Day: May 14, 2026

Professor Gwythian Prins portrays the Starmer government’s (especially Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s) push for rapid “decarbonisation” and Net Zero by 2030 as blind hubris, akin to Captain Smith’s refusal to slow down or alter course despite warnings.

He argues the UK is ignoring immutable laws of physics (e.g., energy density, intermittency of renewables, thermodynamics) and economics while doubling down via EU alignment.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Dr Gwythian Prins

This is the first in a series of 12 articles challenging climate change orthodoxy commissioned by Dr Prins (who has authored this article and one other himself). We will be publishing the articles at a rate of one a week over the next 12 weeks. The hope is that they can be collected into a book for Sixth Formers and university students.

On Britain’s political voyage today, the opulence of the first-class passengers – who are the rulers now – is not exhibited in furs and jewels as it was in their predecessors’ day, but in their flaunted luxury beliefs. As night falls on the Starmer Government, steaming unceasingly onwards, only one Minister seems to stand erect, glassy-eyed and untouchable on the bridge, and it is, unfortunately, Ed Miliband. He alone seems to believe in something, and that something is ‘decarbonisation’.

The British ship of state is slicing through the political seas swiftly and blindly towards a terrible collision with reality – with the laws of thermodynamics, engineering and, insofar as economics has constant principles, economics too – and with the consequences of petulantly ignorant denial of the same. Thomas Hardy observed in his lines on another famous collision – that of the Titanic with the iceberg – that at the moment when nemesis for the pride that made her became unavoidable, “the Spinner of the Hours said – ‘Now!’” That fateful freezing night of April 15th 1912, other captains on the North Atlantic had prudently changed course, slowed down or stopped – but not Captain Smith; nor now, by the same token, our Energy Secretary, as he rings up the civil service engine room for full ahead to ‘Net Zero by 2030’ and orders his loyal long-time ally and helmsman – his equally deluded ‘mission controller’ Chris Stark – to hold course.

There is still time to avoid shipwreck, but not much. Others have changed course, slowed down or stopped the scientifically illiterate and politically dangerous rush into so-called ‘renewable’ energy. So too must we. Remember, what sank the Titanic was also an immutable law of physics: that the energy of a moving mass increases as the square of the velocity. The 60,000-ton Titanic, at 21 knots, represented an energy of 1,161,000 foot-tons. At 10 knots, her energy would have been reduced to 290,250 foot-tons. Collision at that speed would have damaged her but would probably not have ripped out half her length underwater, and she might well have survived. Bear that in mind.

There are three rocket flares in the political night sky: one green, two red. The green flare. Having already withdrawn the US from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, on February 12th the Environmental Protection Agency cancelled the Obama-era 2009 ‘Endangerment Finding’ – a geopolitically massive move. That finding had stated that ‘greenhouse gases’ (as well as other tailpipe emissions) were a danger to human health requiring regulation under the Clean Air Act. From vehicles, the finding had been extended to capture power plants and other users of combustion fuels. It was a regulation that both locked the climate-catastrophist narrative into US law as indisputable fact and imposed a trillion dollars of regulatory costs that crushed the spirits of free-market enterprise. The former is now reopened for examination. The latter has been lifted.

One red flare. Simultaneously, as part of his blinkered drive to resubordinate this country to the European Commission as a powerless rule-taker, Keir Starmer has agreed to subject Britain to EU ‘decarbonisation’ acceleration – compounding the dead weight of domestic regulation and taxation with which he and his hapless Chancellor are suffocating the British economy. Then, thirdly, also in mid-February, a second red flare. The Mail on Sunday became the first major newspaper to report accurately the threat to Britain from a united-front Miliband Labour-Polanski ‘Green’ (for Islam, not for the environment) electoral pact that could beat Reform alone, while a national government of Reform, Restore and the Conservatives would defeat that hard-Left-Islamist pact – a threat to the very existence of this realm as we know and love it.

The ‘Green’ party’s victory in the Gorton and Denton by-election on February 26th, in which it cynically weaponised the Muslim vote concentrated in Gorton, validated that fear. It was unquestionably one of those turning-point events in modern politics – like the Orpington by-election of 1962 or the Crichel Down affair of 1954, the latter of high relevance to ministers who seek to avoid responsibility for their actions. After nearly 30 years of relentless ‘down with us’ policies, as the late and much-lamented Roger Scruton named them, the final Battle for Britain is, in a true sense, upon us.

