Net Zero Watch: Hertz to sell 20,000 EVs in shift back to gas-powered cars

 

In this newsletter:

1) Hertz to sell 20,000 EVs in shift back to gas-powered cars
Bloomberg, 11 January 2024
 
2) China set to overtake Japan as the world's top auto exporter
Fortune, 10 January 2024

3) EU’s anti-subsidy EV probe prompts retaliation from China
Teslarati, 10 January 2024

4) India plans to double coal production, ignoring climate pledges 
Bloomberg, 9 January 2024
 
5) Biden’s oil policies threaten the next energy crisis, trade group warns
Bloomberg, 10 January 2024
 
6) How a new Middle East alliance could reshape the global energy landscape
Simon Watkins, OilPrice.com, 9 January 2024
 
7) UK unveils plans for nuclear power expansion to boost energy independence
France 24, 11 January 2024 

8) As climate lawsuits wind through the courts, concerns arise over the impartiality of the judges
Just the News, 10 January 2024

9) Money, money, money: Green Tory MPs are looking to board the green gravy train
The Spectator, 11 January 2024
 
10) Andrew Orlowski: Chris Skidmore and the scourge of the Tory eco-zealots
Spiked, 10 January 2024
 
11) Roger Daltrey: I'm an eco-sceptic (Won’t get fooled again…)
The Times, 11 January 2024

12) And finally: Electricity prices to almost double as German consumers who use heat pumps face green reality 
MSN News, 11 January 2024

Full details:

1) Hertz to sell 20,000 EVs in shift back to gas-powered cars
Bloomberg, 11 January 2024

 

Hertz Global Holdings Inc. plans to sell a third of its US electric vehicle fleet and reinvest in gas-powered cars due to weak demand and high repair costs for its battery-powered options.

The sales of 20,000 EVs began last month and will continue over the course of 2024, the rental giant said Thursday in a regulatory filing. Hertz will record a non-cash charge in its fourth-quarter results of about $245 million related to incremental net depreciation expense.

The dramatic about-face, after Hertz announced plans in 2021 to buy 100,000 Tesla Inc. vehicles, underscores the waning demand for all-electric cars in the US. EV sales slowed sharply over the course of 2023, rising just 1.3% in the final quarter.

“It’s not at the level of demand that we anticipated,” Hertz Chief Executive Officer Stephen Scherr said in an interview on CNBC. “We may have been ahead of ourselves.”

Its shares fell 5.5% to $8.83 as of 9:32 a.m. in New York. The stock declined 32% last year.

Hertz said in the filing it will use some of the money raised by selling off EVs to buy gas-powered vehicles. “The company expects this action to better balance supply against expected demand of EVs,” it said.

The shift back to more conventional cars marks a reversal of a strategy centered on EVs, which the company hoped would fetch higher prices at the counter and hold their value. Tesla’s price cuts over the past year lowered the value of the cars in Hertz’s fleet and with EV sales growth slowing, it’s not clear if consumers will have an appetite for them in the used-car market.

Full story
 
2) China set to overtake Japan as the world's top auto exporter
Fortune, 10 January 2024

There’s a new king of the global auto market. The global shift to electric cars, signified by companies like Tesla and BYD, has helped China’s carmakers potentially reach two important milestones, unseating once-dominant players and unnerving legacy automakers in Europe, Japan and the U.S. 
 
Chinese carmakers exported 3.83 million passenger cars in 2023, a 62% increase from the year before, the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) estimated during a press conference on Tuesday. That would mark the first time its exports have surpassed those of Japan—Japanese carmakers exported 3.5 million cars between January and November, according to Reuters. The CPCA estimated that 5.26 million vehicles in total were exported from China, compared to 4.3 million from Japan.
 
Chinese brands also outsold foreign carmakers inside China, taking 52% of the domestic market, up 4.6 percentage points from the year before.
 
Foreign carmakers struggle
 
China’s success is being driven by a domestic shift towards EVs. Consumers, aided by government subsidies, flocked to buying affordable hybrids and battery-powered vehicles. Yet foreign carmakers, particularly from Japan, were slow to launch new electric car models in China.

