UK and Scottish Ministers were pressured by the Friends of the Earth to pass the Climate Change Acts. At Westminster, this was done in 2008 under New Labour, supported by all except 5 Ministers, and in Scotland, the following year. Again in December, the 2019 Climate Change (Emissions Reductions Targets) (Scotland) Act was passed - amending the 2009 Act to set 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% by 2020, 75% by 2030, 90% by 2040.
The intention behind the Friends of the Earth and Greens' campaign now being implemented via this 'decarbonisation' energy policy imposed by the climate legislation, 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.' Yet the much-heralded 'science' behind this claim has never been empirically verified and empirical validation is what is needed in science. Instead of science, there are innumerable computer models and alarming reports prophesying, for example, the extinction of polar bears or the drowning of cities and islands due to melting polar ice and rising oceans. Australian and Californian wildfires and 'extreme' weather events are all blamed on global warming and/or climate change.
Worse still, far from admitting either that climates have been changing ever since the Earth was formed or that there is no way to attribute any change to humans, these alarming reports are insinuating that this 'global warming' and 'climate change' are due to humanity's use of cheap energy - fossil fuels coal, gas and oil; the implication of this insinuation being that we should feel very guilty about our industrial, transport, agricultural and domestic processes, stop using coal, gas and oil and change our lifestyles to save the planet and 'future generations' (currently being taught this at school.)
However, actual scientific evidence gives us the following:
- Carbon dioxide is about 0.04% of the planet's total atmosphere, and anthropogenic CO2 about 4% of that, which comes to 16 odd units of anthropogenic carbon dioxide in every one million units of atmosphere. Obviously, this miniscule amount cannot have the slightest effect on global atmospheric temperature or any influence whatsoever on the planet's climate. Another 'greenhouse' gas, methane, exists in even tinier quantities.
- 'Greenhouse gases' 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.
- 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 the 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.
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 deliberately intended. 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, 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 yet our Parliamentarians and 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 influenced as ever by the Greens/FoES anti-growth lobby have resolutely refrained from opening up this resource and persist in denying employment and prosperity to communities like Inverclyde. Now, with Scottish 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 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. Do Scottish Ministers, like the EU, expect impoverished communities to rely on the income from tourists 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 like silica dust. Solar panels are potentially very dangerous. The fire could not be extinguished for five days after Liberton Primary School's solar panels exploded. Wind turbines in Scotland provide profits and hundreds of thousands of jobs to people in EU Member States like Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, France and Portugal but very few actually in Scotland. Income made would be mostly from the people south of the Border – whose climate legislation also obliges them, like us, to purchase and subsidize so-called 'renewable energy.'Yet the income hardly tallies with the tens of billions spent on wind and solar energy production.
Do Scottish Ministers care about the increase costs to consumers via our utility bills and the resulting 'fuel poverty' where 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 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 because, as the Father of Ecology Sir James Lovelock said, the 'mad mad mad Greens' are against it.
Why are Scottish Ministers so beholden to the FoES/Green lobby that they accept the corruption of science, ruin of our wilderness, chaos to the grid, de-industrialisation of Scotland, end of economic growth 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 Ministers succeed in returning Scotland to pre-industrial conditions? Then what next?