GWPF Newsletter: Teenage 'Anti-Greta' To Confront Climate Activists At Conference In America

Naomi Seibt: ‘I Don’t Want You To Panic. I Want You To Think’

In this newsletter:

1) Teenage 'Anti-Greta' To Confront Climate Activists At Conference In America
The Daily Telegraph, 24 February 2020
 
2) Naomi Seibt: ‘I Don’t Want You To Panic. I Want You To Think’
The Heartland Institute, February 2020

 
3) The Price Of Climate Hysteria: European Green Deal Risks Breaking EU Apart
EurActiv, 20 February 2020
 
4) ‘Red Wall’ Tory MPs Plot Revolt If Boris Johnson Hikes Fuel Duty In PM’s First Major Test
The Sun, 22 February 2020

5) Millions Of Britons Could Be Plunged Into Fuel Poverty Over Coal And Wet Log Ban
Daily Express, 22 February 2020

6) Andrew Montford: It’s Time For An Honest Debate About The Cost Of Net Zero
The Spectator, 24 February 2020
 
7) Harry Wilkinson: The Mind-Boggling Cost Of Net Zero
The Conservative Woman, 25 February 2020
 
8) Melanie Phillips: The Real Western Civilisation Emergency
Melanie Phillips, 21 February 2020

Full details:

1) Teenage 'Anti-Greta' To Confront Climate Activists At Conference In America
The Daily Telegraph, 24 February 2020
 
America is about to be introduced to a climate change sceptic dubbed the "anti-Greta".


 
Naomi Seibt, 19, will appear at the Conservative Political Action Conference [CPAC], this week where Donald Trump is the main speaker. It is the biggest annual jamboree for grass-roots Republicanism in the United States.
 
Miss Seibt, who is from Germany, has been dubbed the "anti-Greta" because of her views on climate change, which are in stark contrast to those of Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage environmental campaigner.
 
She features in a video produced by the Heartland Institute, a US think tank which rejects the scientific consensus on climate change.
 
The video, titled "Naomi Seibt vs. Greta Thunberg: whom should we trust?” splices footage of the two European teenagers making opposing cases.
 
In a speech at the United Nations last year Greta excoriated world leaders and demanded quick and decisive action.
 
She said: "Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money, and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!"

Greta, 17, has become the face of a movement and been named Time magazine’s "Person of the Year".
 
Ms Seibt says she used to be like Greta but is now sceptical of what she calls "climate alarmism".
 
In a video posted on YouTube, which has had 24,000 views, she said: "I used to be a climate change alarmist myself because, obviously, as a young girl I grew up around the climate change hysteria in the media, in my school books.
 
"I was an innocent young girl and I thought by hugging the trees I could save the planet, which quite frankly turned out not to be true."
 
She calls the consensus on climate change an "insult to science, and the complexity of nature, and freedom of speech" and says "it is important we keep questioning the narrative that is out there."
 
She adds: "Climate change alarmism at its very core is a despicably anti-human ideology. We are told to look down on our achievements with guilt, shame, disgust and not even to take into account the many major benefits we have from using fossil fuels as our main energy source.
 
"Look around. We are living in such an amazing era of fast progress and innovation. We are not allowed to be proud of that at all? Instead debates are being shut down and real scientists lose their jobs."
 
Miss Seibt's position is that human activity is a factor in climate change but that it has been overstated.
 
Full story
 
2) Naomi Seibt: ‘I Don’t Want You To Panic. I Want You To Think’
The Heartland Institute, February 2020
 
Naomi Seibt, a 19-year-old German YouTube personality and influencer, has joined The Heartland Institute's Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy. Naomi will be working on communicating the climate realism message to her generation – which has marinated in apocalyptic nonsense their whole lives – for audiences in both in Europe and the United States. See her personal channel here.
 

Watch the short video by clicking on the image above

Unlike the global legacy media’s favorite young climate communicator, Greta Thunberg, Naomi doesn’t want you to “panic.” She wants you to “think” – the way she did to free herself from the climate alarmist indoctrination. As she says in this video introducing herself on Heartland’s YouTube Channel:
 
“I’ve got very good news for you. The world is not ending because of climate change. In fact, 12 years from now we will still be around casually taking photos on our iPhone 18s. … We are currently being force-fed a very dystopian agenda of climate alarmism that tells us that we as humans are destroying the planet. And that the young people, especially, have no future – that the animals are dying, that we are ruining nature.
 