With these three events, the Overton Window of what is possible and discussable around climate change has suddenly shifted at speed. To defeat the Miliband-Polanski threat it must be attacked from two directions. One is directly – as happened with the lifting of the Endangerment Finding – undermined by sapper-politicians and blown up. That is the job of all right-thinking politicians. The other is in the public mind, where the narrative has curdled quite generally. There, eco-catastrophism must be blown up too, but indirectly.

Trump is entirely correct to have cut off the legal legs of the green lobby. Why so? Because its arguments belong to the era of eco-catastrophism that is rapidly subsiding worldwide (not that it ever arose in China or Russia). It is the duty of those of us who were there from the beginning – even before Ed Miliband – and who know to tell the public the full story from first principles in a connected narrative for the first time. Here it is.

When eco-catastrophism was first rising in 2008, I wrote a paper with my late friend and colleague Steve Rayner – Professor of Science and Civilisation at the Oxford University Martin School, taken far too early by cancer – named after the world-famous animated Wallace and Gromit film The Wrong Trousers. It made our partnership well-known and highly unpopular among catastrophists. We explained that the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (in force from February 16th 2005) needed to be ditched before it got going. It was premised on three category mistakes.

Despite the best efforts of clever Gromit, his dog, we wrote that bemused Wallace, his gormless master, “becomes trapped in a pair of automated ‘Techno Trousers’. … They take control and carry him off in directions he does not wish to go. … The Kyoto Wrong Trousers have done something similar.”

We explained that the Kyoto Protocol failed because of three category mistakes. First, it was the wrong type of instrument – an understandable error. A template was needed for a universal intergovernmental treaty. What had recently succeeded and was therefore to hand? Kyoto was in fact built on the template of a nuclear weapons reduction treaty in which the warheads had been swapped out and tonnes of carbon dioxide swapped in, with various bells and whistles added. Second, it relied too heavily on the wrong agents: supranational bodies and their cosmopolitan ‘anywhere’ admirers – today’s first-class passengers, pound-shop successors to the Astors, Guggenheims, Wideners and Strausses but without their style or, one suspects when disaster strikes, their courage. Third, that instrument and those agents exercised the wrong sort of power: declamatory, non-binding ‘international law’ – shades of the Chagos debacle which, with luck, will be its finale.

As I explain fully in my chapter in Geopolitics for Hard Times – the textbook for military and diplomatic academies of the free world, to be published later this year – the Rules Based International Order (RuBIO) may have broken finally and visibly in January and February 2026, but it had passed its apogee long before. That break means that the careers of phalanxes of climate-change bureaucrats and diplomats who jovially and lucratively inhabited that world have been turned upside down. As happens with the double effect of any necessary act of self-defence in a just war, their salaries, constant jet-setting, self-esteem and jobs are collateral damage – a small price to pay.

Yes, I’ve been to a good few COPs myself, as a minority Jeremiah. Dr Eija-Riitta Korhola, the Finnish parliamentarian and participant-historian of all the COPs (Conferences of the Parties), has documented them all meticulously, and Rayner and I have been proved right by events against the heavy majority consensus. It is standing on that proffered credential of record that I suggest, 18 years later, it is time to unscramble the wiring of an even more fundamentally dangerous pair of Wrong Trousers. At the heart of the problem with Kyoto, and all succeeding COPs, is the problem which dare not speak its name: a failure to understand systemically the nature of our climate – by which I mean to understand from first principles the essence of the epistemology of its dynamics.

Trump’s second administration began by dynamiting the self-sealing cult of ‘green’ energy which has, for two decades, sustained a cosy symbiosis of fanatics filling the God-shaped hole in their lives and rent-seekers filling their boots – the groups who attacked Rayner and me. The symbiosis is familiar from the years of Prohibition. Then, the bootleggers rode on the backs of the Baptists. This is not new news.

On May 21st 2025 the Senate Appropriations Committee held hearings with the new Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, on one of the biggest boondoggles ever seen. The incoming team at the Department of Energy discovered that in the 76 days between losing the election and leaving office, under the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden Department of Energy had pushed out $93 billion in loans and grants for ‘green’ projects – described by the Inspector General as “high risk” – mostly to recipients with no financials and without oversight.

Published on February 5th 2025, the Secretary of Energy’s Secretarial Order One – the replacement for green dogma – was geopolitically the first wing. The cancellation of the ‘Endangerment Finding’ in February 2026 is the second. Now we can fly.