These companies are now struggling to keep their presence in the Chinese market.
On Tuesday, Volkswagen reported a 1.6% increase in its China sales, with a 23% rise in EV sales specifically. Yet that growth lagged the rest of the China auto market, which grew by 5.6% and 36% in the broader market and for electric vehicles specifically, according to the Financial Times citing data from the CPCA.

Volkswagen was once the largest car brand in China, but lost the top spot last year to BYD, the Chinese EV giant backed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. The German multinational pledged 5 billion euros ($5.5 billion) to shore up its strategy in China, and also invested $700 million for a 5% stake in Xpeng, a Chinese EV startup that makes Tesla-like premium models.

U.S.-based General Motors sold just 2.1 million cars in China last year, down from a peak of over 4 million cars sold in 2017, according to Bloomberg. By comparison, GM sold 3 million cars in the U.S. in 2017, and 2.6 million cars last year. It’s the first time GM has sold more cars in the U.S. than in China since 2009.

China presents other issues for GM. The U.S. manufacturer is trying to change its supply chains to ensure all its EVs sold in the U.S. still qualify for tax credits, following a rule change meant to exclude models that rely on China-sourced parts. Last week, GM promised to make up the difference for models losing the tax credit with a $7,500 incentive.

Japanese carmakers also reported declines in sales over 2023, like Mitsubishi’s 60% drop in revenue from China between April and September. The company announced in September that it would suspend its manufacturing operations in China.
 
Full story
 
3) EU’s anti-subsidy EV probe prompts retaliation from China
Teslarati, 10 January 2024

The European Commission’s anti-subsidy probe into electric vehicle (EV) imports from China prompted a retaliation from the Chinese government. 
 
The Chinese government launched a trade probe into luxury liquor producers from Europe. Fortune states that Beijing’s probe targets liquor producers directly competing with China’s most valuable state-owned company. Through the investigation, President Xi Jinping aims to examine price dumping among EU brandy vendors selling in China.

The Chinese government’s EU liquor probe starts several months after Brussels started investigating cheap EV imports from China, including BYD. In September 2023, the annual IAA Mobility Show revealed the growing presence of Chinese EV manufacturers in Europe, shocking legacy automakers from the region. The volume of Chinese EVs at the event caught the eye of the European Commission. 

By October 2023, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von Der Leyen, announced the start of the probe into EV imports from China to the EU. She highlighted that Europe’s EV market was flooded with cheap electric vehicles whose prices were “kept artificially low” by “huge state subsidies.”
 
Full story
 
4) India plans to double coal production, ignoring climate pledges 
Bloomberg, 9 January 2024

 

The south Asian giant is setting new targets to use more coal, despite committing to transitioning away from fossil fuels.

As climate diplomats at COP28 in Dubai debated an agreement to transition away from fossil fuels last December, India was facing another energy conundrum: It needed to build more power capacity, fast.

“To meet growing demand,” the Indian government said on Dec. 11 it expects to roughly double coal production, reaching 1.5 billion tons by 2030. Later, the power minister Raj Kumar Singh set out plans on Dec. 22 to add 88 gigawatts of thermal power plants by 2032. The vast majority of which will burn coal.

The move to invest more in the world’s dirtiest fuel – one of the biggest contributors to global warming – may seem counterintuitive for the South Asian country, which is highly vulnerable to climate impacts. Yet, as the country heads into elections during April and May, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is keen to avoid any risks of power shortages. Along with record heat waves India has seen big spikes in peak demand for electricity over two successive years.

“India’s policy is to build everything. Push for renewables, but also push for coal and other fossil fuels,” said Sandeep Pai, director of the climate-focused organization Swaniti Global. “The justification is an increase in power demand.”

When it comes to renewable energy, however, India is failing to build enough to meet its ambitious goal of 500 gigawatts of clean-energy capacity by 2030. The rates at which solar and wind power was installed over the past few years is about a third of what’s needed, according to BloombergNEF.

There is a combination of factors affecting the renewables roll out. The top reasons, says Rohit Gadre of BNEF, are the misaligned incentives of state-owned electricity retailers, difficulty of acquiring the land necessary and lack of consistent policies at federal and state levels. As a result, even as the demand for power is rising, there’s not enough appetite among private investors to speed up renewable investments.

