From Brexit to NetExit – Watts Up With That?

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley in Tallinn, Estonia

The Identity and Democracy Party, which is preparing to win the election next March in the former Soviet vassal state of Estonia, the most northerly of the three Baltic states, recently invited me to give a keynote speech at its winter conference on the climate.

In the park outside the Hilton hotel in Tallinn, the nation’s capital, there is snow on the ground and the temperature is below freezing. My kind hosts were a little surprised that I did not wear a coat, even though it was snowing. I explained that I was Scottish and, therefore, accustomed to colder weather than this in our remote Highland fastness.

The ID party, described by Britain’s Communist propaganda sheet The Guardian as “far Right” (which, being translated, signifieth “non-Marxist”), is one of a tiny handful in Europe, none of them – alas – in the UK, that oppose the entire global warming nonsense latae sententiae, as the Romans used to put it.

The first speaker, Nikolaus Fest of Alternative für Deutschland, another party mischaracterized by The Nanny as “far Right”, explained how the Brussels tyranny-by-clerk was eagerly destroying the economies of Europe by three new and dangerous energy-related policies:

1: Removing individual nations’ right to veto any environmental proposals brought forward by the politburo of unelected Kommissars who wield all real power in Brussels. This matters, because the elected European Parliament has no power under the EU treaties to bring forward any proposal. Only the Kommissars may exercise the probouleutic function.

2. “Green taxonomy”, by which business-development loans by Europe’s banks would attract a discounted rate if the Kommissars deemed the investment to be eco-friendly, but a punitive rate if not. From the politburo’s point of view, this method of destroying Europe’s economy is attractive because the banks, and not the Kommissars, will get the blame for the damage the policy will cause.

3. “Fit for 55”, which sounds like an exercise regimen for pre-pensioners but is actually a Communist five-year plan to cut Europe’s life-giving emissions of CO₂ by 55% by 2030, leading to nut-zero by 2050.

Mr Fest said the Kommissars do not care about jobs or businesses or profits or economic survival, but only about nohow-zero.

Martin Helme, the former finance minister of Estonia who chaired the conference, responded by asking Mr Fest to comment on his fear that this winter “we will see people dropping dead of hunger and cold”. The reply was that this was a grave concern throughout Europe, but that no one dared speak out. Even Poland and Hungary, who both depend heavily on coal for their power, just as Estonia gets almost all its power from shale oil, had been bought into silence by the Kommissars, so no nation was now willing to speak out against the cruel energy policy of the EU.

Mr Fest said that, though the French yellow-jacketed protesters, the gilets jaunes, might protest, most people in Europe would remain quiet under the Kommissars’ regime of fear. Energy-intensive industries were pulling out of Germany and, as Margaret Thatcher had once said, the EU will end when the Germans run out of money [which will not be long now].

The cultural supremacy of the Green agenda, which was a new kind of religion, would be unchallenged until Europe collapsed.

Mr Helme said McKinseys, KPMG and the banks knew that the ESG agenda was a nonsense contrary to the laws of physics, but they reckoned that for the time being they could make money by appearing to defer to it. He wondered how long it would be before the people realized it was a racket.

Rain Epler, the former Environment Minister, spoke next. He said that wind and solar had not done what had been expected; Fukushima had slowed the installation of nuclear plants; coal had been largely closed down; Russian gas had been turned off; the German government had had to set a limit to the temperature of public buildings.

The Kommissars were advising householders bankrupted by the politburo’s energy policies to wear woollen socks and keep their houses cold. Warm houses, said Mr Epler, would become a fond memory that we would talk about to our baffled but envious grandchildren.

Mr Epler said the green transition had no mandate from the voters. It had been inflicted upon Europe from above by the unelected politburo. Winter, he thought, would open people’s eyes to the nonsense of the forcefully-promoted official narrative that “fossil fuels” were a danger to the planet and that wind and solar power were free and renewable, when they were neither. He expected brownouts this winter, leading to attempts by scientists to produce static battery storage. Good luck with that one.

