Sweden is a highly industrialised country with a small population of 10 million people. Few countries could match its record of productivity, as exemplified by the fact that it still designs and manufactures world-class cars and aeroplanes such as the Saab JAS 39 Gripen.
But when the cost of electrical power becomes too high, productivity suffers, factories become uncompetitive with those of other countries and either close or relocate and industries collapse.
To remain productive and competitive, Sweden recently decided to modify its net-zero policy without waiting for approval from an international committee.
Electricity prices in Sweden and its neighbouring European countries skyrocketed in the past few years due to the inefficiencies and true costs of attempting to conform to impossible net-zero targets proposed, even imposed, by the United Nations (U.N.).
The U.N. General Assembly established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 to evaluate scientific, technical, and socio-economic data related to human-induced climate change, presuming that human activity can alter the Earth’s climate.
To that end, trillions of dollars have already been spent by countries around the world, blindly following centralised, committee-decided diktats with no evidence that the climate has changed for better or for worse as a result.
On the contrary, this dreadful waste of resources has had terrible consequences for the economic climate of the Western world, denying access to cheap, affordable, and reliable energy, especially for low-income people.
The IPCC hosted the inaugural Conference of the Parties (COP 1) in Berlin in 1995, where tens of thousands of delegates assigned net-zero targets to signatories.
Few of the delegates would have had any knowledge of physics, chemistry, mathematics, geometry, or of the earth sciences that depend on these, geology, meteorology, astronomy, astrophysics.
Their primary (political) concern was, and remains, the sharing of wealth generated by countries that had created their wealth using fossil fuels and not on science and a better understanding of the planet.
In supplanting science with politics, their collective decisions have become a direct threat to Western civilisation.
On June 20, Sweden’s Finance Minister, Elisabeth Svantesson, said in Parliament: “We need more electricity production, we need clean electricity, and we need a stable energy system.”
Unilaterally, Sweden changed the economically ruinous net-zero targets in favour of longer-term compliance.
They returned to an energy source that had served them well for four decades—nuclear power stations—to provide electricity, representing a significant retreat from the net-zero target that the IPCC promotes.
Science Is Contested
The record of climate change on planet Earth is indelibly written in the rocks, tree rings, ice cores, sedimentary deposits, and latterly during the short period of human habitation, in documented history.Not one of the sometimes-cataclysmic changes in the climate of this planet can be attributed to the presence or levels of carbon dioxide, natural or anthropogenic, in the thin atmosphere enveloping the planet.
For many people, it may come as a surprise that the “cleanest,” most stable electricity source readily available today is coal. It has enabled the transition from manual hard labour and horsepower to where we can now harness the power of the atom and have the capability to feed and shelter a populace inconceivable to the likes of 18th-century economist Thomas Malthus.
But the belief that humans are able to change the climate by limiting emissions (duplicitously inferring to carbon dioxide emissions) belongs in fantasy land.
Planet Earth remains as Winston Churchill once defined Russia—“a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”
Of course, advances in knowledge have been made during the last century. For example, the link between planetary/cosmic cycles and the climate was firmly established by Serbian scientist Milutin Milanković a century ago. His theories can be evaluated with data now available through constant monitoring in different ways: historical records, CCTV via satellite, and body cams capturing extreme weather events.
In our time, the work of Professor Wyss Yim of Hong Kong University establishes the close link between subsea volcanic activity and resultant weather patterns that make up the global climate—totally independent of carbon dioxide, natural or anthropogenic.
Work by other eminent scientists such as former president of Greenpeace Canada Patrick Moore and Professor William Happer of Princetown University in the USA demonstrate the need for more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not less as demanded by net-zero idealogues.
Costly projects to “capture and store carbon” are not only futile but the opposite of the need to break the drought of carbon dioxide. A dearth of this vital plant nutrient threatens all forms of life.
Short-term droughts of the most potent greenhouse gas, water vapour, are visible, but a long-term drought of carbon dioxide is critical, previously unrecognised, but now measurable.
It cannot be repeated often enough, life on Earth needs more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—not less.
Built on a ‘Tower of Assumptions’
The prospect of pursuing net-zero was summarised by Nick Cater, executive director for the Menzies Research Centre, in his article in the Australian, where he reviews the latest report by Net-Zero Australia on “the capital costs of decarbonising the [coal-fired] grid” by 2030.The absurdity of the entire energy debacle is revealed when the proposed logistics are analysed in detail.
These logistics require the mining and processing of rare minerals, the sterilisation of fertile land, the duplication of reliable coal-fired grids to “firm” unreliable dilute supply sources, and clean-up costs necessary within a decade or two.
This is madness on an industrial scale. Carbon compounds are the lifeblood of our economy—“decarbonisation” is analogous to cutting its throat, draining its life force.
Carbon dioxide has never been at net zero. Over millennia, carbon dioxide always trended to net-negative as organic matter soaked this trace gas from the atmosphere.
But periodic replenishment of this life-essential gas from the interior via volcanicity has fortuitously maintained carbon dioxide levels above 130 ppm below which plants would starve, along with humans who, paradoxically, now seek to capture and store it.
Store it for what? Plant and animal life thrived one hundred million years ago when CO2 levels were much higher than today.
The models are, therefore, wrong in confidently predicting that by closing down our essential fossil fuel industry, the Earth’s temperature can be controlled to within one or two degrees.
The Western world has become hostage to IPCC commitments that threaten to destroy our entire energy system.
Many of its captives are profiting by siding with their captors, many have been brainwashed by their captors into believing the breath of life, carbon dioxide, is their enemy. Surely, it is time to stop pretending that by holding our collective breaths, we can change the tides of climate that rule our environment.
And it appears as if Sweden has opened the door as to how we can escape being hostage to the IPCC.