“I really believe that many [members of left-wing environmental groups] have good intentions, that they are genuinely scared of the world ending, and that they are scared that their parents and grandparents are ruining the planet. It’s breaking relationships. It’s breaking up families. And we at The Heartland Institute, we want to spread truth about the science behind climate realism, which is essentially the opposite of climate alarmism.
 
“Many people are now actually developing mental disorders and referring to them as eco-anxiety and eco-depression. I believe it’s important that we act now and change this entire mainstream narrative of fear-mongering and climate alarmism, because it’s basically just holding us hostage in our own brains. Don’t let an agenda that is trying to depict you as an energy-sucking leech on the planet get into your brain and take away all of your passionate spirit. I don’t want you to panic. I want you to think.”
 
3) The Price Of Climate Hysteria: European Green Deal Risks Breaking EU Apart
EurActiv, 20 February 2020
 
The European Green Deal “will definitely create tensions” inside the EU, and risks pushing “two or three countries” to leave the Union altogether, warns former Romanian President Traian Basescu, saying the real priority in Romania is to build new infrastructure like motorways and exploit natural gas resources from the Black Sea.
 
“The Green Deal will require re-skilling, job losses and investment,” says former Romanian President Traian Basescu, who warns that the €10 billion in EU funding currently envisaged for Romania’s energy transition is “ridiculous”.
 
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS:
* Many EU countries do not have the financial resources required to meet the climate and clean energy objectives of the European Green Deal.
 
* The EU’s current funding proposal for Romania is “ridiculous,” he says. “With €10 billion, it is impossible to close down the coal energy production in our country”.
 
* “Our real priorities in Romania is to build infrastructure like motorways” and railways as well as modernising education and the healthcare system.
 
* Romania “cannot compromise” these infrastructure projects for the Green Deal because they “are a key element” of the country’s development.
 
* Such “discrepancies between EU and national priorities are likely to generate huge tensions inside the EU, which could lead to some countries considering the possibility of leaving the Union altogether.”
 
* “It is only when we have more clarity and analyse the impact of the Green Deal on our economy that we will see whether the EU will remain united or will lose two or three members.”
 
* “ExxonMobil and Lukoil are ready to exploit gas deposits” in the Black Sea, which Băsescu says will be essential to replace Romania’s coal power plants: “Without investing in its own gas projects, it will be impossible for Romania and other Member States to meet the new European carbon emissions targets.”
 
Full interview
 
4) ‘Red Wall’ Tory MPs Plot Revolt If Boris Johnson Hikes Fuel Duty In PM’s First Major Test
The Sun, 22 February 2020

BORIS Johnson has been warned he faces his first major revolt as PM if he ditches his pledge to keep fuel duty frozen.

Dozens of Tory MPs in ‘Red Wall’ seats are to write a letter to the new Chancellor Rishi Sunak next week warning him not to hike fuel duty.

Senior Conservative MP Robert Halfon said ending the freeze would anger ­millions who voted for the PM for the first time in December’s general election.
He said: “This is a number one cost of living indicator.”

He is drumming up support for the letter following our revelation earlier this week that the Treasury is considering hiking duty to raise £4billion a year. It would boost the Government’s green credentials ahead of the UN climate change conference in the summer.

Many in the so-called ‘Red Wall’ seats are said to be signing the letter, which will warn the PM that ending the fuel duty freeze after a decade would damage the Tories in the crucial seats they must keep to stay in power.

If more than 40 Tory MPs in those areas sign the letter they would have the numbers to defeat the PM in the Commons as he has an 80-seat majority.
 
Full post
 
5) Millions Of Britons Could Be Plunged Into Fuel Poverty Over Coal And Wet Log Ban
Daily Express, 22 February 2020

MILLIONS of people living in rural parts of Britain will be plunged into fuel poverty when a ban on burning coal and wet logs comes into force next year, experts warned last night.

Traditional coal and wet wood fuels are to be phased out as part of plans to slash toxic particles being pumped into the air.
 
But the Government was told last night the move would force consumers to switch to more expensive alternatives, leaving some unable to afford to heat their homes.

Around 2.5 million households are now living in fuel poverty - where the home cannot be kept warm at a reasonable cost - at a time energy bills are soaring. Some 17,000 deaths a year are caused by cold homes.
 
Ian Gregory, an adviser to the fuel industry, said: “This is gesture politics of the worst type and is going to hit the rural poor the hardest. Alternatives are twice as expensive and unaffordable for many.
 