He said that ordinary people valued warm houses and that other countries recognized this fact, which was why Japan was installing 22 new coal-fired plants and even Germany had been forced to extend the life of its coal-fired and nuclear-powered generating stations, notwithstanding the attempts by the east-German, Russian-speaking former Kazlerin, Angela Merkel, to toe the climate-Communist Party Line by shutting them down and making Germany abjectly dependent upon Siberian gas.

Why, he asked, would the Kommissars not help people to survive? In Estonia, the present Communist-friendly administration was refusing to bring idle oil-shale blocks into production, though the cost of doing so would be relatively small and the benefits substantial.

He admitted that defeating the far-Left administration in the spring would be difficult because the tax windfall from grossly overpriced electricity was so large, and was being spent buying votes. He had recently visited Japan, where his opposite number had expressed bafflement that Estonia was not making full use of its vast shale-oil reserves. Estonia should plan to install nuclear power stations, which would take 12 years, and cover the development period with additional oil-fired generation. The decision would require courage from politicians, because only the Identity and Democracy Party understood the climate hypocrisy.

Mr Bankman, the founder of the now-bankrupt crypto Ponzi scam FTX, had told the Wall Street Journal that ESG is bullsh*t, and everything woke is bullsh*t, but these were easy ways of getting money from fools.

One of the 2000 people who followed the conference online asked whether the Government should spend more on home insulation. Mr Epler replied that people could insulate their homes, but if they were not able to heat them then, insulated or not, they would be cold.

Martin Helme, the former finance minister, who may well hold a very senior position in the new administration if the ID party and its coalition partners win the general election next march, said that his father, the man of great learning and vision who had founded the ID Party, had bought a country log cabin some years previously. For the cost of insulating it he could heat it with logs for 30 years. He is heating it with logs.

In my own talk, I reworked the Strategic Threat Assessment Group’s calculations showing just how little global warming would be prevented even if the whole world went nut-zero by 2050 (which it won’t). The calculations are on the back of the envelope below:

The difference between this calculation and STAG’s appraisal are as follows:

1. My calculations are based on 27 years’ rather than STAG’s 30 years’ straight-line movement to nit zero.

2. I use transient climate response (TCR) to doubled CO₂ rather than equilibrium doubled-CO₂ sensitivity (ECS) because TCS is the estimated actual warming that will have occurred at the moment when atmospheric CO₂ has doubled, while ECS is too far away to be included in any intertemporal discounting calculation because it will not be reached for hundreds of years.

3. I estimate that operating expenditure on attaining newt-zero will be fully double the capital expenditure.

4. With the three above adjustments, the global warming prevented by every $1 billion spent on attaining not-zero would fall from STAG’s one two-millionth of a degree to one 11-millionth of a degree – the worst value for money in the entire history of Communism, which is saying a lot.

5. Using the invaluable data on the scarcity of techno-metals produced by Professor Michaux at the Finnish Geological survey, I derived a scarcity factor for each of the seven most expensive techno-metals by dividing the number of years’ 2019 global output of each metal required to get to nah-zero by the number of years to 2050 and then multiplying today’s annual cost of the required quantity of each metal by its scarcity factor.

In reality, non-zero is not attainable, for renewables are not renewable because there are not enough techno-metals, particularly for the static battery backup that would be needed if we were foolish enough to make wind and solar our principal form of energy. These unreliables are proving unable to provide a continuous, stable and affordable power supply.

When Professor Michaux told the House of Lords of the shortage of techno-metals and of the consequent impossibility of nope-zero, Their Lordships told him not to be so negative. All we needed to do was cross our fingers and dance the cachucha while sprinkling a little fairy-dust over our ermined shoulders and the wicked demon Siotu would be placated, all would be tickety-boo and we could go back to our port and cigars at the club, don’t you know.

Martin Helme spoke next. He began by pointing out, bluntly, that the ideological motivation of the traffic-light tendency – the Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds – is Marxist. It was tragic, he said, to see young people losing their innocence under the influence of relentless propaganda at school, at university and in social media. For revolutions always ate their own children. Thanks to this technological reversion to primitivism, today’s miserable teenagers would remain children all their lives, just as in the developing countries.

People wore their electric buggies as a fashion statement to make them look good, but buggies were not the answer, because, as His Lordship had pointed out, there were not enough techno-metals. Where was the lithium going to come from? Electric buggies would destroy the planet. We would go from cars for all to no cars for nearly everyone.