Point One of the 2025 Order deletes the Net Zero Carbon future entirely because “Net Zero policies raise energy costs for American families and businesses, threaten the reliability of our energy system and undermine our energy and national security. … The fact is that energy matters, and we need more of it, not less.”

Secretarial Order One and the cancellation of the Endangerment Finding also license us to see – and for the first time permit us to discuss properly – a deeper fallacy about ‘Net Zero’ lying beneath. It’s the Wrong Trousers again, and once again, epistemology comes first.

Axiomatic to any successful policy intervention is having the right theory of knowledge. Error here vitiates everything that follows. Consequent second and third-order details are, by that fact, simply not worth debating – although this is where most attention is directed. Eyes and minds are closed to inconvenient evidence or explanations. How to break this encapsulation?

A taxonomic question always comes first: of what is this an example? Global climate systems belong to a special category of complex adaptive systems that are self-organising and scale-free, balanced by many mysterious and incompletely understood feedback loops. The IPCC itself recognised this in 2001: “In climate research and modelling… we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore… the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible” (emphasis added). That statement is correct, inconvenient and has therefore been ignored by eco-catastrophists ever since, despite endless bleating that we must all ‘follow the science’. Yet in their Orwellian worldview, where some science is more equal than other science, it seems that only selected science which they ‘curate’ makes the grade. Poor ‘curate’: a perfectly decent verb tortured nearly to death.

But modelling had gone on regardless; and the high-emission scenario known as RCP8.5 (radiative forcing of 8.5 watts per square metre caused by high CO₂ emissions) had been used as the ‘business as usual’pathway, with no fossil fuel abatement, to underpin thousands of published papers across a generation of academic work. Then, unexpectedly, in April 2026 a committee within a committee responsible for validating a range of climate models to the IPCC announced that the high-end scenario RCP8.5 and its derivatives were now implausible. With terrier-like tenacity, one of the co-authors of the original 2010 Hartwell Paper, Professor Roger Pielke Jr, has been on the case of RCP8.5 for years; and on April 29th he published a detailed account (signposted by the Daily Sceptic) of how this retreat occurred, announcing that RCP8.5 is now officially dead and that “the future is not what it used to be”. This is a necessary second-order but not yet sufficient first-order step. It opens the door into the secret garden. Now let us enter.

Determining both how the chaotic world climate will change, and how any single variable such as CO₂ might affect that change, are what scientists call ‘wicked’ problems. Experimentation to prove a hypothesis is impossible because each intervention irrevocably changes context. ‘Wicked’ means ‘unbounded’. But irreversible actions are being toyed with in this space.

‘Geoengineering’ to meddle with the atmosphere and dim the sun is a case in point. The high-risk, opaque but manifestly ‘woke’ para-statal think tank ARIA now proposes to investigate ‘solar engineering’ on unsafe assumptions and under wholly inadequate oversight. ARIA has become an academics’ gravy-train perversion of Dom Cummings’s idea for a British DARPA. ‘Solar engineering’ should not even be considered, for all the reasons that Professor Mike Hulme – who does understand the issue – laid out in Can Science Fix Climate Change? (undesirable, ungovernable, unattainable) and has repeated ever since.

And so Wallace’s Wrong Trousers come clumping along again. The benefits claimed for Net Zero Carbon policies are exploded by different but more axiomatic category mistakes than was the case for the Kyoto Protocol. ‘Wicked’ problems are not amenable to stepwise, weather-type forecasting no matter how large the computer – or, worse, to modelling of any kind, as the IPCC said in 2001 – which perforce assumes levels of confidence in closure on all key variables that by definition cannot exist. Projections from modelling are not predictions.

Such errors fall into Popper’s Trap in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, mistaking subject matter – rather than problems – as the object of study. In his 2023 Scruton Lecture in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, Peter Thiel correctly observed that the “corruption of settledness” creates a truly general crisis in Western science today.

Yet, to seem credible as policy, Net Zero Carbon has no choice. It must assert as fact that carbon dioxide has a direct and leading relationship to rising temperatures – although the systemically flawed climate models on which the policy relies cannot show this, for the reasons that Patrick Frank’s seminal 2019 paper explains. That paper and its author have been frequently insulted but to this day have not been shown to be wrong in their science.

Of course it has been known since Arrhenius’ 1896 paper (and Tyndall before him) that ‘carbonic acid’ can play a role in warming on the ground. It is a theoretical possibility. But how much, if at all? We cannot know. Yet, with bureaucratic delight, ‘Net Zero’ alchemically transmutes that unquantifiable possibility into unquestionable fact, which policy then injects into regulating absolutely everything. It is socialist heaven – the ideal, all-purpose, meddlesome tool to poke into any and every aspect of life.

