I found this interesting essay on the Clintel website. Here is one section of it:
The Cult of Net Zero
After 50 years of failed predictions of climate apocalypse, the zealous pursuit of Net Zero climate policies at any cost in the EU and UK to ‘save the planet’ is a peculiar form of economic suicide. The postwar European miracle was built on cheap and abundant fossil fuels, nuclear power and pragmatic economic management. That foundation is now being dismantled in the name of fighting climate change.
Subsidies for wind and solar have reached astronomical levels, yet these intermittent sources cannot provide the baseload power that industry and households require. Nuclear energy, once a symbol of modernity, has been hobbled by regulation or phased out entirely. Natural gas supplies to supplement dwindling North Sea production were once reliably imported from Russia. They were cut off by sanctions and geopolitical hubris although the EU remains the largest importer of Russian LNG. The sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline signalled the end of cheap Russian natural gas that helped lay the foundations of Europe’s post-war economic prosperity.
The result is predictable: deindustrialisation, skyrocketing electricity bills and declining living standards. Germany’s vaunted Mittelstand firms — medium-sized manufacturers that long formed the backbone of its export model — are relocating abroad. Energy-intensive industries in France and Great Britain are shuttering. Households, already squeezed by inflation and stagnating wages, are asked to shoulder the costs of heat pump mandates, bans on gasoline and diesel cars and ever-higher energy taxes.
This is not an energy transition. It is an energy regression — an attempt to reconfigure advanced industrial societies around technologies that cannot deliver the reliability and affordability required for economic growth. The climate policies imposed by Brussels, Berlin, Paris and London amount to a vast system of central planning and prescriptive industrial policy. History – and Friedrich von Hayek in his book The Road to Serfdom – have shown that central planning, ‘green’ or otherwise, leads not to progress but to shortages, inefficiencies and decline.
Read the whole essay here: The End of Europe’s Welfare State: Net Zero, Debt and Decline - Clintel
