Special to Climate Depot
It is time to sweep the monarchy away
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
For the first time, many of us who have hitherto been firmly and cheerfully loyal to the Crown are talking openly about getting rid of the monarchy. The late Queen Elizabeth the Great was the perfect constitutional monarch. She did not meddle in politics and nearly always kept her opinions to herself. Her noble example and her lifetime of devoted service kept the “Great” in Great Britain.
Not so the Climate King. He disgraced himself, the monarchy and the United Kingdom with his half-witted and nakedly partisan political address to the climate conference in Abu Dhabi.
Most of His Majesty’s subjects now disagree with the climate nonsense, not least because we cannot afford it. Electricity prices in Britain are six to eight times those in Russia and China, India and Pakistan, the four Communist-led giants of the East, whose leaders know that global warming is a net benefit, not a “climate emergency”, not least because over the years, and at their request, my team have quietly briefed most of them.
Yet there was not a word of comfort from the King for those of us who can no longer afford to heat our homes. As I write, I am wearing two pairs of heavy breeks, two pullovers and a solid leather biker jacket, with a thick woollen rug over my knees, because keeping the heating on all day during freezing weather is no longer affordable.
Russia has practically no “renewable” energy, and relies chiefly on coal and Siberian gas for its electricity. China has more than 1100 coal-fired power stations and, last year, permitted two new ones each week on average. India made it plain at the G20 summit, and again in Abu Dhabi, that it would continue its plan to expand its already extensive coal-fired generation by 60%. Pakistan will expand it by 300%.
Since coal-fired power is half the price of gas and less than a fifth of the price of wind or solar power, it is no surprise that our electricity prices are shutting down Britain’s manufacturers one by one. They can no longer afford not to export their jobs, their profits and, eventually, our economic hegemony itself to the largely totalitarian East.
The King, of course, was tellingly silent about his fellow-Communists’ justifiable disregard and contempt for the global-warming scam that their agents of influence so busily peddle here. Instead, he delivered the usual bleating litany of imagined and imaginary catastrophes:
“Alarming tipping points being reached … existential threats facing us over global warming … 30% more CO2 … 40% more methane … countless communities which are unable to withstand repeated shocks … lives and livelihoods are laid waste by climate change … repeated cyclones batter vulnerable island nations … unprecedented floods … decades-long drought … most severe wildfire season on record … dangerous feedback loops … climate scientists have been alerting us for decades … records are now being broken … warmest global average temperature on record … taking the natural world outside balanced norms and limits … into dangerous, uncharted territory … a true sense of the emergency we face …”, etc., etc., yada, yada, ad nauseam.
The problem is, Charles the Absurd is as thick as two short planks, and, like all totalitarians, strikingly unaware of anything other than the Party Line that he so faithfully but destructively parrots. Stupidity and totalitarianism are deadly bedfellows.
I need not answer his litany of apocalypses and cataclysms, for nearly everyone already knows that the weather is much as it has ever been – changeable and intermittently destructive.
But it is worth pointing out some of the good news. Bjørn Lomborg’s recent update on the annual death toll attributable to climate-related events shows that in 2022 some 7000 people died worldwide from bad weather. Climate-related deaths have declined by a remarkable 99% since the 1920s.
No small reason for this spectacular decline is warmer weather. It is cold, not heat, that is the real killer, as a series of papers in The Lancet over the past decade have established. The Lancet, a venerable medico-scientific journal, has long been a cheer-leader for the climate nonsense. But its editors still retain enough intellectual honesty and independence to publish papers contrary to the climate-Communist Party Line.
The most comprehensive survey of deaths from cold against deaths from heat was Zhao et al. (2021). Globally, ten times as many die from cold as from heat; in Africa, almost 50 times as many:
Even the King ought to be able to deduce from the above chart that the most likely consequence even of substantial warming would be to reduce climate-related deaths worldwide. Sure enough, the unelected Kommissars of the European Union commissioned research in 2017 to establish how many extra Europeans would die for each increase in global temperature. To their horror, they discovered that the warmer the weather became the more Europeans would be alive by 2080:
No small part of the reason why people live longer if the weather is warmer is that famines – the most life-threatening consequences of cold weather – become fewer as the weather warms:
As to His Majesty’s waffle about “tipping points” and “feedback loops”, the rate of warming continues to be small and net-beneficial. Though IPCC’s emissions-growth scenario in 1990 led it to predict 0.2 to 0.5 degrees’ warming per decade (best estimate 0.3 degrees/decade), and 2 to 5 degrees’ final warming by doubled CO2 (best estimate 3 degrees), observed warming in the third of a century since then has been just 0.14-0.2 degrees/decade, implying only 1.4-2 degrees’ 21st-century transient warming or final warming by doubled CO2.
The King’s predecessor King Canute once went down to the seaside and had his throne set up facing the incoming tide. His courtiers gathered about him and watched as he stretched forth his hand and commanded sea level not to rise. The tide, however, with unbecoming lèse-majesté, came in just as usual and soaked the Royal tootsies.
Canute, who was as wise as Charles is not, turned to his baffled courtiers and said: “See, my beloved counsellors, how even the divinely-anointed King cannot command even these little wavelets. Remember, then, however great ye be, that your powers also are far from infinite, and give praise to Him in Whom alone rests all power.”
