One of the most frustrating things about living in reality is having to endure all the bulls**t by those who don't want you to.
Worse yet is having to deal with all the people who get taken in by the snake oil salesmen. Watching somebody get fooled over and over is bad enough; having to endure their scorn or hatred because you refuse to be taken in is almost unendurable.
That's one reason I will remain forever scarred by the COVID years. First, there was the frustration of watching people buy the BS; second, there was the fury directed at me for warning everyone about the impending disaster being foisted on us.
The longer-running con everybody here knows is, of course, the climate change scam. Leave aside for the moment the reality, or lack thereof, of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change and simply focus on the "solutions" being sold, and we can avoid an argument irrelevant to my point. Whether you believe in climate change or not, we should all agree that the public should not be lied to. Right?
Well, I ran across a press release from Oxford University that is a classic example of policy-related deceit. Presented as academic work and latching onto the credentials the credulous still believe mean something, the release summarized a report from the Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.
What a deceptive piece of crap, designed to fool the credulous and arm the activists to make a case that any person with a lick of common sense should know by now, is total crap.
New evidence shows the UK can get a good deal on Net Zero at minimal cost to people and the economy, with the co-benefits of improved homes, reduced bills and 250,000 more jobs.
The UK could meet its 2030 net zero targets with £6-8bn of public sector investment a year, finds new analysis by the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.
Getting a good deal on Net Zero reveals that even if current challenging economic conditions continue, committing to a balanced mix of policies focused on the transport, buildings and power sectors will benefit the majority of households, as well as the UK economy.
Around 80–87% of low-carbon investments – like heat pumps and EVs - will reduce overall costs to consumers over the technologies’ lifetimes, relative to continued reliance on fossil fuel technologies like gas boilers, the authors say. And a “well-coordinated” household sector transition – with heat pumps and electric vehicles – could deliver net savings of up to £380 a year for households with one car and a heatpump.
The upshot is that meeting NetZero targets by 2030 will cost every Briton the equivalent of only a cup of coffee or two, and hence is de minimis, but the benefits will include a thousand baby unicorns being born a day that will provide all the fuel the economy ever needs.
There's a lot of fancy math designed to make your eyes blur, and lots of promises about savings that we know will never come about, but that's not what caught my eye. What made me focus on this report is that it presents a perfect example of the mechanisms credentialed people use to come up with numbers like this.
In a sick way, it's kinda brilliant. They have figured out a way to fool people in a vaguely credible way by using techniques that only an economist or someone familiar with the technical aspects of green energy would notice, and they slide over logical issues most people wouldn't catch.
Let me start with the biggest lie of all: that the United Kingdom reaching NetZero would have any impact at all on climate change. Most of the benefits they claim stem from linking UK CO2 emissions to climate change. Business as usual policies lead to disasters of unprecedented proportions, but UK NetZero would stop climate change cold.
Uh, wut? How exactly does that work? The United Kingdom's carbon emissions have almost zero impact. China emits 30-40 times as much CO2 per year as the United Kingdom, and over the past eight years has emitted more carbon dioxide than the UK has in its entire history.
And it's emissions continue to grow.
The United Kingdom's carbon emissions amount to a fraction of 1 percent of global totals, so getting to zero would make precisely, within measurable limits, zero impact on the path of global emissions. None. Zip. Nada.
If you argue that reaching NetZero in the UK will produce benefits from stopping global warming, you are assuming every other country does the same at the same time. That is not happening. Ever. So every dime of benefit claimed from avoiding climate disaster is based on a lie. Every dime.
So that's the first lie, and they continue on from there.
The claim that green energy is cheaper is, too a lie. In some weird technical sense, it is true that wind and solar can be cheaper, but only if you exclude all the costs of producing and distributing them.
This video should be compulsory viewing for every net zero-obsessed politician, commentator, teacher and student. Listen to an Oxford Prof explain why the UK’s energy costs are so ridiculously high. It’s all self-inflicted. Net stupid zero indeed. https://t.co/NZJckAOV41
— Mike Gardner (@mikegardner_wb) January 30, 2026
If you leave out transmission, backup power, and all the other variables, then it's cheaper. If you include the net cost of everything it takes to actually use these sources as the backbone of your power system, it is not. It is more expensive.
Gee, that matters. If you exclude costs, it's great. That's like saying a gas subsidy makes it cheaper; sure, if you exclude the taxes you pay and the regulatory costs. In the real world, it's worse.
The problems compound from there. Amortizing the cost of installing new heating systems over a property's lifetime makes it look cheap, but in the real world, dropping $20,000 now is a burden. Telling somebody that the calculations, which assume everything works out as intended, will save them $20/mo in 2035 without telling them they have to dump money they don't have into a system that may not work well for them is dishonest.
Everywhere you look in this document, they are exaggerating benefits, assuming no hiccups, pretending that costs don't exist, forgetting that solar panels break in hail and wind turbines fail well before their expected lifespan, and that heat pumps don't work that well in UK housing stock.
It's a sales job with an academic pedigree.
So much of what we are told is BS, laundered and made to smell, temporarily, much better by spraying it with the perfume that only credentialed elites can spray.
This is the predominant technique technocrats use to get people to buy into ideas that are, by any reasonable measure, awful. They throw a group of PhDs as authors onto a document filled with lies, and enough people swoon or bow that the politicians get what they want.
It's appalling, and you would think by now that everybody could smell the BS stink that lies underneath that sickly sweet perfume, and many do.
But there is a large midwit credentialed class who love this sort of stuff. The Pete Buttigieg voter type, who think a credential is still indicative of honesty, integrity, and wisdom.
What a mistake.
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