“Net-Zero Tyranny”

In an interview with the Financial Times published on 19 September, Steven van Rijswijk, the chief executive of ING, said that the Dutch bank had put its clients on notice that it would either restrict or stop providing finance to companies that fail to address their carbon footprint on a case-by-case basis. Additionally, from 2025, the bank will no longer offer extra funding for LNG export terminals, a decision in line with the International Energy Agency’s recommendations. Fresh funding for upstream oil and gas businesses exploring untapped geographical areas will also be halted.

At midnight on Monday, Britain’s last remaining coal-fired power station turned off its turbines. The closure of the Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant in Nottinghamshire brings to an end Britain’s 142-year reliance on the black stuff for generating electricity.

The end of coal is being celebrated by the political class as a sign of Britain’s ‘leadership’ on the climate. Apparently, this is a mark of our ‘progress’ towards a greener, cleaner future. Indeed, politicians were so eager to shut Ratcliffe down that the deadline for its closure was actually brought forward by a year by Boris Johnson’s Conservative government, ahead of the 2021 COP26 climate talks in Glasgow.

If any two commodities were central to the industrial revolution, they were coal and steel. Britain pioneered the mass production of both, launching a worldwide transformation that multiplied living standards many times over. And now, ironically, it looks as if, in an almost Maoist pursuit of global leadership in achieving Net Zero, we will be the first major developed country to close them both down. There is just one catch. In reality, that is economic suicide – and time is running out to do anything about it.

“… Italy’s government has been sounding the alarm for some time. The country’s industry minister, Adolfo Urso, has now returned to this theme, describing the EU’s ban on sales of new traditional cars after 2035 as posing a “grave crisis” for its auto sector. He wants the ban (and, it can be assumed, the forced ratcheting down of conventional sales that precedes it) to be reviewed and revised.”