UK Energy Madness
By
Malcolm Mackley
Over the last twenty years, the USA has utilized fracking technology to enable them to become the world’s largest fossil fuel gas supplier, and this has helped the USA government to be globally bold in their current actions. During this same period successive UK governments have strived to make the United Kingdom ‘Net Zero’ in relation to fossil fuel utilization resulting in the UK’s steady economic decline. Yes, science has shown that global warming is a big global problem that requires global attention however, the speed of the UK transition away from fossil fuels has resulted in driving the UK into ‘poverty’. By UK poverty, I mean that in the winter many of the UK population cannot now afford to heat their homes properly. UK District and City authorities are unable to carry out their basic needs, including even repairing the country’s notorious potholes! We now also have a significantly weakened UK military defense force with fewer personnel, warships, tanks (that do not work properly) and a serious lack of drone technology.
Because of super high energy costs, the UK loss of heavy engineering from the UK has been spectacular and this includes steel, cement, and chemicals manufacture. I could also include other areas of ‘UK poverty’ including for example the current disaster of Higher Education through the need to charge extortionate student fees because the Government does not have the cash to pay universities properly. All this relates to the current negative energy cash flow of the UK because of the rush to Net Zero.
The UK transition to Net Zero has been too fast and the current population of the UK are paying a very heavy price. The level of madness is so great that at present the UK pays Norway more than £100 billion annually to import gas rather than use for example the gas of the Shetland Cragganmore and Rosebank gas fields simply in order that the UK government can drive to ‘Net Zero’. There is still gas and oil offshore in UK waters but no; this is currently taxed at such a high rate that governments have made it unprofitable to extract it. So, we now import fossil fuels from countries like the Middle East and the USA.
In the 1970s the UK was a world leader in nuclear technology, but since then the UK political drive to maintain a useful carbon neutral energy source has declined. The UK is currently playing catch up on a carbon neutral energy source that could have been a UK ‘green golden egg’.
Most of the past nineteenth and twentieth-century glory of Great Britain can be associated with having a reliable and plentiful energy supply of coal. Sadly, deep mined UK coal contained significant amounts of Sulphur and in 1970s the Norwegians realized that ‘acid rain’ was coming from the UK; with the result that UK coal was both expensive and polluting. Since then, the North Sea fossil fuel bonanza has been handled badly by successive UK governments in a way that was not in the best interests of the UK population. Now, an obsession with ‘Net Zero’ is driving the UK economy further down.
11 March 2026