Full story
 
5) Biden’s oil policies threaten the next energy crisis, trade group warns
Bloomberg, 10 January 2024

US oil and gas production is booming, but policies being imposed now could jeopardize the country’s energy might, the industry’s top trade group is warning Washington.

That sobering outlook came from the American Petroleum Institute Wednesday, as it holds an annual gathering in the nation’s capital to highlight top policy priorities, amid concerns about climate change and conflicts around the globe that have heightened tensions over fossil fuel supplies.

US oil production hit a record in 2023, and it’s on track to surge to new highs this year, according to a forecast from the government’s Energy Information Administration. That’s yielded real dividends for American consumers and the industry, but it’s an outgrowth of activity by previous administrations that could be undone, API President Mike Sommers told industry officials, congressional staff and others at the event a few blocks from the Capitol.

“Washington is on the cusp of spoiling the American energy advantage, undermining it with short-sighted policies and hostility toward US oil and natural gas,” Sommers said.

In a separate interview, Sommers warned that the administration is sending signals and pursuing policies in a way “that is sowing the seeds for the next energy crisis.”

According to an API analysis, the US has increased production by about 1.6 million barrels per day since President Joe Biden took office — a historically high number. However, 1 million of those barrels came from private lands and 500,000 came from leases offshore and onshore sold during previous administrations. In general, oil and gas leases granted under Biden’s watch could take years to yield results.

Biden is under increasing pressure from climate activists to block oil and gas projects seen out of step with a warming world and the urgent need to phase down the use of fossil fuels.

The API — which represents some of the nation’s largest oil, pipeline and supply companies — is pressing for swifter permitting of energy projects, including licenses to broadly export liquefied natural gas around the globe, and more opportunities to pursue production on federal lands. That includes across the Gulf of Mexico, where Congress forced the Biden administration to sell drilling rights last year. That’s set to be the last auction of its kind until at least 2025, when there may be tighter limits and less available territory.

The industry is worried that three potential future Gulf lease sales — tentatively planned by the Interior Department because they are required to issue new offshore wind rights — may be significantly scaled back or canceled altogether. It’s a “huge concern,” Sommers said, noting the relatively better environmental footprint for oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico versus other regions.

Full story
 
6) How a new Middle East alliance could reshape the global energy landscape
Simon Watkins, OilPrice.com, 9 January 2024

 

Iran and Iraq's partnership is significant due to their vast oil and gas reserves, strategic geographic location, and influence in the Middle East. China and Russia gain geopolitical advantages from this alliance, including control over key oil and LNG shipping routes in the Middle East.

Iran and Iraq last week agreed to create a series of executive committees aimed at increasing cooperation in all areas of the energy sector and beyond. Given that the U.S. is now the world’s leading producer of crude oil, natural gas, and liquefied natural gas, many Americans may wonder why this matters. The answer is that the world runs on energy, most of the world’s energy resources are still in the Middle East, and the ongoing struggle to control them is a key determinant in how the world functions politically, including the U.S. Out of all the Middle East’s big oil and gas powers, Iran and Iraq are the most important, and closer cooperation between the two will either be a blessing or a curse, depending on which country is looking at the situation.

One of the reasons why Iran and Iraq are the two most important oil powers in the Middle East is that together they have the biggest oil and gas resources in the region by far, as analysed in full in my new book on the new global oil market order. Iran has an estimated 157 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves, nearly 10 percent of the world’s total. As great as its oil reserves are, its gas reserves are even greater, with Iran holding proven natural gas reserves of 1,193 trillion cubic feet (Tcf), 17 percent of the global total. Additionally, Iran has a high success rate of natural gas exploration, in terms of wildcat drilling, which is estimated at around 80 percent, compared to the world average success rate of 30-35 percent. In the face of huge ongoing sanctions, Iran produces around 3.4 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil, and over 1 billion cubic metres per day (bcm/d) of gas. Realistically, it could increase oil production to 6 million bpd within three years at most, and to 1.5 bcm/d within the same period, with relatively modest investment, technical upgrades, and development discipline. Its unofficial oil and gas reserve estimates are much higher and are likely to be proven accurate over time.