However, since the satellite era began to give us good, clean data, we have learned that there is empirical evidence for substantial direct benefits from rising CO₂. Greening of the planet is photographically demonstrable and measurable – 15% over 30 years, with CO₂ responsible for 70% of that, as measured by chlorophyll fluorescence. Rising CO₂ feeds increased greening because it is the key input for photosynthesis. Moreover, as Matt Ridley, that embodiment of rational optimism, notes, plant stomata need remain open less long to absorb the required CO₂, which means less water loss and thus better drought resistance. This CO₂ fertilisation effect is a principal cause of the continuing rise in global crop yields and food supply. Hooray!

In contrast, there is not – because there cannot be, thanks to the new Wrong Trousers – comparable direct proof of James Hansen’s June 1988 ‘control knob’ hypothesis of global warming caused by anthropogenic CO₂. On a convergent bearing comes Pat Frank’s explanation of errors in the propagation of statistical uncertainty in climate modelling – errors of a magnitude that overrides the range of any putative actionable signal. It is a different type of flaw in climate modelling to those rotating around the RCP8.5 story, and even more deadly to the cottage industry of climate change modelling. Pat Frank’s own paper about his famous paper will also be appearing later in the series which this article launches in the Daily Sceptic.

If proof well above the civil level of proof (balance of probability) is unavailable – which is the bare minimum threshold – Net Zero Carbon as an all-pervasive command policy, with all its imposed costs, is more than economic hara-kiri. It destroys trust in the social contract between electors and those elected, keeps people poor and our children frightened, misuses valuable resources, hurts the environment and – as former MI6 Chief Richard Dearlove has already explained in the Spectator – it undermines national security. It is scientifically unjustifiable, economically unaffordable and morally and politically insupportable.

Furthermore, satellite temperature series uncontaminated by the ‘heat island’ effect on terrestrial thermometers show no acceleration of the gentle underlying global warming trend since 1970 – for in geological time we are still emerging from the Little Ice Age – only natural variations. Unlike the greening trend, they simply do not correlate with the global standard Mauna Loa record of CO₂, which shows a one-third increase since the early 1970s. Furthermore, satellite data documented in detail the recent period of globally warm and wet weather: nature’s helpful and large demonstration experiment.

Satellites recorded the largest bottom-to-top perturbation in the atmosphere ever measured by modern instrumentation – bigger than any atomic or hydrogen bomb test – and with a VEI (volcanic explosivity index) of 6, the most powerful volcanic eruption since Krakatoa in 1883. The underwater Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai (HTHH) climax eruption on January 15th 2022 increased the total water-vapour content of the stratosphere by an estimated 150 million tonnes: 10% of its typical content, a gigantic if temporary boost to global warming.

The HTHH eruption coincided with a large El Niño (warm water upwelling in the Pacific) and with the approaching maximum of Solar Cycle 25 – the 11-year cycle of increasing and decreasing intensity of solar energy reaching Earth that correlates with sunspot observations. Together these are logically sufficient cause for the effect: the global warming spike that immediately followed.

The safe rule of thumb is that the larger the natural event, the less likely that human intervention plays a significant role. The domestic implications for self-harmed Britain are plain. Adopt Secretary Wright’s thermodynamically literate Order Number One before it is too late, or suffer irreparable damage to the security, economy, social cohesion and psychological wellbeing of our realm. The end point sought is dangerously chimerical. There is no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. Let us therefore turn our attention to the means chosen to chase this carefully ‘curated’ pointlessness: market failure ‘corrected’ with sticks and carrots, and the whole confection rammed down the public throat.

Renewables are not renewable. A major 2021 audit of the natural resources needed to attain Net Zero emissions by 2050, conducted by Professor Simon Michaux of the Finnish Geological Survey, shows that to replace coal, oil and gas with electricity from wind and solar power backed up by nuclear generation and large-scale batteries would require energy-intensive, polluting and costly mining of the following multiples of current global annual extraction of rare, mostly Chinese-controlled minerals: 180 times the global annual extraction of copper in 2019; 380 years’ worth of nickel; 1,600 years’ cobalt; 6,700 years’ graphite; 9,400 years’ lithium; 29,000 years’ germanium; and 67,000 years’ vanadium. It just ain’t going to happen, Cap’n Ed.

For three fundamental reasons, ‘renewables’ are neither clean nor reliable nor home-grown – whatever the oxymoronic Department for Energy Security and Net Zero declares.

