Net Zero Nuts (Part II)

Some of our post 1992 new universities, already powerhouses of mediocrity, have decided to make the prospects of their doomed students even worse. In yet another example of corporate virtue-signalling, about twenty of them have banished fossil fuel companies from attending recruitment fairs on their campuses.

Whether this drive towards such empty gestures is being fuelled by those who run the universities, or whether it comes from the student bodies is not clear. It is probably a bit of both, as those in charge of our higher education institutes seem only too willing to bend over backwards in the face of pressure from their transient student populations.

Universities, like so much of the corporate sector, have been captured by the woke mind virus. But, unlike some of the corporate sector which seems to be coming to its senses, universities persist in genuflecting to whatever trend is current among their student body. Thus, my old employer the University of Hull, to this day, flies whatever the latest version of the LGBTQwerty+ flag is.

Banishing fossil fuel companies from campuses is another manifestation of the net zero agenda, and the new universities referred to above are far from alone in the higher education sector. Many universities, my former employer among them, have net zero policies whereby they profess their aim to be ‘carbon neutral and ‘sustainable’ campuses.

Presumably some of these universities have Physics and Chemistry departments where, it is to be sincerely hoped, some of the occupants understand the laws of thermodynamics. The first of these – as every schoolboy knows – is the law of the conservation of energy, which means that energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transformed from one form of energy into another.

Thus, electricity which is one form of energy, is made from other forms of energy, including burning fossil fuels. It may be possible to make a campus carbon neutral, or to live under the impression that you have – it depends on how you do it.  If, for example, you insist that only electric vehicles are permitted on campus then, provided you ignore how the electricity which powers them is generated, you can bask in the glow of your carbon neutrality.

But you must ignore the thermodynamic fact that your clean campus is being created at the expense of some poor blighters who live in the shadow of coal or, increasingly, wood burning power stations, or suffer the constant hum of wind turbines which are, increasingly, blighting our landscape.

I checked the UK Energy Dashboard on the day I wrote this article, and I was surprised to see that wind was providing 54% of our energy. Solar power was producing none. But I have checked on other days and it is not always so, as gas and wind are often neck and neck in how much energy they are providing. Clearly the extent to which wind turbines contribute to energy provision depends on their being wind, or not too much wind. And wind turbines are not carbon neutral as much of the technology and material that goes into their manufacture comes from China, where the industry is fossil fuelled. The same goes for solar panels.

Another aspect of wind turbines is that they can be destroyed by strong wind, as many were recently in Wales. And, to rub ironic salt into the wound of the net zero cranks, in the same incident strong winds destroyed a solar farm. It’s hard to make this stuff up.

Another of the great net zero swindles, explained in Not Zero by Ross Clark, is that formerly coal-burning power stations in the UK are now burning imported wood in the form of wood pellets. Even though burning this wood belches more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than burning coal, the combustion is recorded as being net zero as the carbon has been imported. Burning wood is recorded as ‘biomass’ on the Energy Dashboard. Incidentally, 16% of our energy was being produced by ‘imports’ on the day I wrote this, which means energy directed from Europe to sustain our grid. Much of that energy is fossil fuelled.

We seem to have strayed from the original point which was about students being deprived of the opportunity to meet potential employers from fossil fuel companies in some of our universities. But we haven’t. Net zero propaganda is a total scam, completely unobtainable, and empty gestures such as those displayed by a handful of our universities will achieve nothing but reducing the employment opportunities of the very students they purport to help. If our university campuses want to be sustainable, perhaps they could start with the truth?

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.

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