The same is true for Iraq, but officially it still has about 145 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves, around 8 percent of the world’s total. With the same caveats as with Iran, it could realistically increase oil production to 7 million bpd within three years at most, and then to 9 million bpd, and possibly then to 12 million bpd. Little has been done to truly assess or develop its associated and non-associated gas reserves, but they are likely to be on a similar scale to Iran’s. The fact that Iran and Iraq share many of their largest oil reservoirs also increases the strength of their alliance, and their importance. By dint of these shared fields, Iran has long been able to send as much oil and gas as it wants to virtually anywhere it likes through several methods analysed in full in my new book.

The second reason why the two countries are the most important energy powers in the Middle East is that that literally form the geographic centre of the entire region, marking a gateway from the Far East into Europe to the northwest and into Africa to the southwest. This makes them key to the success of China’s economic and military multi-generational power-grab ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI), and to Russia’s political and military ambitions along the east coast of the Mediterranean, both of which are also analysed in detail in my new book on the new global oil market order.

One long-running ambition on Iran’s part, and also Russia’s, has been to use Iran and Iraq to create a permanent ‘land bridge’ from Tehran to the Mediterranean Sea by which it could exponentially increase the scale and scope of weapons delivery into southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights area of Syria. These would have a huge force multiplier effect for Iran’s own Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Syria - and for its proxy Hezbollah forces in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine – to use in attacks on Israel. The aim of this on Iran’s part is to unite the world’s Islamic countries against what it believes to be an existential battle against the broadly Judeo-Christian democratic alliance of the West, with the U.S. at its centre.

Full post
 
7) UK unveils plans for nuclear power expansion to boost energy independence
France 24, 11 January 2024

 

The UK government on Thursday announced plans for what it said was the country's "biggest expansion of nuclear power for 70 years" to bolster its energy independence and meet carbon emission targets.
 
The Civil Nuclear Roadmap includes exploring the construction of a major new power station, £300 million ($382 million) of investment to produce an advanced uranium fuel and "smarter regulation". 
 
Taken together, the measures would quadruple UK nuclear power by 2050 to 24 gigawatts, enough to provide a quarter of the UK's electricity needs.
 
"Nuclear is the perfect antidote to the energy challenges facing Britain -- it's green, cheaper in the long-term and will ensure the UK's energy security," said Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
 
"This is the right long-term decision and is the next step in our commitment to nuclear power, which puts us on course to achieve net zero by 2050 in a measured and sustainable way," he added.
 
The government says it is committed to the 2050 net zero target but has come under fire after announcing last summer it will issue "hundreds" of new oil and gas licences in the North Sea.
 
It is also grappling with a cost-of-living crisis partly caused by the spike in oil and gas prices following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
 
Energy minister Claire Coutinho said the plans would mean the UK would "never again be held to ransom over energy by tyrants like Vladimir Putin".
 
The government said the proposals represented "the biggest expansion of nuclear power for 70 years", adding it would "reduce electricity bills, support thousands of jobs and improve UK energy security". 
 
The most eye-catching proposal is the possible construction of another power station as big as Sizewell in east England, construction on which is due to begin this year, and Hinkley in west England, which is currently under construction.
 
Both power stations will be capable of powering six million homes each. 
 
The UK currently has nine operational nuclear reactors on five sites but many are nearing the end of their operating lives.
 
Six reactors on three sites have been shut down since 2021 and will be dismantled.
However, operator EDF announced in March that it was extending the life of two British power plants -- Heysham 1 and Hartlepool.
 
The UK intends to build up to eight new reactors by 2050.
 
Full story
 
8) As climate lawsuits wind through the courts, concerns arise over the impartiality of the judges
Just the News, 10 January 2024

A network of climate activists and environmentalists, who are opposed to fossil fuel use and supportive of renewable energy, are likely training the same judges presiding over the cases.

A federal judge in Oregon denied a request from the U.S. Department of Justice to dismiss a climate-change based lawsuit, explaining in her ruling that climate change poses such a dire risk to mankind and the court is “duty-bound to provide redress for the irreparable harm government fossil fuel promotion has caused.”