If CO₂ were removed from the atmosphere, the Earth would be destroyed. Nohope-zero was, therefore, a mad concept. Estonia’s EU Kommissar had said that the “Fit for 55” program was revolutionary. And so it was – a revolution against democracy itself. The so-called “green revolution” was really all about forcible redistribution of wealth.

Mr Helme, a historian like his father before him, said that in past revolutionary redistributions the peasants had taken land from the governing elite. Now, in a disfiguring reversal, the governing elite was stealing wealth from the peasants under the pretext of Saving The Planet. Society today, he said, was similar to pre-revolutionary France. The people had had enough.

In the past, under rule by other nations, life in Estonia had been poor, nasty, brutish and short: Wake, walk, work, die, bye-bye. Now the green fanatics were making Estonia poor again. People would not vote for that.

In Tallinn University, where the temperature in the lecture halls and libraries had been reduced, climate-Communist students were complaining that they were freezing. Well, the snowflakes had asked for it, and now they had gotten what they had asked for.

The green energy transition was Marxist through and through. The intention was to destroy existing society in the free West. All revolutions led to death and terrible poverty. This one would prove to be no exception.

In the brave new world of one-size-fits-all central planning from northern Finland to the south of France, the EU would say you must comply with the destruction of existing society. The new Soviet youth would be compelled to attend compulsory climate and rainbow parades. It would be noble to freeze, to ban meat, to eat locusts and to inform on your neighbours. The EU was enforcing a food production policy that would reduce the agricultural land area and meat consumption. The crisis in food production was being presented as noble.

Production of oil from the shales that supply nearly all of Estonia’s energy needs had been hindered and investment cut. Investment needed to be restored immediately or things would get worse. We would die or become slaves living in poverty. Carbon trading was foolishness.

Elections could not change Europe’s environmental policy, because it was dictated by unelected Kommissars answerable to no one. However, when people faced death and hunger there would come a breaking-point, either for totalitarianism or for freedom, the restoration of normal life, liberty and prosperity.

In answer to an online question about the policy of an ID Government, Mr Helme said that he would address prices first. We must stop energy-driven bankruptcy. We should replace the regulated market in energy with a free market once again. Energy prices must fall or there would be a huge deficit. The Left, on the other hand, would put up taxes and make the crisis of their own making still worse, and Estonia would be plunged into a deep crisis that would be very difficult to reverse. To prevent that needless crisis, it would be necessary to vote for the Identity and Democracy Party.

I was fascinated. Here was a party, recently in government and likely to be in government again soon, whose senior politicians have seen with a clear eye the real agenda behind the so-called “green transition”. They favour not never-zero but the new political catchword spreading round Europe – NetExit. Just as Britain had Brexit, so there are many European countries – Estonia first among them – that would now like to achieve NetExit.

It is foreseeable that, if the Kommissars, from their overheated offices in Strasbourg and Brussels, continue to make themselves feel important by dictating ever costlier and more destructive energy policies to the member states, Estonia will be by no means the only nation that will not tolerate so gross a series of harms directed at its population.

The Kommissars’ climate policies will be the last straw. They will drive out many nations from rule by the tyranny-by-clerk. Given the care with which the ID Party had prepared for its international conference, and the depth of knowledge of its senior personnel, it is very likely that Estonia will lead the way out of the EU and join the United Kingdom in freedom.

Mr Helme, as a former finance minister, got the point at once that since each $1 billion spent on net zero would buy no discernible change in global temperature, and since even if the whole world went to debt-zero by 2050 less than a thirteenth of a degree of global warming would be prevented, there was no point in doing anything at all to mitigate global warming. Nothing we do will make any measurable difference to global temperature.

His political organizer, Matti Silla, on learning that the models’ current prediction of 3 [2 to 5] degrees’ equilibrium doubled-CO₂ sensitivity implied a system-gain factor varying from the midrange by little more than ±0.5%, when the uncertainty even in the far better constrained direct forcing by CO₂ is more like ±15%, realized at once that climatologists cannot predict how much or how little global warming there will be, and that, therefore, there is no scientific basis for doing anything about global warming in the first place. O si sic omnes!