Not Zero: How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won't Even Save the Planet)

Product Information

Cambridge News (1 July 2003). "City's depressing housing under fire". Cambridge News. Archived from the original on 20 December 2013. Clark continued: “In the minds of Deben [chair of the government’s Climate Change Committee], Sharma and others, only one thing seems to matter: lowering Britain’s carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. All other considerations, such as jobs and national prosperity, seem to go out of the window.” The Daily Mail published an article by Clark titled: “We all want to save the planet but the Government’s barely debated and uncosted fantasy of achieving net zero by 2050 will leave us all poorer, colder and hungrier”. 20 Ross Clark. “ We all want to save the planet but the Government’s barely debated and uncosted fantasy of achieving net zero by 2050 will leave us all poorer, colder and hungrier,” Daily Mail, January 21, 2023. Archived January 23, 2023. Archive URL: https://archive.is/d7zG3 He argued that efforts to decarbonise the economy had contributed to such events, stating: “We invest in more and more intermittent forms of energy such as wind and solar while the provision of energy storage lags well behind, resulting in several close shaves recently as the wind dropped and the sun went down.”

Ross Clark argues that it is a terrible mistake, an impractical hostage to fortune which will have massive downsides. Achieving the target is predicated on the rapid development of technologies that are either non-existent, highly speculative or untested. Clark shows that efforts to achieve the target will inevitably result in a huge hit to living standards, which will clobber the poorest hardest, and gift a massive geopolitical advantage to hostile superpowers such as China and Russia. The unrealistic and rigid timetable it imposes could also result in our committing to technologies which turn out to be ineffective, all while distracting ourselves from the far more important objective of adaptation. Clark wrote an article for The Spectator criticising the government’s proposals to ban the sale of new gas boilers after 2025 as part of a net zero decarbonisation strategy to be implemented by 2050. 44 Ross Clark. “ The boiler ban fiasco and the true cost of net zero,” The Spectator, 25 May 2021. Archived June 1, 2021. Archive URL: https://archive.ph/qRlL7 O’Brien, Neil; Clark, Ross (2010), The Renewal of Government, A manifesto for whoever wins the election (PDF), Policy Exchange Clark argued that: “if it involved any other subject, the news that the Government hid estimates of the true cost of one of its policies would be a scandal.”Clark suggestedthat the reason many people in Britain would describe the majority of the world’s population as living in poverty is partly due to the “fantasy” that wealthy lifestyles in the West is fuelling climate change. 76 Ross Clark. “ What the rise of the middle class reveals about the global poverty myth,” Spectator, October 3, 2018. Archived April 3, 2020. Archived .pdf on file atDeSmog. In 2012, Clark's musical Shot at Dawn was performed as a workshop at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden. The musical was a success and was later restaged as a full-scale professional production in 2014 at Upstairs at The Gatehouse in Highgate, north London and the Mumford Theatre, Cambridge. [11] He also wrote, with Martin Coslett, The Perfect City, which was performed at the Etcetera Theatre in March 2013. [12] In 2015, the musical Shot at Dawn was renamed The White Feather and performed at the Union Theatre in Southwark. [13] Personal [ edit ] He added: “it won’t mean ‘climate chaos’ if some of these fall – it will simply be an inevitable result of ‘record temperatures’ having become a debased currency”. The reason we keep having ‘record-breaking heat is not so much because of climate change – although rising global temperatures are slightly increasing the chances of records being broken – but because there are so many records to break.” The article concludedthat, “we are still a long way from efficient CCS, but there is nothing to say that it can’t outflank technologies such as hydrogen and battery storage, to become a large part of a transition to zero carbon. So, no, it is not a foregone conclusion that oil companies will be brought down and their assets stranded – even if Greenpeace would very much like them tobe.”

Reason Foundation (6 November 2013). "Newsday's Lane Filler and The Times' Ross Clark Win Reason Foundation's Bastiat Prize". Reason Foundation. He concluded the article by suggesting that blaming oil and gas companies for climate change is an attempt to “palm off responsibility”: 27 Ross Clark. “ Don’t blame oil and coal companies for climate change,” Spectator, October 10, 2019. Archived April 3, 2020. Archived .pdf on file atDeSmog. In a January 2023 Daily Mail article, Clark wrote: 15 Ross Clark. “ My inconvenient truth: Ross Clark accepts that the planet IS warming. But in a new book he challenges the consensus and argues that the hysteria and doom-mongering that now surround any debate risk doing more harm than climate change ever could,” Daily Mail, January 21, 2023. Archived January 23, 2023. Archive URL: https://archive.is/RTbU2Given the failure of the world to come to an end, it is tempting to say, just as we do when religious cults and other fantasists make doom-laden predictions which fail to come to pass: well, the whole thing must be a hoax.” KeyQuotes Oil and coal companies are the unsung heroes of the greatest period in the improvement of global living standards theworld has ever known.”