The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge of Oregon Ann Aiken, a Bill Clinton nominee, contains a number of statements that express sympathy with the view that climate change is posing a threat to the human race so great that a judicial response is warranted to address the plaintiffs argument that the government, by allowing and promoting fossil fuel development, is violating their rights.
 
Climate activists across the country have launched dozens of these cases holding government agencies, oil companies, and industry groups liable for injuries the activists claim to suffer as a result of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.
 
Critics worry that the activists are using the court system to enact energy policies they want, which circumvents legislatures where the policies would be voted on by elected officials representing their constituents’ desires. More than that, a network of climate activists and environmentalists, who are opposed to fossil fuel use and supportive of renewable energy, may be training judges presiding over the cases.

Activist training 
 
As these lawsuits aimed at stopping fossil fuel production wind through the courts, a nonprofit dedicated to eliminating fossil fuels is training judges nationwide on how to understand the evidence in these cases.
 
The Climate Judiciary Project, according to Fox News, has crafted 13 curriculum modules and hosted 42 events, with more than 1,700 judges having participated in its activities. The project was created by the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Law Institute (ELI).
 
The ELI’s 2022 annual report describes the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) as a “first-of-its-kind resource that provides the judiciary with reliable, up-to-date information about scientific issues in climate litigation.” According to the ELI website, the goal of the project is to “provide neutral, objective information” on climate science that’s relevant to current and future litigation. The ELI has a program on energy called “Greening Our National Energy Transformation.”
 
“In the contest among new energy sources, law will have a great deal to say about winners and losers, subsidies and preferences,” the ELI explains on its website, where it lists out a number of ongoing projects dedicated to the promotion of wind and solar energy sources.
 
Despite all the pro-renewable information on its website, the organization says it’s not trying to influence the outcomes of the many climate suits across the country. “The work of the Climate Judiciary Project is no different than other continuing judicial education organizations that address complex topics, from medicine, to tech, to neuroscience. We provide judges with indisputable, evidence-based scientific curriculum to make informed decisions in cases and support their own jurisprudence,” Nick Collins, spokesperson for ELI, told Just The News.
 
Full story
 
9) Money, money, money: Green Tory MPs are looking to board the green gravy train
The Spectator, 11 January 2024

 

Tory MPs are already war-gaming what follows the election. Defeat seems certain, but then what? There will be an almighty tussle in which up to 200 colleagues scramble for a handful of the same sort of jobs: consultancies, directorships and advisory gigs. In these Tory Hunger Games, the clever thing to do is to start taking the best jobs now.
 
Chris Skidmore, for example, is not hanging about. His 14 years in parliament involved a three-month stint as interim energy minister, after which he wrote a book about net zero. The green job offers came thick and fast. He was made a professor of practice in net zero policy at Bath University and bagged two £80,000-a-year advisory gigs, all while collecting his full-time MP’s salary representing constituents in Kingswood. Only politics can turn someone without any formal qualifications into a professor and consultant.
 
Skidmore started his lucrative new life while he was still tied to his old one. After Rishi Sunak suggested an autumn election, he stood down from his seat, ostensibly over the decision to drill in the North Sea. Kings-wood faces a pointless £250,000 by-election before the seat is abolished by the constituency boundary changes later this year.
 
Skidmore is not the only MP who has turned himself into a green king of the private sector. Take Alok Sharma, the former business secretary, who has also vented outrage about the North Sea drilling decision. Sunak, he proclaimed, is guilty of ‘chopping and changing’ climate policies, reinforcing ‘the unfortunate perception about the UK rolling back from climate action’. He didn’t say why he disagreed with the government’s logic that it is cleaner and greener to use what’s left in the North Sea than to import Liquefied Natural Gas from Qatar and America.
 
Only a cynic who witnessed the tears Sharma shed as COP26 president would doubt the sincerity of his fury. But it’s worth noting that his eco-earnings now dwarf his humble salary as a backbencher. After standing down from the COP presidency 14 months ago, he too announced plans to quit parliament. Like Skidmore, Sharma did not wait until the election to start bagging second jobs. Since September, he has been advising the Swedish bank SEB on ‘geo-political and economic trends, green finance, carbon transition and strategic issues’. The price of his expertise is £1,000 an hour.
 
