He also stated: “In America as in Britain, debate is becoming fixated on decarbonising energy without thinking enough about resilience.” Clark’s most recent book, Not Zero: How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won’t Even Save the Planet), in which he argues the UK government’s policy to reach net zero by 2050 is a “terrible mistake”, was published. 31 “ Not Zero – Ross Clark,” Swift Press. Archived February 16, 2023. Archive URL: https://archive.ph/oRFbu

Calling the group a “bunch of anarchists”, Clark went on to agree with the Counter Terrorism Police’s suggestion to put XR on the terror watch list saying, “it was hardly an unreasonable thing to do.” Ross Clark argues that it is a terrible mistake, an impractical hostage to fortune which will have massive downsides. Achieving the target is predicated on the rapid development of technologies that are either non-existent, highly speculative or untested. Clark shows that efforts to achieve the target will inevitably result in a huge hit to living standards, which will clobber the poorest hardest, and gift a massive geopolitical advantage to hostile superpowers such as China and Russia. The unrealistic and rigid timetable it imposes could also result in our committing to technologies which turn out to be ineffective, all while distracting ourselves from the far more important objective of adaptation.

Not Zero

Clark defended oil and gas companies in a Spectator column: 26 Ross Clark. “ Don’t blame oil and coal companies for climate change,” Spectator, October 10, 2019. Archived April 3, 2020. Archived .pdf on file atDeSmog. Clark began a Spectator article titled “How did climate doomsters get the Great Barrier Reef so wrong?”, by saying: 37 Ross Clark. “ How did climate doomsters get the Great Barrier Reef so wrong?”, Spectator, August 8, 2022. Archived October 31, 2022. Archive URL: https://archive.ph/HBkPs Describing quotes from two child climate strikers as “disturbed statements”, Clark blamed “climate change alarmism” on “the traumatising power of watching frightening films at an impressionable age”. In a Spectator column, Clark claimed that Britain’s growing reliance on renewable energy will make power cuts more likely, criticising wind power in particular. He concluded by writing: 66 Ross Clark. “ How renewable energy makes power cuts more likely,” Spectator, August 10, 2019. Archived April 3, 2020. Archived .pdf on file atDeSmog.

Justifying his position, Clark said that the new airport could be “marketed as a green solution” by doubling up as tidal barrage. So, you want to do your bit for the environment, and you took the Government at its word when it told you that ditching your perfectly well-functioning gas boiler for a heat pump is the way to go. But what do you do if you can’t find an engineer prepared to install one of the devices in your home because, in all honesty, they know it wouldn’t actually keep you warm? If Rishi Sunak concedes to the demands of a group of (reportedly) around 50 MPs and lifts the moratorium on onshore wind which has been in place for seven years, it won’t take long before we find out why it was imposed in the first place. There are few places in England where you can build a wind farm of any size without either causing serious annoyance to locals or compromising valued landscapes.”He went on to argue that the UK would struggle to plant the number of trees they had planned as land space was scarce and they need to make sure to plan on land “which does not seriously encroach on good quality farmland”. Clark, Ross (21 March 2013). "If property prices fall, this scheme will be a disaster (Osborne pulls out all the stops to reflate the housing bubble)". The Times. Clark regularly questions climate science in columns for the Spectator, arguing, for instance,that while “climatic observations” should be trusted, predictions should be taken with “a pinch of salt” because “the only near-certain thing is that they will all be wrong”. 3 Ross Clark. “ Climate change isn’t responsible for Australia’s hailstorms,” Spectator, January 21, 2020. Archived April 3, 2020. Archived .pdf on file atDeSmog.

I don’t want to sound negative. I would much rather heat my house with an electric heat pump than its existing, smelly oil-fired boiler, and I would have made the switch years ago if I could be convinced it would keep the property warm. But to judge by the experience of many people, the air-source heat pumps being marketed en masse at the moment simply aren’t up to the job. They are an effective way of raising the temperature in your home when you don’t really need it to be heated, but if you live in an old property, and you have no other form of heating, you are likely to find yourself shivering on the coldest days. As it stands, Britain is embarking on an experiment unique in human history, in which it voluntarily rejects whole areas of established technology that make society and the economy function, and tries to replace them with novel technologies which do not currently exist. Clark argued that: “if it involved any other subject, the news that the Government hid estimates of the true cost of one of its policies would be a scandal.”Children will be taught, for example, the ‘impact of diet choices for land usage and environmental impact’ […] That isn’t educating children to think for themselves; it is trying to train them to be the next generation of environmental activists.” Clark, Ross (2017). War Against Cash: the plot to empty your wallet and own your financial future - and why you must fight it. Harriman House. ISBN 978-0857196255. The then prime minister, Boris Johnson, told delegates that the world was ‘a minute to midnight’, in his quest to convince the rest of the world to follow Britain’s unilateral example and commit to reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050. But that deadline and that target are ludicrous, and it is a scandal that there was never a proper national debate in this country before they were imposed. Here was a piece of legislation that would impact each and every one of us – changing our lives catastrophically, making us poorer – but its far-reaching consequences were not even discussed, let alone analysed. If the Government wants to encourage investment in native oil and gas production – and it should – it needs to […] give the industry reassurances that it is not going to be regulated out of existence by net zero commitments”.