FOR years the NHS has been obsessed with Net Zero, more concerned about saving carbon than patients’ lives. It has set up a ‘Greener NHS’ team, with a pay bill of £3million, including five on six-figure salaries, who spend their time counting up carbon emissions not only in the NHS itself, but also those embedded in the products and services it buys.
Suppliers face a 135-question process to ensure that a product’s social values and contribution to emissions targets has been considered. All of this of course simply adds more bureaucracy to the health service.
The latest bright idea is to replace ambulances with electric ones, and these are on trial in areas such as West Midlands. They are reckoned to cost £150,000 each, much more than a conventional one, because leading manufacturers do not make them – due to lack of demand. West Midlands, for instance, have been buying theirs from VCS Bradford, who convert conventional ambulances to run on battery power. On top of that, ambulance services will have to spend hundreds of millions on charging infrastructure.
The real problem is not just the cost. It is the fact that electric ambulances have to spend hours every day recharging. It is estimated that they have a range of only about 70 miles, though VCS claim 105 to 110 miles. As we know, driving with a heater or air conditioning on full blast quickly reduces range, as will all the medical devices on board, such as oxygen supply. Recharging takes four hours, and West Midlands reckon their ambulances average about 120 miles a day, which suggest they will need to be recharged twice a day. In other words, they will be unavailable for eight hours out of 24. Tough luck if you need one in the middle of the night!
Problems become more acute in rural areas. In many areas a round trip to hospital can be more than 70 miles. And what happens when the ambulance gets an emergency call, but its meter says the battery does not have enough juice left in it?
Every hour of downtime recharging is an hour when patients are not being treated/taken to hospital. This can only lead to patients dying – it is that simple.
Now we’re responsible for China’s emissions too!
IMPOVERISHING the country in the name of Net Zero is not enough, according to the eco-zealots. A study from Leeds University complains that although the UK has halved its territorial emissions since 1990, when we factor in the carbon content of imports, the saving is much smaller, around 20 per cent, according to the Telegraph.
Given that high energy costs, amongst other things, have caused UK manufacturing to disappear overseas at a rate of knots, this is perhaps not surprising. Indeed it highlights the whole hypocrisy and futility of the UK’s Net Zero agenda. Until the rest of the world phases out fossil fuels, nothing we can do will make a blind bit of difference.
Goods made in China and elsewhere in Asia will inevitably have a much higher carbon content, because their economies still rely heavily on coal. On top of that are all of the emissions involved in shipping them halfway round the world. Pursuing Net Zero will just make matters worse. And quite how the UK government is supposed to influence what China are doing with their emissions is a mystery.
But professional climate alarmist Myles Allen, Oxford University’s professor of geosystem science, lets the cat out of the bag at the end of the Telegraph report, saying: ‘Achieving net zero should mean, from 2050, no one can be allowed to sell stuff that causes global warming. So anyone who sells a product that causes global warming would need to explain how they are going to stop it causing global warming – whether through its production, use or disposal – by 2050.’
In other words, all imports of goods, raw materials and food from China, or just about anywhere else in the world, will be banned.
Welcome to the Dark Ages!
Soaring cost of electricity grid upgrades to handle wind power
THE National Grid has just announced that upgrades to cope with wind power will cost £58billion, on top of the £54billion already committed to.
The upgrades, which will involve some 5,000 miles of new power lines and the pylons to carry them, are necessary to transmit the huge amount of offshore wind power to where it will be used. The project will also increase transmission capacity needed to cope with increased demand for power from electric cars and heat pumps.
None of this spending would be necessary if it were not for Net Zero policy.
It will be spread between now and 2035, so works out at about £10billion a year, or £400 per household. As we are well aware, public infrastructure projects never come in under budget, so we could easily be looking at double this cost, plus interest on top.
The Electricity Systems Operator (ESO), which is currently part of the National Grid but will shortly be taken over by the government, will be responsible for the project. Quite where the government will find the money is a mystery – no doubt it will be added to our already unaffordable National Debt!
Worse still, these costs are the tip of the iceberg, as they concern only the high voltage transmission network, which makes up only about 2 per cent of the overall grid. Most of the network is low voltage distribution, the stuff that actually brings electricity through our streets and into our homes. This network will also need to be upgraded, something that energy experts have estimated will cost £500billion.
All of this nails the lie that offshore wind power is ‘cheap’. It was utterly irresponsible for successive governments to offer contracts to wind farms which were hundreds of miles away from users, with no means of connecting the two together.
It is perhaps a sign of the times that the government plans to spend unimaginable amounts of money like this, yet nobody appears to bat an eyelid.