“Nearly 4 million people are off the gas grid in the UK, and 92 percent of our coal is imported from countries like Russia and Australia. It’s baffling as well as barmy.”
 
The move by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will affect around 4 million households. Environmentalists said burning coal and wet wood releases tiny pollutant particles which can lead to serious health conditions.

George Eustice, the Environment Secretary and former special adviser to David Cameron, heralded the ban as a vital step towards achieving a clean air strategy.

But cynics said it was policy to placate an increasingly vocal and mobile climate change lobby ahead of the UN climate change conference in Glasgow in November.
 
Around 2.5 million homes in the UK have open fires or increasingly popular wood-burning stoves which provide the only source of heat.
 
Full story
 
6) Andrew Montford: It’s Time For An Honest Debate About The Cost Of Net Zero
The Spectator, 24 February 2020
 
When the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) launched its report on the feasibility of entirely decarbonising the UK economy, we were told the expense involved was manageable. The CCC’s chief executive Chris Stark explained that the project ‘carried a cost – of one to two per cent of GDP – which was affordable’. His claims were noted approvingly by MPs during debates in Parliament on whether to enshrine a ‘net zero’ emissions target in law.
 
While others complained about the lack of a clear cost-benefit case, CCC chairman Lord Deben put aside these concerns. He told the Lords: ‘the report has been recognised universally as the most seriously presented, costed effort…’ A recent leader in The Spectator said the CCC had been ‘admirably candid.’ If only.
 
The truth is that the CCC has not given a full estimate of its net-zero target. The only fact it has offered is that the cost would be one to two of GDP in the year 2050. It makes no statement about the cost before then. We only know this because of a response to a Freedom of Information request. So how much it will cost to get to net zero? Contrary to what The Spectator assured its readers, we still don’t know. In other words, it has not actually prepared a costing of the net zero project at all. This is an extraordinary admission given what Lord Deben said in the Lords debate.
 
Not long ago, another CCC member, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Paul Johnson, told The Week in Westminster that ‘the cost of getting to net zero by 2050 will be in the order of one to two per cent national income, each year between now and then’.
 
But how can this possibly be when no estimates have been prepared for all those intervening years? As Mr Johnson is not saying, and the CCC refuse to comment – or reveal the calculations behind the one to two per cent figure they quote so frequently – it is hard to have much confidence that the decision to go net zero is well founded.
 
We are embarked on a journey towards an economic revolution, some might argue to economic disaster. Yet those in charge don’t even seem to ask any basic questions about how much it’s all going to cost.
 
The Treasury itself has yet to complete an assessment. A leak to the FT last summer cited a letter from Philip Hammond (when he was chancellor) to the effect that the ‘CCC has estimated that reaching net zero will cost £50bn a year, but the department for Business, Energy and Industrial strategy puts the figure at £70bn’.
 
Hammond was quoted as saying ‘on the basis of these estimates, the total cost of transitioning to a zero-carbon economy is likely to be well in excess of a trillion pounds.’ It could, of course, be far more. But we don’t know because none of the government departments involved have published a definitive statement on costs. Even the CCC haven’t done the sums.
 
The Commons Treasury Select Committee, meanwhile, decided to hold an inquiry into the economic opportunities of net zero; the bill to be paid at the end is apparently of little interest. Ofgem, allegedly the voice of the consumer in energy matters, has given no specific cost either, instead turning itself into a sort of corporate cheerleader for the net zero project. A joint report from the Royal Academy of Engineering and Royal Society looks remarkably like the CCC’s – lots of buzzwords, precious little engineering and hardly any mention of specific costs.
 
Only Conservative MP Christopher Chope has looked to get to the bottom of the matter, launching a private members bill to force an independent review of the costs. Its chances of becoming law are slim of course.
 
In the meantime, however, outsiders can come up with their own figures. My colleagues at the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) have made a start, looking at National Grid’s plans for delivering a (near) zero-carbon electricity grid. National Grid, like everyone else, doesn’t cost these so-called ‘Future Energy Scenarios’, but the authors of the GWPF paper have done so, and reckon the bill will come in at around £1.4 trillion. And that is just the cost of the generating equipment – government levies and so on are extra. It amounts to around £50,000 per household, to be paid through soaring electricity bills, higher taxes, and higher prices for goods and services.
 
Full post
 
7) Harry Wilkinson: The Mind-Boggling Cost Of Net Zero
The Conservative Woman, 25 February 2020
 
It is beyond belief that Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and indeed most Tory MPs are yet to realise that such costs are not going to go down well with voters. 

