2025-01-22
Tomorrow is the second reading that the Green Blob hopes will send the Climate and Nature Bill speeding its way toward the Statute Book.
So what will it mean for the legendary man on the Clapham Omnibus?
" ... Parliament is due to vote on a Private Member’s Bill that could lead to mass starvation, widespread disease and fatalities and the almost certain collapse of civil liberties and society within a few years"
Is that all? And here I was thinking that it might be serious.
"The bill is a thinly-disguised attempt using meaningless climate and nature crisis verbosity to ration and control almost everything that citizens consume"
Well, my parents had to cope with rationing and much else in WW2 (and beyond), and we survived that ...
"It appears that a near 90% reduction in hydrocarbon use within a decade is sought and this would affect everything from the energy that heats homes and drives a modern economy to the medicines and food that sustains life"
Our food distribution chains are more or less totally dependent upon diesel lorries, so that explains one cause of rationing - it won't be physically possible to move more than 10% of the food that currently gets handled. Can we survive on eating one day out of 10? On the plus side it might make a dent in the obesity crisis.
"People would freeze in winter, there would be no food in the shops or medicines in the hospitals and pharmacies. There would be no power to run sewage treatment plants or hydrocarbon-based chemicals to clean the water. A complete breakdown of law and order would be likely as citizens survive as best they can"
Most of us rely on gas currently for our heating - even those with heat pumps need electricity to run them (currently dependent on gas because no matter how many windmills and solar panels are installed, no wind / no sunshine = no power), so perhaps we can only heat our homes and cook our meals on one day in ten (if the wind happens to blow on the right day)?
And no diesel = no ambulances, so the NHS will have 10% of its previous arrivals to A&E, which might alleviate the insane queuing and trolleying I suppose.
"The bill is short on figures ... "
You don't say!
"But this is not the end of the story since the bill mandates that an account must be taken of emissions released by all UK imports ... "
OK, I give in, this is madness; we get much of our imports from China, who are not going to restrain their fossil fuel consumption for anybody, and even if we do hit net zero (excluding imports) we could never make up for the carbon footprint of the Chinese imports that arrive even if we could measure them, so these objectives obviously cannot be physically implemented.
Maybe our MPs might glance surreptitiously across the Atlantic to see how our brethren of the "Special Relationship" will be holding up their end of the measures to confront the Climate Crisis?
