Readers’ Letters: Ditch net zero for defence
Under Donald Trump, the US is beginning to wake up to the fact that it urgently needs more dispatchable electricity to meet the demand for power to restore its heavy industry and to meet the needs of an unprecedented boom in AI data centres.
On his first day in office, he declared an energy emergency, because he knew that energy abundance is the key to winning today’s global industrial arms race.
He will increase US production of all forms of fossil fuel, including coal because he can see that world use of coal is increasing rapidly.
It is clear, now, that many major western energy companies are reconsidering the net-zero pledges they made in recent years and are turning away from renewables and back towards oil and gas.
This move makes sense, because the subsidies that wind and solar depend on may dry up, and traditional sources outcompete them.
President Trump is no longer likely to underwrite the costs of European security so that there is now a huge impetus to increase local arms manufacture right across Europe. This demands reliable and cost-effective energy production and distribution.
We in the UK, have significant untapped reserves of fossil fuels in the forms of coal, oil and gas lying under and around us.
How can it be that in this new and rapidly changing world we are determined to pursue Net Zero and to depend on ‘the breezes and the sunshine’ which are intermittent, unreliable and can only be collected and distributed by defacing our country with huge solar farms, turbines and armies of enormous pylons?
Whatever the negative propaganda about extracting fossil fuels may be, their extraction facilities are local and will occupy far less of our ‘green and pleasant land’ and can be controlled effectively.
Net Zero leads us down a path towards deindustrialisation at the very time when we need to gear up our production of military hardware and to provide for new data centres.
Can we ever wake up from this clean green nightmare? — ROBERT SHEPPARD, Beckingham.
