THE 2019 Climate Change (Emissions Reductions Targets) (Scotland) Act sets targets to reduce Scotland’s emissions of all greenhouse gases to net zero by 2045 at the latest, with interim targets for reductions of at least 56 per cent by 2020, 75 per cent by 2030 and 90 per cent by 2040.
As with the 2009 Act which it amended, the legislation followed pressure from Friends of the Earth Scotland. The intention behind the green activists’ campaign is to take carbon dioxide emissions out of industrial, transport, agricultural and domestic processes since, they claim, the carbon dioxide (CO2) – wrongly called ‘carbon’ – emitted by humans (‘anthropogenic’) is destroying our planet and causing a ‘climate emergency’.
However, scientific evidence gives us the following:
1. Carbon dioxide is 0.04 per cent of the planet’s total atmosphere and anthropogenic CO2 is 0.00065 per cent or 36billion metric tons (US EIA, 2017) within a total average atmosphere of 5.5quadrillion metric tons.
This minuscule amount cannot have the slightest effect on global atmospheric temperatures or the planet’s climate. Another ‘greenhouse’ gas, methane, exists in even tinier quantities.
2. ‘Greenhouse gas’ is a misnomer, anyway, since the Earth is not a covered box but a planet exposed to the moon’s gravitational pull, the sun’s magnetism and cosmic rays from space.
3. According to satellite data, there has been no global atmospheric warming for about 20 years.
This evidence alone should make UK and Scottish governments query the validity of claims made by Friends of the Earth, Greens, ‘environmentalists’ and scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and elsewhere who persist in publishing alarmist computer models and reports. The scientific method demands empirical evidence which in turn demands experimentation, study, free debate, time and money. If ideological attitudes influence any of these, the science dies.
In the case of the IPCC, the scientific method has never been used because the organisation was established by globalist and fanatical ideologues in order to ‘prove’ that man-made carbon dioxide emissions cause global atmospheric warming. Thus, in order to maintain their funding and a measure of quasi-scientific authority over these ideologues – who were demanding governmental policy changes even before any scientific evidence had been found to deem these necessary – Dr Ben Santer came up with an appropriate computer model in 1995. (See Searching for the Catastrophe Signal, Bernie Lewin, 2018.)
Since then, it is the determination to get funding by promoting the ideology which has destroyed the scientific method and replaced it with computer models, fake news and catastrophist reporting; why scientists who held opposing views had their articles rejected and their careers ruined; why, instead of debating with so-called ‘sceptics’, there is ferocious anger against the ‘deniers’ because their challenge is a challenge to the ideology.
Since there is no scientific justification for ‘decarbonisation’ we are left with the need to identify the ideological intentions behind the campaign by the Greens. These intentions can be traced back in recent history to the anti-growth and ‘sustainability’ ideologies of mainly white Canadian, American and European people in the 1970s who wanted to halt the industrial development and population growth of what was then called the Third World. For example, the Club of Rome which in 1972 produced The Limits to Growth report, and the neo-Malthusian Dr Paul Ehrlich whose 1968 book The Population Bomb incorrectly prophesied starvation for millions by the 1980s. And Maurice Strong, Maurice Strong a wealthy New Age celebrity environmentalist and so-called ‘socialist’ who, via his undemocratic globalist organisation the United Nations Environment Programme, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Conference of Parties (the 26th, known as COP26, is due be held in Glasgow in November this year) has probably wasted more money and done more harm to the ‘international proletariat’ than anybody else.
This harm to working people, the unemployed, the poor in underdeveloped parts of the world and to rural women off the grid, without clean running water, power for refrigeration, cooking, cleaning and safe conditions for giving birth, was and continues to be intentional. After all, Maurice Strong said his purpose was to destroy Western industrial civilisation.
The green environmentalist campaign to ‘decarbonise’ the economy and to keep resources of cheap energy untapped and in the ground is deliberately intended to impoverish and prevent economic growth, to deny employment and to disempower working people and low-income communities.
In Scotland, our well-heeled ministers, MSPs, civil servants, local authorities, many voters, churches, charities, our school curricula, academic institutions and most media are complicit in this, as is the deeply ignorant, arrogant and rather criminal Extinction Rebellion. The intention of these fanatics and the Greens is to return society at large to pre-industrial conditions. Scotland is full to the brim with coal, see here (p17 onwards).
Yet all those in power from ministers to local councillors shout ‘climate emergency’ and deny communities this resource. To the west of the Isle of Lewis is what has been described as the biggest oil field in the world. Yet again, Scottish ministers and MSPs, influenced as ever by the Greens and Friends of the Earth Scotland anti-growth lobby, have resolutely refrained from opening up this resource and persist in denying employment and prosperity to communities such as Inverclyde.
Now, with devolved control over the first twelve and a half miles of coastal waters, Scotland has no need for independence in order to use this oil and gas for the benefit of local communities and national prosperity. But have ministers and parliamentarians given the go-ahead to such development? No, because bringing up the oil and gas would create employment, industry, commerce and wealth which the Greens do not want. It would appear that Scottish ministers and parliamentarians are happy for impoverished coastal communities to rely on income from tourists and benefits to survive.
Wind and solar energy are not renewable or environmentally friendly because turbines and panels use finite, rare and toxic chemicals and produce toxic and hazardous materials such as silica dust.
Wind turbines in Scotland provide profits and hundreds of thousands of jobs for people in China and EU member states such as Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, France and Portugal but little profit and very few jobs actually in Scotland. Any income made would be mostly from energy users south of the Border whose climate legislation also obliges them to purchase and subsidise so-called ‘renewable energy.’ Yet the income hardly tallies with the tens of billions spent on the purchase of wind turbines and solar panels manufactured abroad, the costs of which are subsidised by Scotland’s taxpayers and via our utility bills.
Do Scottish Ministers and Members of Parliament know or even care about the increased costs to consumers and the resulting fuel poverty where already vulnerable people have to decide whether to eat or to heat their home? Who is covering the costs to the grid that has to manage inputs from these turbines and panels and also provide conventional energy when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun shine? Who is measuring the costs to landscape, wild birds and sea life?
Coal-fired power stations have been closed here yet Scottish Ministers and Members of Parliament encourage biomass power even though this requires the infinite demolition of trees, be they from North or South America or Europe, wild and ancient or commercially planted. Nuclear energy is on the blink too though the Father of Ecology Sir James Lovelock is known for his support of it as ‘the safest source’ while criticising the green lifestyle for its ‘ostentatious grand gestures’.
Why are Scottish ministers and MSPs so beholden to Friends of the Earth Scotland and the Greens that they accept the corruption of science, ruin of our wilderness, chaos to the grid, de-industrialisation of Scotland and impoverishment of Scotland’s people – just to end our negligible emissions of a non-polluting, clean, colourless and odourless gas, essential to respiration and plants and a vital source and product of life itself? If the Greens achieve ‘zero carbon’ what will they do next? Will they, their Citizens Assemblies and malleable politicians succeed in returning Scotland to pre-industrial conditions?