First, as the Finnish audit indicates, the EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Invested) is so poor as to be often negative. The system complexity, size, cost, extraction pollution and short lifespan of collectors and batteries stand in inverse relation to the low quality of wind or sunlight as fuel. Furthermore, solar and wind – and most especially solar – cannot, by their nature as passive collectors, generate the essential inertia without which it is impossible to maintain the stable 50Hz frequency that prevents grids from rapidly unbalancing and shutting down protectively. The most recent major such event was the blackout of the Iberian peninsula at 10.59am on April 28th 2025, caused by too much solar power being connected to the grid in an uncontrollable manner. Inertia requires hot-turning turbines, flywheels and the like; generators without inertia cannot self-start from a blackout – they need a hot-turning starter motor. In the real world of today, the more inertia-free generation you deploy, the more you need fossil fuels, not less.

Furthermore, on April 15th Jonathan Leake explained very clearly the elementary error that Miliband and his ‘mission controller’ have made in Britain – one that exposes the country that once had the most robust grid in the world to increasing risk of a Spanish-style blackout, whose first anniversary we mark, if that is the right sentiment. In the brutal, blinkered haste of their luxury belief to bribe or coerce solar blight across productive English farmland, Miliband and Stark made a basic mistake: they allowed solar collectors to be connected to the blind distribution grid rather than to the dispatchable and controllable grid visible to grid controllers.

Second, any attempt to reverse the transition from dense stocks back to thin flows of fuels is astronomically costly, thermodynamically ignorant and historically unprecedented. Thermodynamically ignorant? The whole endeavour affronts the Second Law of Thermodynamics (heat cannot of itself pass from a cooler body to a hotter body). Where is King Canute when we need him to remind us of the dangers of human pride?

Third, in any case there is no global energy transition – only addition. Globally the world is breaking records in coal use (over 8.2 billion tonnes last year). Transport by land, sea and air is structurally over 90% oil-driven. As a percentage, fossil fuels are slightly lower today (81%) than in 1971 (87%), but overall consumption has increased threefold, hugely improving human welfare worldwide. Renewables are not displacing fossil fuels because they are too feeble to do so.

Incredibly, Britain now runs two grids. The first is a firm-power ‘hubs and spokes’ grid, largely burning gas – a premium fuel that should be reserved (as it used to be) for peaking power but is now used for base load, thereby setting the marker price. Gas is used faute de mieux because, for reasons of differing prejudices and incompetences, high-grade British coal and base-load nuclear – which used to be the cheapest fuels in the CEGB’s ‘merit order’ that became possible after the 1926 Electricity Supply Act and the rapid building of the grid during the Depression – are not available. (Leslie Hannah’s Electricity before Nationalisation tells that remarkable story, suddenly relevant again today.)

This first grid picks up the slack for the second: a hugely subsidised and parasitic wind and solar fleet that simply would not exist in a free market, and which therefore relies for life-support on enduring political intent and continual injections of taxpayers’ money – to induce deployment, to give dispatch priority when the wind blows or the sun shines (which creates weakness if not mayhem in the grid) and, very importantly, to ‘constrain off’. That means paying ‘renewables’ rent-seeker investors to switch off their assets when their uncontrollable generators threaten grid stability with too much electricity. The Renewable Energy Foundation has documented in granular detail the payments to wind installations placed with insufficient or no adequate connectivity – which, as a side-effect (if it is), causes sharply increased volumes of constraint payments to flow. Needless to say, electricity prices are ruinously high, and subsidy demands for overriding market wisdom are a significant part of the reason why. It is the energy economics of a mad-house. Two national authorities on these costs, Professor Gordon Hughes and Dr Lee Morrissey, will also be publishing on these questions in detail in the series of articles that follows.

Nor – contrary to the lazy conventional wisdom at DESNZ – will savings from increasing the efficiency of energy use result in a reduction in gross primary energy consumption. Greater efficiency results in greater and ever more productive uses of energy, which together create economic growth. This is Jevons’s Paradox, another de facto immutable first principle, first explained in William Stanley Jevons’s book The Coal Question in 1865. The current AI revolution is a further demonstration of the paradox’s truth, but it operates domestically too. Save money on super-efficient gas central heating and insulation in your house, and you free up cash in the family budget to reallocate – for that extra holiday jetting to the sun, or the sports car you have always hankered after – each transaction generating more jobs, more innovation and more net wealth through contingent economic activity. Energy is very much like money in a free market: none is ever left on the table. Saved in one place, it will be invested profitably elsewhere.

