Massive rift in the left threatened in the aftermath of the apparently green energy-linked Spain blackout and comments from power-behind-the-throne Tony Blair stating green politics and decarbonisation policies are failing.
“Even Tony Blair now says the push for Net Zero has become ‘irrational’ and ‘hysterical’” noted Brexit leader Nigel Farage as an extraordinary double-blow for the prevailing green extreme orthodoxy came this week. On Monday, the largest power cut in Europe in living memory plunged two whole countries into darkness, with early theories of a freak atmospheric event or a cyber attack dismissed now in favour of the suggestion that Spain’s heavily renewable-reliant grid has been rendered simply too fragile and susceptible to shock by the replacement of traditional generation with solar and wind.
Then just hours after the lights in Spain went back on, the power behind the throne of British politics — now his Labour Party is back in power, and not to mention his enduring grip on the British establishment political culture nearly 20 years after he left office — dropped a new report saying the rush to decarbonise “isn’t working”.
In a remarkable development, Blair — the giant of British ‘centrism’ — spoke the language of green transition-sceptics acknowledging that: “in developed countries, voters feel they’re being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal… any strategy based on either “phasing out” fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail”.
The green lobby’s “purist” solutions of simply ending carbon altogether is “totally misguided”, Blair wrote, observing: “political leaders fear saying what many know to be true: the current approach isn’t working… in 2024 China initiated construction on 95 gigawatts of new coal-fired energy, which is almost as much as the total current energy output from coal of all of Europe put together”.
Nuclear power would be an “essential” part of the answer to these problems, the former Prime Minister wrote in direct contradiction of the green orthodoxy of many European states, like Germany and Spain, which have pursued rapid decarbonisation and a shift to wind and solar while also engaging in a programme of destroying nuclear power plants.
Blair’s remarks instantly shot a fissure through the UK political left, quietly divided as they had been hitherto between green absolutists bent on decarbonising the West, and realists perhaps looking to a more pragmatic route. Even within the UK’s left-wing government itself there are deep divisions revealed this week: the ‘Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero’ Ed Miliband is unquestionably a green ultra and Blair’s intervention has been interpreted very much as a direct attack on his approach of the economy being a small price to pay for decarbonisation.
An unnamed Labour insider is claimed to have called the Blair comments a “public tantrum… really unhelpful” while the UK Guardian, the country’s standard-bearer left-wing newspaper, appears to have been put on a full war footing to feature as many critical comments about Blair and his report as possible. A co-leader of the Green party has even, incredibly
On the other hand there is Miliband’s colleague the Environment Secretary Steve Reed who said, The Times reports, that he agrees with “much of what [Blair] said… He’s making a valid and important contribution to a very significant debate that we’re having”.
While the green great reset is suddenly being critically interrogated by its own proponents for the first time, another civilisational shift that conservatives have opposed has also been shown up by the Spain blackout. The transition to a cashless society, accelerated by the Covid years, had its most obvious flaw underlined on Monday: no transactions without electricity and a working data network.
Responding fast, the UK Treasury has been told the public should hoard cash in case of blackouts, with The Telegraph reporting MPs had told the government: “the value of physical cash in emergency preparedness” must be considered. This follows by months the European Union telling the public to always carry cash in case of a society-level emergency, as well as other essentials like medicine, water, and a radio.
Nigel Farage took the change in attitude as a positive sign, noting that if Tony Blair could speak the language of Net Zero-scepticism then “We are winning the argument!”.
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