
See what I’m getting at? The parallel with the extortionist cost of stopping those damn things from turning is obvious, to me at least.
The problem is that too much energy may be as problematic as too little. When the wind blows with gusto for days on end, the system can’t cope. The National Grid can no longer use the glut locally, and it can’t export it to areas where more energy is needed.
Consumers have to bear the onus of ‘constraint payments’, those imposed on them to make the turbines less hyperactive when the wind picks up. As renewable energy proliferates, constraint payments alone will run to billions, which is to say thousands for every household.
The grid needs to expand significantly to accommodate the forests of turbines being planted by Ed Miliband and his accomplices. Such expansion will be extremely costly, but cost is never a problem for chaps like Ed. The money isn’t theirs, is it?
It’s not the money but the delay that they find unbearable. After all, their tenure has certain in-built limitations. If the Tories sort themselves out, possibly by reaching some arrangement with Reform, Ed may not have more than another four years in office.
This is a risibly short time to inflict as much damage as he craves on the fat cats, defined as any Britons who have any discretionary income at all or – dread word – investments. Their cupidity cries out for punishment, and Ed is the man to administer it.
As a former leader of the Labour Party, he could have become prime minister but didn’t, even though he had to stab his brother David in the back to get ahead. Had Ed moved to 10 Downing Street, his punitive zeal would have found a vast arena for self-expression. But, as Ed is proving every day, even his present, more limited, brief is rife with possibilities.
All one has to do is roll back, ideally eliminate, the production of oil and gas, while also closing old nuclear power stations and refusing to build new ones. That puts paid to cheap energy and leaves the people at the mercy of renewables that attack consumers from several directions.
First, the grid will have to be expanded, and guess who’ll bear the ultimate cost? Then it’ll be necessary to create adequate storage facilities, a little detail that escaped the attention of net zero zealots. Then provisions will have to be made for generating energy on the days when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine – and I must inform you that such days do happen in Britain.
This means consumers bearing the staggering cost of building battery farms, with household energy bills rising steeply every step of the way. And that’s not the end, nowhere near.
For even if Miliband succeeds in building the extra 3,500 wind turbines by 2030 and doubling onshore wind capacity to 30GW, that’ll be not even close to the amount necessary to power modern industry. That means British consumers will have to pay exorbitant amounts for imported oil and gas, while also seeing huge rises in the cost of most goods.
But never mind consumers, feel the ideology. The kind Ed Miliband swears by got a galvanising jolt from the larcenous swindle of global warming. With their eagle’s eye the Milibandits of this world saw their great chance to make Marx’s prophecies come true.
There it was, the crisis of capitalism within easy reach. If that loathsome abomination stubbornly refuses to collapse under its own weight, the Milibandits can use climate according to Archimedes’s adage: “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”
Climate change provided both the lever and the fulcrum to prise capitalism off its foundations and dump it into what Trotsky called “the rubbish bin of history”.
Hence the Milibandits’ legerdemain with weather and climate. They know from their long history of chicanery that statistics can yield any result you want, provided you choose the right subset.
When analysing climate, serious scientists looking for truth consider centuries or even millennia. Venal scientists funded by the Milibandits can make do with a couple of decades or even a few years here and there. Once they’ve identified a period that fits, no matter how short, they construct their bogus ‘hockey stick’ graphs to illustrate the plight of ‘our planet’ reeling from the blows of capitalism.
Here I have to disagree with Joseph de Maistre, which I seldom do. Not every nation gets the government it deserves, and Britain is a woeful proof. No Western nation deserves to have Milibandits on the prowl, looking for another back to stab.