On the speaking circuit, he’s billed as an expert on ‘sustainable investing’ and the ‘energy transition’. He has so far earned £95,000 extolling their virtues for the likes of UBS and JP Morgan, travelling to places as far afield as Abu Dhabi and Sydney. Sir Alok’s online profile makes two references to his knighthood, but no mention of the fact that he is still a serving member of parliament for Reading West. 
 
Since David Cameron was elected on his ‘vote blue, go green’ slogan, a third of all former energy ministers have cashed in on their purported eco-expertise. Perhaps the record for speediness was set by Claire Perry O’Neill, a former aide to George Osborne, who ended up in parliament and the cabinet. After she was ousted as COP president in favour of Sharma in early 2020, it took her just six days to file documents to set up her eponymous consultancy firm. Last year, the company boasted net assets of £244,000.

Chris Huhne, the former Lib Dem MP for Eastleigh and secretary of state for energy and climate change at the start of the co-alition government, has reinvented himself as a major player in the UK biogas energy sector. Prior to returning to parliament in 2017, Ed Davey, Huhne’s successor and the current Lib Dem leader, advised MHP Communications when it boasted EDF Energy on its books. Greg Barker, a junior minister under Huhne and Davey, went to work for the oligarch Oleg Deripaska at his firm EN+ as it prepared for the green transition; Nick Hurd, one-time climate change minister in Theresa May’s government, now advises investment firms Pollination and i(x) Net Zero. The millionaire Zac Goldsmith is fortunate enough not to need such means of employment.
 
Full post
 
10) Andrew Orlowski: Chris Skidmore and the scourge of the Tory eco-zealots
Spiked, 10 January 2024

 

Skidmore is not just lining his own pockets. He is an ideological fanatic on a quasi-religious mission. He is a Waitrose Robespierre.
 
Former UK cabinet minister Chris Skidmore has resigned his seat several months before a likely General Election. Since Zac Goldsmith was ousted from the Commons in 2019, Skidmore has been the most influential and effective environmentalist in Westminster. As an energy minister under Theresa May, he signed into law one of the most radical pieces of legislation that parliament has ever passed, committing the UK to Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050, without any prior public debate.

Last week, Skidmore quit parliament with a performative flounce, objecting to the Tory government’s Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill, which will issue new hydrocarbon-exploration licences in the North Sea. Apparently, Rishi Sunak’s government has helped to ‘destroy the UK’s reputation as a climate leader’ by approving new oil fields.

Skidmore’s resignation has created a headache for Sunak by triggering a by-election. But the problem for the rest of us has not been caused by him leaving parliament. It’s been caused by him staying in parliament for so long and flourishing. Like a squatter pushing at the rotten door of an uninhabited, dilapidated property, Skidmore was able to make himself at home in the Conservative Party. In fact, he probably could have stayed as long as he liked. No one was going to evict him.

Skidmore has had quite the political journey. A contemporary of Liz Truss at Oxford, he was once an ardent free marketeer who fulminated against crony capitalists. As recently as 2012, he co-authored Britannia Unchained with Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Kwasi Kwarteng and Truss. This was a stirring call for deregulation and growth. Today, he acts as a Gauleiter of the powerful environmental lobby. He represents vested interests that depend entirely on environmental regulations and taxpayer-funded subsidies. At some point in his career, Skidmore seemingly heard a higher calling.

As a backbencher, he was a keen member of the Conservative Environment Network (CEN). According to the CEN manifesto, an MP’s primary duty is not to serve the voters who elected him or her. Nor is it to serve the poorest and most vulnerable. Nor even is it to further human flourishing by promoting freedom, opportunity and abundance. Instead, as CEN’s first pledge has it, it is MPs’ ‘duty to preserve and restore our planet for future generations’. And in case you missed the pseudo-religious quality of this pledge, it is followed by a pious dirge about how ‘transformational change starts with the responsibility of the individual’. Every religious order requires a similar sort of pledge. In the case of the green religion, your duty is not to other people or to a god, but to ‘nature’.

