Blackout: The Net Zero Agenda’s Dystopian Impact

"Net zero" and the entire "green" agenda are simply a power grab by the elites to extend their control even further. The aim is totalitarianism.

From The European Conservative

By Bill Durodié

Science, technology, and security are human and cultural issues—and shaping our outlooks on these has never been more urgent.

We still do not know the immediate cause of the massive power outage that impacted Spain, Portugal, and parts of southern France on Monday. But this has not impeded wild speculation, dubious explanations, and blame avoidance to deter discussion of the role played by the EU’s ‘Net Zero’ agenda and the cultural mindset that accompanies it.

The cultural mindset that dominates energy policy today reflects a dystopian outlook that views human development—the ‘human footprint’—as the problem rather than the potential solution. We are told that the development of industry and technology must be measured in units of carbon, which should be reduced rather than expanded.

The demand to use less energy is key to this anti-development culture, with the drive to use alternatives to fossil fuels—despite the fact that wind and solar cannot meet our needs, alongside the continuing irrational antagonism to nuclear power. This has led to a lack of investment in energy infrastructure and a shortage of engineers. 

In short, the Net Zero agenda and the cultural attitudes behind it have created an energy crisis waiting to happen.

Just days before this week’s blackouts, at an energy security conference in London, European Commission President, Ursula van der Leyen, touted her upcoming energy ‘roadmap’ for Europe to phase out Russian fossil fuels. Perhaps she could present its benefits to her audience in Valencia today as they scurry around recovering from the blackout.

A cyber-attack was quickly ruled out by the Spanish European Commission Executive Vice President for a Clean, Just and Competitive Transition (no, I’ve never heard of it either) Teresa Ribera. And, predictably, Politico, mouthpiece of the Euro elites, was quick off the mark to find a tame, EU-funded academic to deny any connection to ‘green energy.’ 

This, despite in excess of 80% of electricity across the Iberian peninsula deriving from just such intermittent renewables in the hour before the blackout, and experts having consistently warned that this might overwhelm the grid, or over-complicate it through a reliance on an excess of unreliable entry points. 

Instead, the incident that plunged people, businesses and hospitals into darkness, impacted most modes of transport, and paralysed financial transactions, communications and much else besides had, by mid-afternoon, been attributed to a “very strong oscillation in the electrical network” that led Spain’s high-voltage lines to disconnect from the European system with knock-on consequences elsewhere.

Others were keen to point out that a decade earlier, in the Madrid Declaration, the same three countries had welcomed the European Commission’s efforts to launch a European Energy Union, recognising the importance of building more interconnections across the region so as not to operate in isolation. But words are cheap. Real advances need time and money, and above-all cultural support and political commitment. What’s more, interconnectedness can sometimes be part of the problem.

Almost twenty years ago, in the aftermath of the last significant European blackout, which impacted much of Northern Italy, triggered by a Switzerland flashover of power lines with trees that cascaded across borders, I worked with colleagues from the energy supply sector across Europe on an EU-funded project run through Chatham House, the international relations think tank based in London, to investigate the elements required to assure the security of the electricity supply across borders.

We found, unsurprisingly maybe, that in the aftermath of 9/11, many of the resources to achieve this had gone into hard protection measures to enhance physical security at power stations and substations. In fact, many problems stemmed from the ageing infrastructure that had not been updated much since the 1950s. Overloaded power lines—as demand rises and new transmission routes are not built—sag through heat, thereby bringing them into contact with vegetation that, due to environmental concerns, may not be pruned or kept at a distance, and can also cause wildfires.

The key challenge then has little to do with terrorism and security, or even science and technology, but rather our cultural attitude towards development itself. While superficially a technical problem, the electricity supply chain is above all a complex, interlinked network that crosses international borders and connects people from wildly differing backgrounds, both as producers and consumers, bridging different languages, and experiences. The unifying element is an understanding that our world depends to a considerable degree upon the efficient supply and delivery of energy.

We pointed, in our report for the EU, to the importance of a shared culture that reflects interlocked technical and social networks, which can “play a decisive role, especially in emergency situations”. Over a decade before Greta Thunberg’s first school protest, and before the advent of the ‘Net Zero’ agenda, we highlighted a culture emerging in the West that appeared to stand opposed to the goal of increasing energy production.

What’s more, by failing to celebrate human ingenuity and our technical achievements this undermined the moral confidence that underlay the actual resilience of the entire energy system. A recent report from MCC Brussels makes these points eloquently, while further pointing to the conflation of climate alarmism with the need for more energy.

Today, we live at a time when it is hard to imagine how or why any ambitious young person would have anything to do with becoming a part of this industry. Fossil fuel production, which continues to power most of the electricity used by those who critique it, remains a core and essential component. But who looks to go into that now, or to talk openly of their profession with pride?

You have to wonder who would invest time and money in training to become an engineer in a related field today. Inevitably, due to rising energy costs, businesses have been forced to curtail innovation and begun to close down facilities with a concomitant impact on jobs.

Rather than looking for ways to increase the efficiency of energy production (the consumption of which has always been a measure of civilisation), we are continuously exhorted to reduce our demand. Today must be the first era in which ‘less’ has come to pose as a radical demand. 

Right across the board, as energy production is questioned and its supply becomes less reliable, as we are chastised for our supposed profligacy in its use on the grounds that the planet cannot take it, so human energies and passions turn elsewhere or become attenuated.

Science, technology, and security, then, are human and cultural issues first and foremost. Our outlooks and presumptions can liberate us or hold us back. Shaping these has never been more vital. 

The culture wars are not simply about a narrow concept of culture to do with museums and art, or how we use language – important as those things are. Cultural pessimism and low expectations impact everything. 

Whatever the trigger was, the real lesson from Spain and Portugal is that we need to transcend the dystopian mindset of the ‘Net Zero’ agenda.