British Climate Activist Responds To Ponton's UK Wind Power "Reality Check"

April 6, 2023 Francis Menton

Having read Bill Ponton’s very clear “reality check” on the UK’s Net Zero project, you are probably wondering, what are the counter-arguments advanced by the supporters of Net Zero?

After all, the Net Zero thing appears to have near-unanimous support in the UK. There is no significant political party in that country that advocates policies dissenting from the Net Zero program, unless you count the UK Independence Party, which at the moment holds zero seats in a House of Commons of 650 members. The currently-governing Conservative Party is fully on board with the Net Zero program, with the partial exception of a small group of about 50 MPs (out of 355 Tories in the Commons) claiming to be “studying” the issue; and all the various parties to the left of the Conservatives advocate even more extreme, immediate and forceful measures to reduce carbon emissions than those that the Conservatives are pursuing.

So surely there must exist somewhere a lucid explanation of how this Net Zero thing makes sense and how it can work.

A few days ago on GBNews a Conservative MP named Jacob Rees-Mogg conducted an interview with a young lady named Phoebe Plummer. Mr. Rees-Mogg is a somewhat prominent Conservative MP known for having expressed mildly skeptical views about the climate. Rees-Mogg is not a current member of the Cabinet, and thus is technically what is known as a “back bencher,” although he has held cabinet positions in the past. Ms. Plummer is the spokeswoman for the climate activist group known as Just Stop Oil, and is perhaps best known for being one of the protesters who damaged the Van Gogh painting “Sunflowers” in the UK’s National Gallery back in October 2022. The interview resulted in a video of about ten minutes long that is embedded below (if I have done it right). In the interview, Ms. Plummer states the rationale, if you want to call it that, for her position.

For those who would rather read than watch a video, I have transcribed below some choice quotes.

Rees-Mogg begins the interview by asking Ms. Plummer how she can reconcile her demand for an immediate halt to carbon emissions with the desire of people to “lead comfortable lives.” The response:

I wonder why you think it’s incompatible to help people with the cost of living crisis and switch to renewables, which are nine times cheaper than fossil fuels. Can you name me one of your viewers who is suffering the consequences of the energy crisis who doesn’t want their energy bills to be nine times cheaper right now?

Rees-Mogg interjects to ask how Plummer proposes to deal with the intermittency issue, where the sun and wind don’t work when it is dark or the wind is calm. Plummer’s answer:

Well, why are we inventing renewable technology? The largest solar farm in the UK was built in six weeks. It takes up to 28 years for any oil to come out of the ground in the North Sea. . . . We already have the capacity to provide so much of our energy from renewables, without any technology needed for storage solutions.

As the word avalanche continues, Rees-Mogg tries a somewhat desperate “But where is this coming from?”, noting that in the depth of the winter when renewables failed, Britain was relying on a combination imports from the EU, coal, and natural gas. Plummer:

Frankly I’m not a scientist. What I’m doing is listening to what all the experts are saying. We’re living in this insane world where the experts aren’t being listened to. The United Nations has called for no new oil and gas. The International Energy Agency has said that we can have no new oil and gas. The IPCC Report, the largest global report on the climate crisis, have all said we can have no new oil and gas. How many more experts need to say it?

Rees-Mogg tries asking what Plummer proposes to do for transport, and how to get goods into supermarkets. Some of the answer:

I’m looking at the world, and we’re living with the effects of the climate crisis today. Right now, people are dying. Children are starving. Families are fleeing their homes. And it’s preventable. We have the solutions.

And on and on. Rees-Mogg asks how to keep up the food supply without fossil fuels and fertilizers derived from them. Plummer:

You know what’s essential for the food supply? Tackling the climate crisis. This year we lost a third of our wheat crop, half of our potato crops. And it’s only going to get worse. We’re heading towards a future where people are going to be fighting over the last loaves of bread. . . . How do you expect to feed the world when our crops are destroyed by droughts, floods, wildfires, storms. . . .

Those quotes cover about a third of the interview, but the rest is of the same intellectual level, if you want to call it that. Watch the whole thing if you have the patience. Plummer’s spiel is some combination of appeals to authority and fear, with approximately zero understanding of how the world actually works.

I found the video at Paul Homewood’s site Not A Lot Of People Know That. Homewood titles his post “Phoebe Plummer, Spoilt Brat.” Homewood also links to a Daily Mail article of October 10, 2022 for some specifics on Plummer’s educational background:

[Plummer] went to [45,000 pound/yr] St. Mary’s School in Ascot which also taught Prince Edward’s daughter Lady Louise, plus the Duke of Kent’s grandchildren Marina and Amelia and Monaco’s Princess Caroline. Plummer went on to 30,000 pound/yr Mander Portman Woodward College in Kensington, London, named “spoilt brat central” by Vice Magazine in 2006.

Sadly, I think that Ms. Plummer’s statements are fairly representative of the arguments put forward in favor of fossil fuel suppression, at least on the few occasions when the advocates of such policy are pressed to support their views. If anyone is aware of a more coherent explanation of how fossil fuel suppression by Western countries makes any sense, I’d be interested to see it.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, I don’t appear to have succeeded at uploading the video. But you can go to the link to Homewood’s site if you want to watch it.