A warning to successful South Korea from bankrupt Britain

Friday/weekend blog

First, I hope some of you survived mega-storm Agness. Where I live it was a normal September cloudy day with little wind and no rain.

Regular readers will know that a translation of my book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS has been published in South Korea:

To try to help sales of the book, I have had 8 or 9 articles translated into Korean by the Korean university professor who translated my book and published in a South Korean newspaper. I attach below the latest article I have just sent to South Korea. I apologise that it’s based on a blog I wrote a couple of days ago. But I thought it worth repeating as it shows in appalling clarity the simple connection of: – the more supposed ‘renewables’ a country uses, the higher its energy costs and thus the more likely it is for its manufacturing to move away to countries with lower energy costs.

On the news this morning, the Instititute for Fiscal Studies announced that the UK now has the highest rate of taxation since WWII. My fear is that the UK has destroyed so much of its manufacturing (due mainly to high energy costs) that it is in a doom loop where insufficient wealth is being created to support the UK welfare state. So the country has to keep printing and borrowing money and increasing taxes. But as someone much more intelligent than myself said: “if something cannot go on forever, then at some point it will stop”. Let’s hope that Starmer’s Labour are in power when the music stops for the UK.

Anyway, here’s the article I’ve proposed to my South Korean counterpart. You might even want to copy this article and send it to your local useless Greta-worshipping MP:

South Korea must not make the same mistakes as Britain

by David Craig and Seok Park

South Korea’s president His Excellency Yoon Suk Yeol, accompanied by Mrs Kim Keon Hee, has accepted an invitation from the British King Charles III to make a State Visit to the United Kingdom in November. For many years the British King Charles has been warning the world about a coming climate apocalypse supposedly due to man-made global warming. For example, in May 2009, the then Prince Charles gave a speech in which he warned: “The best scientific projections indicate that we have very little time left – indeed less than 100 months – in which to alter our behaviour dramatically”. And in July 2022, he was still giving the same message when he said: “The climate crisis really is a genuine emergency and tackling it is utterly essential”.

Given King Charles’s many-year belief that CO2 emissions from human activities are changing the world’s climate, we can expect the King to discuss the subject with South Korea’s President during the President’s November visit. And we can be sure that Charles will be encouraging the President to do what he can to reduce South Korea’s CO2 emissions. But President Yoon Suk Yeol should be wary of King Charles’s enthusiasm for decarbonising our countries as this has been an economic disaster in Britain.

British politicians and eco-fanatics rightly claim that Britain is leading the world in reducing their country’s CO2 emissions. Since 1990, Britain’s CO2 emissions have almost halved from 604 million metric tons to just under 350 million tons by 2022. That equates to a drop from 10 metric tons per capita in 1990 to below 5 tons per capita. South Korea’s CO2 emissions are around 656 million metric tons – about 13 metric tons per person.

While celebrating this great supposed ‘success’ in reducing CO2 emissions, King Charles and British politicians, mainstream media and eco-activists often seem less keen to explain how Britain’s reduction in CO2 emissions was actually achieved. Since 1990, the year UK CO2 emissions started falling, the percentage of UK GDP from manufacturing has dropped from just over 16% to around 8%. Moreover, during the same period, the number of people employed in UK manufacturing fell from 4,963,000 to just 2,601,000. A cynic might be tempted to wonder what happened to all those hundreds of thousands of highly-skilled, highly-paid green jobs that the politicians and climate activists promised would be created in Britain by the energy transition away from fossil fuels to renewables.

For years Britain has had some of the world’s highest energy prices due to Britain’s replacement of cheap, reliable fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – with expensive, unreliable and intermittent supposed ‘renewables’ – mainly wind and solar. In 2022, in the UK which gets only 42% of its electricity from fossil fuels, household energy cost $0.41/kWh. In France, where 70% of their electricity comes from cheap reliable nuclear, electricity costs were just $0.21/kWh – almost half the UK price. In the U.S., which generates about 60% of its energy from fossil fuels, the price was $0.18/kWh – less than half the UK’s cost. In South Korea, where expensive and unreliable renewables only make up 7% of the country’s energy, household electricity costs were just $0.1/kWh – less than a quarter of the cost in Britain. In China, where 55% of electricity comes from coal and a total of 83% comes from fossil fuels, household electricity costs were only $0.08/kWh – under a fifth of the UK’s cost. There is a similar picture in India, where over 75% of electricity generation is from fossil fuels of which three quarters comes from cheap, energy-rich coal, household energy costs were only $0.07/kWh.

So, just to put all of this into context, we can look at how much of the UK’s GDP comes from manufacturing – making real things that people in Britain and abroad want to buy – compared to Britain’s major competitors. In 2022, 8% of the UK’s GDP came from manufacturing compared to 9% for France, 12% for the U.S.A., 13% for India, 14% for Italy, 18% for Germany, an impressive 26% for South Korea and a massive 28% for China.

A picture is emerging which suggests that the more a country relies on renewables for its electricity, the higher are its energy costs and the lower is the percentage of its GDP made up by wealth-producing manufacturing.

Economist Richard Salsman wrote: ‘The science of economics is clear: the production of money and debt is not equivalent to the production of real wealth. To claim otherwise is to follow fantasy, not reality – or science’.

As British politicians enthusiastically print money and increase national debt in pursuit of their Net Zero goals, they seem to be wrecking UK manufacturing with high energy prices thus committing economic suicide as UK manufacturing moves to countries with lower energy costs. It’s more than astonishing that neither King Charles nor any politicians or mainstream-media supposed ‘experts’ seem to understand or are willing to admit what is actually happening and how the UK is committing an extraordinary act of economic self-mutilation by cutting the country’s CO2 emissions.

If there really was a climate crisis, Britain’s economic suicide to supposedly save the planet might be justified. But as we try to explain in our recent book Climate Apocalypse: The Greatest Scam in Human History (titled THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS in the English edition), there is no climate crisis. Yes, the Earth has probably warmed up a little since the freezing 1960s and 1970s when all the experts were panicking about global cooling and the advent of a new ice age which the experts predicted would cause crop failures, mass starvation, the migration of millions from the cooling North towards warmer countries and wars over scarce food supplies. But this warming is just part of a natural cycle of warming and cooling driven mainly by the Earth’s rotation, solar activity and cloud cover. Moreover, the ice caps aren’t melting in spite of the climate alarmists regularly predicting their demise. The polar bears are doing fine. In fact there may be so many of them that they may have difficulty finding sufficient food. The Great Barrier Reef has record levels of coral. Around five times as much U.S. forest burned each year in the scorching hot 1920s and 1930s as is being burnt now. Even the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) admits that there has been no acceleration in sea level rise for the last 100 years. And the number of people killed by extreme weather events has fallen by over 95% in the last 120 or so years in spite of the world’s population quadrupling from under two billion in 1900 to almost eight billion now.

So President Yoon Suk Yeol should be very careful when the British King Charles lectures him on the need for South Korea to follow Britain’s example in cutting CO2 emissions in order to fight the non-existent threat of man-made climate change. South Koreans surely won’t want to commit economic suicide in the same way that the British have done.