Contrast the divergent trajectories of the largely undamaged American and the green-blighted British economies over the past quarter-century. From broad parity in GDP per person, the average Briton is now significantly poorer than the average American; and British electricity costs are now four times those in the US – the highest in the industrial world. Cost-rationing has led to absolute reductions in energy use in Great Britain in recent years as people are forced to live smaller lives, which is no cause for rejoicing except among flagellant cults. Meanwhile the expansion of cheap, reliable, abundant energy in the US means that Jevons’s Paradox is happily on display across a healthy and growing national economy. The US is furthermore energy self-sufficient, thanks to ‘drill, baby, drill’ – with California and some other ‘woke’ jurisdictions that have engaged in market misdirection and green regulation as self-harming exceptions.

Since the errors explained in this article are first-order and axiomatic, the minimum remedy is commensurately radical: admission of fundamental error and total – yes, total – demolition.

Wind and solar have their place, of course, but it is not in grid systems in complex economies. Their proper place is in village-scale installations with mature battery storage, powering life-saving standalone applications off-grid in the sun-belt tropics or on remote windswept islands. There they are truly life-changing, powering light, cooking, refrigeration, water pumps, radios, televisions, satellite telephones and computers. My case is not and never has been against the technologies, which are morally neutral, but against the arrogance, ignorance or casuistry that inhabits the defective thinking leading to gross misapplication and scaling.

More than any other living scholar, the great Professor Vaclav Smil has taught how energy makes civilisations. The geopolitics are not particularly complicated either. For the leading economies in the middle and high latitudes who made the modern world, led by Great Britain, coal was, is and remains King. Those who acknowledge him gain the power to rule those who do not understand this. The rare materials required for mis-named ‘renewables’ are so scandalously filthy in their extraction, processing and ultimate disposal as to make coal look angelic – not to mention their indelible association with forced modern slave and child labour in the totalitarian lands of our sworn enemies from which we import them.

We will know that we have avoided the iceberg when two genuinely homegrown industries return from the dead to give us once again the energy security in dangerous times that they gave us through two world wars: coal mining and coal-fired power stations (and the steel and heavy manufacturing to support them). But when they return, they will not be as you remember or imagine them. Clean and highly automated, the Welsh and Nottinghamshire coalfields will reopen British access to some of the world’s best reserves of anthracite and other high-grade coal. When the first new ultra-super-critical (USC) coal-fired power stations with fluidised bed combustion (a British invention) come on-line as base load for the British grid, when the market-determined merit order is restored and when interconnectors revert to being occasional and two-way rather than critical and mainly one-way importers that Russian GUGI submarines can threaten – then we will know that sound, science-based energy and security policy is back in its proper place on the bridge.

Fantasy? Misplaced nostalgia? Not guilty. It is already happening elsewhere. At nearly 50% thermal efficiency, USC high-temperature steam-turbine stations such as Unit 8 – producing 912MW of electricity and 220MW of district heat at Rheinhafen-Karlsruhe – do nearly twice the work per tonne of coal burned compared with previous legacy plant, with minimal harmful combustion emissions captured by state-of-the-art flue scrubbers; and the new fleet of German USC stations burns lower-grade dirty lignite from east German mines. In 2023 RWE began removing wind turbines to gain access to the Garzweiler lignite seams beneath. By increasing its coal base load, Germany joins Poland in boot-strapping its energy infrastructure to support its iron, steel and metallurgical industries, which in turn repurpose heavy vehicle engineering – helping to drive German rearmament without limit to cost.

But no climate policy? Surely some mistake? No mistake. On the evidence we now have, the obsession with ‘decarbonisation’ over the past quarter-century has been a grand illusion and distraction – a solution to a problem that cannot be shown to exist. Just as Canute sought to teach his court about the tides, it is an elementary and arrogant conceit to think that we can have ‘policies’ about climate, for the reasons of fundamental error in theories of knowledge explained in this article. How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? You cannot. There is still ineffable magic in this world, thank goodness, if we have the humility to see and appreciate it.

Gwythian Prins is Emeritus Research Professor at the London School of Economics. He was Convenor of the trail-blazing Hartwell Group on Climate and Energy from 2007 to 2015, co-author of The Wrong Trousers (2008), lead author of The Hartwell Paper (2010) and The Vital Spark (2013) and is Convening Editor of Geopolitics for Hard Times (forthcoming 2026).