Transition to Miserable Poverty: Net Zero Targets Designed So You Live With Nothing

You’ll own nothing and be happy, and you’ll feel pure bliss, freezing or boiling in the dark. Well, that’s what the wind and solar transition mob would have you believe. However, the likelihood of feeling happy or grateful living in a world without reliable and affordable power is pretty low.

Electricity is one of those components of civilisation that the notionally civilised always take for granted. Because the suffering that comes from doing without is born by someone else, those with the arrogance to dictate how you should live your life couldn’t care less. Indeed, this crowd is always happy for the sacrifices you’re forced to make .

It’s a theme picked up on by Peter Smith below.

Be Dutiful, Be Abstinent, Be Happy
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Peter Smith
6 January 2024

Reading my newspaper and having my usual morning coffee at a local café — a strong skinny flat white, for your information – minding my own business, when I discovered that my carbon footprint was on the rise. I say on the rise rather than rising because that’s the way people speak these days and one has to be de rigueur, hence my rather fancy coffee. Did I mention my Versace shoes, Canali jeans and Ralph Lauren jacket? No, I didn’t. It’s so damnably hot in Sydney, undoubtedly exacerbated by anthropogenic global warming, that I’m sartorially slumming it in shorts and T-shirt. Though I do have rather trendy white trainers.

Anyway, back to my carbon footprint, about which I wept after returning home. Apparently, 77 per cent of the carbon-equivalent footprint of a cup of coffee is down to milk (obviously someone good at arithmetic has worked it out). Cow belching and the power needed for pasteurisation, refrigeration and transport are the culprits. Switch to black coffee? Maybe. In any event we need to resolve to do something this year to help save the planet. At the same time, one has to draw lines.

I learnt that countless numbers of obsessive-compulsive people are ordering their takeaway coffees in reusable cups. They take them home. Drink their coffees. Rinse their cups and park them ready for next time. How many times does a reusable cup last? I suppose that depends on how well they’re cared for, which, in turn, depends on how obsessive are their owners about saving the planet. Reportedly, some cups are “well used.”

Now I’m as woke as the next chap and it goes without say that trying to save the planet from a fiery end is laudable beyond words. However, this reuseable-cups business is driving baristas as far round the bend as their overwrought customers. Come rush hour, trying to decide whose cup is whose is a nightmare which perniciously wears down the mental resilience of otherwise level-headed baristas.

Oat milk is touted as a solution. I don’t know. All that extra oat growing would require nitrogen fertiliser, wouldn’t it? And doesn’t nitrogen fertiliser come mainly from nasty natural gas? And then oats don’t get turned into milk without power. Nor does the ensuing milk find its own way to cafes. I’ve got a feeling that oats ain’t the answer.

Oats aside, improving the energy efficiency of coffee machines is described as “mission critical.” Okay, that would certainly make a difference to global temperatures. But, really, if we are going to make a difference to write home about, there is really only one option. Us coffee drinkers have to do the right thing by the planet and embrace abstinence. Pity about baristas being made redundant. What to say but that sacrifices must be made for the common good.

Meanwhile, rooftop solar panels are causing a headache for electricity retailers, which they hope to pass on to their customers via higher prices; reportedly, about 25 percent up from their present elevated level. Jaunting Anthony Albanese might have been asked how this squared with his promise that electricity prices would fall under his watch, but I imagine he couldn’t be found at home.

The problem is that when the sun is shining brightest, energy companies buy excess power off well-off people who’ve bedecked their roofs with solar panels. However, the power is worthless. When the sun is shining and, god-forbid, if the wind is blowing too, the price of power goes to zero or below. Hmm, that’s a bummer.

Sadly, employing devilishly clever schemes to produce clean electricity seems to come with unseen effects, as Frédéric Bastiat would have put it. Untold amounts of unknowable expensive baggage. Chris Bowen would begin to understand that were his mind not completely closed to reality. Yet again, as with coffee drinking, the only real answer is abstinence. I’m only surprised that Bowen hasn’t become an ‘Apostle of Abstinence’.

Our distant relatives lived without modern, new-fangled appliances and gadgets and so can we. Surely that’s not too much to ask; in the dire circumstances. Sceptical doubting Thomases should listen to King Charles – no less – live in Dubai. As His Majesty said, “alarming tipping points” are nigh.

A New Year resolution-cum-slogan comes readily to mind. “Do Without and Switch it Off.”

The parlous times demand that we become self-sacrificially virtuous. Live idyllically as cave dwellers once did.

Reminds me of the utopian prophecy emerging from Herr Schwab’s World Economic Forum. “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” You know it makes sense!
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