Episodes
Saturday Aug 10, 2024
Watching the Net Zero agenda wobble
Saturday Aug 10, 2024
Saturday Aug 10, 2024
A number of weeks into the Labour government, the inevitable cracks are starting to appear in the pre-election promises.
According to The Telegraph, the new Secretary of State for Energy Security & Net Zero refused to repeat his elections pledges in the House of Commons, and admitted that it may be some time before the bill payer sees the benefits of the tens, perhaps hundreds of £billions that are required to meet the government’s unilateral policy targets, such as clean energy by 2030.
Meanwhile, new chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, plans to save £5.5 billion by scrapping winter fuel payments for ten million pensioners.
In this podcast, we are joined by director of Net Zero Watch, Andrew Montford, and David Turver, whose Substack has shone much needed light on the Net Zero agenda’s economics and technical failures.
Saturday Aug 03, 2024
Re-energizing!
Saturday Aug 03, 2024
Saturday Aug 03, 2024
The appointment of the new government sees the return of Ed Miliband, who last held the energy brief in 2010. Then Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, now Energy Security and Net Zero, Miliband has made climate and energy, the beginning, midden and end fs his political narrative. This week we learned a little more about the new government’s plans, but not much.
It is a shame that Miliband didn’t spend the last 14 years reading this week’s podcast guest. In 2009 Professor James Woudhuysen and Joe Kaplinsky’s Energise! was published — which argues for a radical re-think of energy…
“…consuming more energy isn’t a problem if the right kind of supply can be arranged. With the right supply, climate won’t run out of control. But so long as the state’s ineffective, moralistic policy on energy is left unchallenged, it’s the state’s interventions in our everyday lives that look set to run out of control.”
We caught up with James for some of his reflections on the book, and how well it has stood up over the fifteen years that have passed.
Sunday Jul 14, 2024
Greenomics
Sunday Jul 14, 2024
Sunday Jul 14, 2024
The new Labour government has wasted no time in launching three new vehicles it hope will reanimate the corpse of the green agenda. The National Wealth Fund, GB Energy and the Clean Energy Mission Control. All staffed and supported by the same-old-same-old wonks, banks and blobs, can this new configuration of deckchairs stop the Net Zero Titanic from sinking beneath the waves? And what is green economics anyway?Host and Climate Debate UK co-founder Ben Pile is joined by
David Paton -- Professor of Industrial Economics, Nottingham University Business School.
Catherine McBride OBE – Independent economist, often seen on screens and social media heroically defending Brexit.
Sunday Jul 07, 2024
Electageddon
Sunday Jul 07, 2024
Sunday Jul 07, 2024
In the aftermath of the UK General Election, we discuss the results, and the implications of the new Labour Government, with its massive majority of seats, with its historically tiny vote share — the smallest ever won by a government. Will the likes of Ed Miliband defy all reason and reality, to double down on Net Zero, or will his party stop him? Host and Climate Debate UK co-founder Ben Pile is joined by
David Rose - currently politics and investigations editor at the Jewish Chronicle, who will be shortly joining Unherd as investigations editor.
Martin Durkin - director of many excellent and highly provocative films, including his latest, Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth).
Andy Shaw - co-founder of Comedy Unleashed — the last bastion of free-thinking, unconstrained comedy, where free speech is allowed and loudly defended.
Whut?
The Net Zero Scandal is the Substack and podcast of Climate Debate UK (CDUK).
CDUK was formed in late 2022 by Ed Rennie and Ben Pile and is a campaign to put democracy, debate and the public back at the centre of climate and energy policy making.
For many years, the public has been excluded from climate and energy policymaking. Climate policy has been largely negotiated in supranational political bodies that the public has no access to, and no representation within. Much of the basis for this remote form of politics has been provided by research organisations that the public equally has no access to. Meanwhile, only non-governmental organisations which are sympathetic to the agenda, and which have huge budgets and global reach, are granted access to these processes.
We believe that it is wholly undemocratic to change society in this way, and that the UK’s unilateral climate and energy policies, intended to make Britain a ‘global leader’, have been expensive and catastrophic failures that put political ambition before the public’s interests.
A debate that involves the public is necessary to establish what the public believes is in its own interests, what principles should prevail, and what sacrifices are tolerable in the policy response to climate change.
Please support our work by either donating through our website or becoming a paid subscriber to our Substack.