 










IS THE decision to reduce net carbon dioxide emissions to zero by 2050 one of extraordinary ambition or extreme foolhardiness? What we know for certain is that it isn’t an example of ‘evidence-based policymaking’. The Government and Parliament have given little thought to how it might be achieved, and how much it might cost.
 
Rather than publish their own estimates, they have outsourced this crucial task to the Committee on Climate Change (CCC). This is the organisation chaired by Lord Deben, who himself receives vast sums from green business interests through his ‘sustainability consultancy’ Sancroft. Sancroft’s clients include Drax, the largest recipient of renewable energy subsidies in the UK. If that wasn’t bad enough, Drax have also effectively appointed their own ‘Head of Sustainability’ to the CCC. These are the very last people you would go to for an independent assessment.
 
The CCC have kindly informed Parliament that the cost of achieving net zero emissions will be between 1 per cent and 2 per cent of GDP in 2050, with a headline figure of £50 billion. The small print of their report describes how at least half of this cost is due to increasing the target from an 80 per cent to a 100 per cent reduction in emissions. Very quietly, MPs appear to have nodded through a doubling of the cost of British climate policy with no real debate and no objections.
 
The limited information they received was misleading. The CCC’s estimate was for only a single year, 2050, despite the fact that there would be enormous capital costs in the intervening years. When blogger Ben Pile asked for estimates for the years from 2020-2049, he was told that such estimates did not exist. 
 
Equally significantly, they would not explain their methodology. This means that it is impossible to say how reliable an estimate this is, or subject it to any scrutiny. The Government is therefore relying on an estimate that it can’t possibly explain or understand, because the CCC themselves cannot explain it.
 
Behind the scenes there are signs of private concern within Government that it will cost much more. Before they both left office, Philip Hammond wrote a letter to Theresa May warning that the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) had estimated the cost would be 40 per cent higher, at £70billion per annum. This would mean households paying an average of £2,400 every year between now and 2050. 
 
Unfortunately, BEIS has now gone all quiet, and the Government appears reluctant to admit that these calculations ever existed.
 
The GWPF was determined to get to the bottom of how much Net Zero might cost, so we commissioned some of the best in the business to apply their expertise to this important question. Their work has now been published in a selection of new reports. Unlike the CCC and the Government, our calculations are there for everyone to see, and we hope that they will trigger an important debate about the costs of Net Zero.
 
Michael Kelly is emeritus Prince Philip Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering. His report, Decarbonising Housing: The Net Zero Fantasy, looks at data from pilot studies to refine his cost estimates of achieving an 80 per cent decarbonisation target through retrofitting existing homes. That is, to make them more energy efficient by improving insulation, draught-proofing, cladding etc.
 
The results are staggering, but not surprising to those familiar with the impossible economics of deep retrofits. Professor Kelly found that £2.1trillion would be required, or £75,000 per house. The findings are very much in line with those from the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI), which found that £2trillion would be required for the entire UK housing stock. A further £1.5trillion would be needed to decarbonise non-residential buildings, resulting in a total cost of £3.5trillion.
 
The other side of the coin is electricity. Not only is it proposed that the National Grid completely decarbonise, but it must also expand significantly to power the electrification of transport and heat. Both Dr Capell Aris and Colin Gibson have decades of experience in the power sector, and they have used a levelised cost of energy (LCOE) approach to calculate the additional costs of a renewables-based grid compared to one based on gas generation. LCOE can be thought of as the minimum constant prices at which electricity must be sold in order to break even over the lifetime of the project (in present value terms). 
 
Their analysis in The Future of GB Electricity Supply: Security, Cost and Emissions in a Net-zero System, explains that to deliver net zero carbon emissions you would have to build far more wind turbines than is necessary merely to cover peak energy demand. This is because wind cannot be relied upon to deliver power when it is needed. In this scenario, generation will also often exceed demand when it is windy, meaning that power cannot be used. The additional capital costs of building what is termed as overcapacity, and cost of paying wind turbines to switch off on windy days, entail a far more expensive system. In monetary terms, the cost is £1.4trillion higher than in a scenario dominated by gas-fired power stations.
 
In theory, you could deliver net zero with a zero-carbon electric grid, and not have to bother about energy efficiency (albeit still making significant investments in heat pumps to replace gas boilers). In reality, a combination of approaches is needed to offset the price increases expected under electric heating systems that would otherwise make them even more unpalatable. Indeed, the National Grid assume reductions of 10-26 per cent in the demand for heat in their net zero compliant scenarios.
 