The totalitarian fallacy is to assume that all that is necessary to achieve a given objective is to follow the Party Line, because We’re In Charge, So There! The King, like almost everyone in Abu Dhabi, has fallen prey to that alluring but murderous fallacy.
Let us pretend that the totalitarian nations will join the West in “climate action”, so that from here on every nation will move in a straight line from here to net zero by 2050. In that event, 0.45 units, or half of the next 27 years’ global anthropogenic forcing of the climate at the near-linear 1/30th unit per year observed in the third of a century since 1990, would be abated.
Since transient doubled-CO2 warming this century is 1.7 degrees, and doubled-CO2 forcing is close to 4 units, converting units to temperature shows that the warming prevented even by global net zero would be less than a fifth of a degree by 2050.
In reality, it is only the West that will even attempt to get to net zero by 2050. In that event, only a tenth of a degree of warming will be prevented by 2050, and only that much if we actually reach net zero, which we won’t. You heard it here first.
If His Majesty’s realm, the United Kingdom, attained net zero on its own by 2050, its contribution to the reduction in global temperature would be of order 1/1000th of a degree – about as effective as King Canute trying to halt sea-level rise. Except that Canute knew the tide would come in just as usual, but his unworthy successor has not yet awoken to the fact that nothing we do will have an appreciable influence on the climate one way or the other.
And then there’s the cost. Governments have made various half-baked guesses at how much it would cost to get to global net zero by 2050. Indeed, the King himself had a go, using the flatulent, gee-whiz rhetoric that the thermo-totalitarians love:
“… we could mobilize the trillions of dollars we need – in the order of four-and-a-half to five trillion a year – to drive the transformation we need.”
Mobilize. Trillions. Drive. Transformation. Kapow!
Over the 27 years to 2050, the King’s estimate works out at about $130 trillion, of which the United Kingdom’s 0.9% (for we emit 0.9% of the world’s emissions) would be $1.2 trillion. The Government’s climate-change advisers reckon that is about right.
But let us get real. One of the very few halfway realistic cost estimates in the “what price net zero” discussion is that of National Grid ESO, the UK’s electricity grid authority. It has estimated that just to prepare the grid for net zero would cost $3.7 trillion in capex alone. And the grid accounts for only 23.5% of UK emissions. Pro rata, the capex cost of UK net zero would be $15.8 trillion. Since opex is at least twice capex, the total cost of UK net zero would not be less than £47 trillion. Pro rata, the global total cost would be $5.2 quadrillion.
Global annual GDP is about £110 trillion. Therefore, the $5.2 quadrillion cost of global net zero would be equivalent to 47 years’ global GDP. Even if His Majesty’s Government’s $1.3 trillion estimated cost of UK net zero were correct, warming prevented by each $1 billion spent on global net zero would still be less than one-millionth of a degree.
Why, then, do I say it is time to sweep the monarchy away? It is not mere petulance. The West indeed faces an existential threat, but the threat is not from the weather. It is from the incremental dismantling of democracy itself, and of the freedom and prosperity of which democracy was once the guarantee.
Our universities no longer tolerate debate on climate, or on a growing number of other topics of interest to Communists. Our journalists and politicians are terrified of the Rufmord – the reputational assassination – that is sedulously directed against those of us who dare to question the Party Line.
The sole bounden duty of a constitutional monarch is to keep holy silence. Yes, Walter Bagehot, the Victorian philosopher of monarchy, said that the monarch’s role was “to advise, to encourage and to warn”. But it is not to speak out in public on one side, and one side only, of a raging scientific and political debate. The King has broken the contract of silence to which he assented at his coronation. For that breach of contract, he must go.
Three of Britain’s political parties – UKIP, Reform and Reclaim – all now oppose the climate nonsense root and branch. Most Conservatives and most working-class Socialists also oppose the climate nonsense. Only the watermelon parties – the Greens and the Illiberals – still believe in it.
The King has, therefore, openly taken the side of the wealthy establishment against the mere people. And he has done so when, on any objective analysis, no one need do anything about global warming except to enjoy it and live longer. For nothing can be done about it anyway, and anything we tried to do would be – as it is already proving to be – disproportionately expensive. The King, from his gilded throne, is kicking the nation’s poor people in the teeth.
His Majesty’s mutterances on the global warming question represent no less than a strategic threat to the security of the United Kingdom as well as to its prosperity and well-being. If he were deliberately trying to destroy this country, he could scarcely have done worse.
I shall stop short of calling his speech in Abu Dhabi an act of treason, for he is too dim to have acted deliberately. Though his speech may not have been treasonous in its intent, it is unquestionably treasonous in its effect.
Therefore, many of us who have hitherto unswervingly supported the Crown have now decided that, decorative though it is, it is now causing such strategic harm to the nation it is supposed to serve, and especially to the poorest, that it must be swept away, and the sooner the better.
Let Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Highgrove House and the many other properties of the Crown become public museums. Let the Royal Family move lock, stock and pork-barrel to Montecito and just leave us alone. Let the State Coach give rides to toddlers at Disneyland. Let the Crown Jewels be sold to pay down the national debt. Let the polo fields be ploughed and planted with apple-trees. Enough is enough.
