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

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Notwithstanding these rare pieces of useful advice, Clark’s book is further confirmation that the fringes of British conservatism are stuck in an intellectual cul-de-sac, unable to accept fully the science and economics of climate change for fear that it threatens a rigid adherence to free-market fundamentalism.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has revised the UK’s economic growth figures since Covid upwards. Clark wrotethat Extinction Rebellion grew out of anti-globalisation movements “whose unashamed purpose was to try to bring down the economic system as we know it and replace it with a kind of primitive socialism”.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. I've been very concerned about climate change for a long time and have tried to take practical steps to help. Few Conservatives will argue with that, nor with the idea of introducing sanctions for benefit claimants who refuse to look for work. 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.

Ross Clark (born 12 September 1966) is a British journalist and author whose work has appeared in The Spectator, The Times and other publications. Clark also cited an article written by Michael Shellenberger for Forbes Magazine advocating for the development of nuclear energy as opposed to renewables, which has since been removed.C. It also showed that, to have an even chance of staying within that temperature threshold, global emissions of carbon dioxide will need to reach net zero by 2050. Clark wrote an article for the Spectatorwhere he argued that if governments look at ways of decreasing single-use plastic bags then they should also look at other materials and ‘bags for life’ and said that environment policymaking “tends to dart between fashionable issues, ignoring complexities”. Clark describedthe term ‘climate denial’ as a “rather oddly-expressed phenomenon” and criticised The Guardian’s conclusion “to show that you are proportionally more likely to be sceptical of climate change if you are of Caucasian appearance and in possession of a willy”. Clark is the go-to journalist for the comment desks of conservative newspapers seeking to downplay climate change. Clark concedes that “the world is warming and there are many reasons why we should want to cut carbon emissions and adopt cleaner forms of energy”, but also argued that “some of what passes for warnings on climate is sheer flight of fancy” and “is not climate science, nor science of any kind; it is science fiction, dreamed up to serve a particular political outlook”.

Now, I can see why one might argue that this would not be the case if the book is simply unreasoning polemic designed to fortify people in their prejudices for some shadowy political reasons.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. After arguing that Britain’s energy crisis “has been made much worse by energy policies which for a decade and a half have doggedly pursued the objective of cutting carbon emissions without any regard to the costs”, Clark also claimed that the Government had “deprived Britain of what could have been by now a very productive native shale gas industry”. Achieving the target is predicated on the rapid development of technologies that are either non-existent, highly speculative or untested. He also stated: “In America as in Britain, debate is becoming fixated on decarbonising energy without thinking enough about resilience.

I think that, in most people’s minds, it was as simple as: climate change is bad, something needs to be done about it, Net Zero is something, let’s do that. Clark wrote an article in The Spectator criticising Hope Not Hate, an activist group which had campaigned to make climate science denial a hate crime. In an article for The Spectator, Clark disputed whether the British energy system lasting for two months without coal would end the country’s dependence on fossil fuels, writing: “the coal hard reality is that we are still a long, long way away from ending our dependence on fossil fuels.The Net Zero policy was subject to almost no parliamentary or public scrutiny, and is universally approved by our political class.