Andrew Montford has looked at both new papers in the round to calculate the total costs of reaching net zero. He concludes in £3Trillion and Counting: Net Zero and the National Ruin that these costs would in all likelihood exceed £3trillion once additional investments in decarbonising industry and transport were taken into account.
 
Full post
 
8) Melanie Phillips: The Real Western Civilisation Emergency
Melanie Phillips, 21 February 2020
 
The “climate emergency”, which we are told threatens the imminent collapse of civilisation and the extinction of humanity, is a dogma being enforced by a culturally totalitarian tyranny. Threatening the living standards of millions, permitting no challenge and wrecking the livelihoods and reputations of any who dares dissent, it has been created by a repudiation of science, humanity and reason: the very markers of modernity and the west. This is the real emergency.
 

Melanie Phillips
 
A few commentators have begun to stumble towards the fact that the policy of becoming “carbon neutral” by 2050, as adopted by the UK and the EU, would undo modernity itself.
 
On Unherd, Peter Franklin observes that, if carried through, the policy will have a far greater effect than Brexit or anything else; it will transform society altogether.
 
“It will continue to transform the power industry, and much else besides: every mode of transport; how we build, warm and cool our homes; food, agriculture and land use; trade, industry, every part of the economy”.
 
Franklin is correct. Even so, he seems not to grasp the full implications of the disaster he intuits – because he thinks there’s some kind of middle way through which the imminent eco-apocalypse can be prevented without returning Britain to the Middle Ages.
 
In similar vein he quotes Rachel Wolf, a co-author of the 2019 Conservative manifesto, who is prone to the same kind of magical thinking. She wrote:
 
“Government has committed to ‘net zero’ greenhouse gas emissions because it does not want the side effects of the energy sources we have used for centuries to destroy the planet. At the same time, we do not want to return to an era where children (and their mothers) regularly died, and where the majority of people lived in what would now in the UK be considered wholly unacceptable poverty. This is a staggering challenge”.
 
This is what we might call an understatement. What is truly staggering is, first, that any sentient person thinks this can be done and, second, that it should be done.
 
For it’s not just that the carbon-neutral target will destroy the livelihoods and wreck the living standards of millions of people. It’s not even that it would take Britain and the west backwards to a pre-industrial way of life.
 
More fundamentally, it shows that policymakers and politicians – even those who may not fawn idiotically over Greta Thunberg and who rightly view Extinction Rebellion as a bunch of anarchist vandals – have not the slightest scintilla of a clue that the whole idea of a “climate emergency” is bogus from start to finish.
 
Those who point this out are vilified by the chillingly offensive term “climate-change deniers” and written off as a small bunch of cranks. This merely shows the terrifying effects of groupthink. The claim that “97 per cent” of scientists support the prediction of planetary disaster through anthropogenic global warming – a figure that is itself said to have misrepresented the evidence – denies the key scientific principle that science is never settled.
 
It also ignores the hundreds of scientists in related fields, many with stellar reputations and some of whom themselves served as expert reviewers for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change until they decided the IPCC was hijacking science for ideological ends, who have shown repeatedly that the evidence for a “climate emergency” doesn’t hold up for a moment.
 
What these scientists are telling us is that policy-makers are intending to destroy the west’s economic and social ecology even though:
 
* There’s no evidence that current changes in the climate are different from the fluctuations in climate over the centuries;
 
* The idea that the non-linear, chaotic and infinitely complex climate can be significantly affected by anything human beings may do is intrinsically absurd;
 
* All climate forecasts are based on computer modelling which is unable to process this level of complexity and unpredictability, and which is also susceptible to false assumptions fed into the programmes which produce false results;
 
* Much evidence of current environmental trends is ambiguous and contested;
 
* Much climate-related research is scientifically illiterate or the product of outright intellectual fraud;
 
* Scientists in climate-related fields can often only obtain grant funding if their research corresponds to apocalyptic AGW theory. This innate distorting mechanism will be hugely exacerbated by the $10 billion which Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has announced he is investing to “save Earth” from climate change, “the biggest threat to our planet”.
 
Nevertheless, scientists with intellectual and moral integrity are continuing to challenge this bogus science with actual facts. I reported several of these in my 2010 book, The World Turned Upside Down. Here are a few more recent examples.
 
Full post

The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.