The CEN caucus is not a grassroots organisation dependent on member contributions. It lists 13 staff and acknowledges the support of ‘a network of private donors… and foundations’. Among these are Chris Hohn’s Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (via the European Climate Fund), Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and WWF UK. Hohn, who earns £1million per day from his hedge fund, initially helped fund Extinction Rebellion. The same people and organisations are currently funding a network of political consultants to encourage extreme green policies at the local level, against the wishes of voters. In post-democracy environmentalism, it is billionaires, NGOs and technocrats who set the policy agenda, not voters or elected representatives. And their ambitions extend to changing every aspect of our lives.

Indeed, Net Zero is a totalising objective. It will regulate personal mobility, housing, heating, education, our diets, workplaces and more. Accordingly, last year Skidmore launched the Mission Zero Coalition, a new body which aims ‘to bring together sectors and communities to establish four Mission Zero Networks’, including ‘a Local Mission Zero Network, an Industrial Mission Zero Network, a Buildings Mission Zero Network and a Solar Mission Zero Network’. Little escapes the remit of Net Zero.

Tragically, Skidmore’s work at Westminster has long been done. He has successfully set the policy agenda and secured all the regulations he wanted. He has kept MPs in line with Net Zero, too. Now, outside of parliament, he can move to policing those regulations, and profiting from the subsidies. He is already paid £80,000 per year as an adviser to a carbon-capture company. And he became a ‘professor of practice’, focussing on Net Zero and sustainability, at Bath University last summer. But Skidmore is not just lining his own pockets here. He is an ideological fanatic on a quasi-religious mission. He is a Waitrose Robespierre.

‘China’s useful idiot’ is how Ross Clark describes Skidmore in the Telegraph, arguing that the industrial destruction that will result from Net Zero will enfeeble Britain and make us more dependent on potentially hostile powers. He was ‘everything that was wrong with the Tories’, agrees Tim Stanley, who blames David Cameron for opening up the selection process for Conservative parliamentary candidates to ‘wets, bolters and defectors’ like Skidmore.
 
Full post
 
11) Roger Daltrey: I'm an eco-sceptic (Won’t get fooled again…)
The Times, 11 January 2024

He’s the rock legend whose band, the Who, was one of the biggest in the world. He's also an eco-sceptic and Net Zero critic.

[...] “This country invented trains and they changed the world, probably more than the internet,” he says. “And where I live in Sussex, it’s like a medieval world. We’ve got beautiful views and no electricity pylons. Life hasn’t changed much there for 400 years.”

It all sounds lovely, but Daltrey has something on his mind.

“Do you enjoy looking at the English countryside?” he asks, making it sound vaguely like a threat.

Yes, I do.

“Well, make the most of it because when they rewild it they will turn it into Connecticut. Ever been to Connecticut? It used to be all dairy farms and now it’s a forest, a dark and dingy forest.”

Rewilding is a hotly debated issue, but Daltrey’s suspicion of change belies some highly unconventional views.

“Oil and coal are organic,” he says. “People don’t see that. Upgrading the grid so that everyone can have an electric car — and this is according to an engineering professor at Cambridge [Prof Michael Kelly], so what would he know, eh? — will require the equivalent of building three HS2s every year between now and 2050.”

Full story
 
12) And finally: Electricity prices to almost double as German consumers who use heat pumps face green reality 
MSN News, 11 January 2024
 

E.ON shocks customers! Drastic electricity price increase
 
Bitter news for all E.ON customers! In the new year the prices will be increased enormously. This measure should take effect shortly. The consumer advice center in North Rhine-Westphalia announced this in a press release on Thursday (January 12th).

E.ON: Energy prices will almost double
 
“Consumers who heat with electricity and live in E.ON’s basic supply area have so far been able to benefit from relatively low prices for the basic heating electricity supply despite the energy crisis. But that will soon be over,” says the NRW consumer advice center.

More precisely, the first of February. Because then E.ON really raises the prices - the tariffs should almost double. For a long time, customers were spared price increases - for many it was only a matter of time before these were adjusted. But this innovation will really shock many customers.
 
Full story (in German)

The London-based Net Zero Watch is a campaign group set up to highlight and discuss the serious implications of expensive and poorly considered climate change policies. The Net Zero Watch newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.netzerowatch.com.