In 2020, 75% of all imports of panels into the EU came from China, according to Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency. If you were to decide in February 2022 that you want to suddenly buy from crystalline solar companies that have nothing to do with Xinjiang you would have almost no choice. That makes Net Zero advocates complicit in massive abuses of human rights. If they weren’t hypocrites they'd be protesting solar farms.

The US has already imposed an effective ban on Chinese solar panels, and the EU, last time I looked, was also leaning in that direction. The EU rarely revokes trade preferences for human rights abusers, but even the EU can’t sit on its hands on this matter. For now it has settled upon supply chain transparency measures under the corporate governance directive, but corporates know how to get around such measures with plausible deniability.

But if you think that reducing food miles is a necessary step to achieving zero emissions, where is the sense in paving over our farmland with black rectangles filled with silicon? It would appear the main attraction for solar developers is that planning permission for solar changes the land use classification, which allows them to build on the land later down the line. They’re greenwashing a form of land banking.

Green activists on Twitter have gone into overdrive following seven days of next to zero output from renewable sources. They’re still claiming that renewables are cheap and getting cheaper. They seem not to have noticed that the price of raw materials and shipping has gone into orbit. They’re working from completely obsolete narratives, having assumed trends over the last decade would continue on the same trajectory.

They are wrong. Not only are they wrong, prices were already turning upward before anyone had ever heard of Covid 19, and global shipping was in crisis. Following two years of lockdowns and now Ukraine, there is zero likelihood of returning to pre-Covid norms. An era in geopolitics has come to an end and globalisation is quietly imploding.

To talk of renewables being cheap was a lie before and it’s an even bigger lie now.

Decades of policy neglect now means there is no cheap option. If we wanted to escape sky high food and energy prices then we needed action at least a decade ago. Had we invested in nuclear instead of windmills we would not now bee needing to buy gas at peak prices when the wind isn’t blowing. The green agenda has increased our dependency on gas and energy imports, it has dangerously exposed Britain to price volatility and is set to make life considerably harder even for the comfortably off.

It was obvious to energy watchers that the obsession with wind turbines would lead to this point. Christopher Booker in The Sunday Telegraph was writing about it as far back as 2005, saying that wind would cause massive grid instability and bring us to the brink of rolling blackouts. We got lucky this year with a mild winter, but if we’d had sustained low temperatures over December and January, we might very well have seen all energy intensive industries ordered to power down. The national grid is already exploring this option for the near future.

But then green energy wonks always knew this was an inherent risk, but assured us then as they do now, that intermittency could be mitigated by smart grids, metering and battery storage. None of this has yet materialised at scale, and is unlikely to. Grid scale battery storage is nowhere close to plugging the capacity gaps when the wind does not blow and the cost of manufacturing batteries is only going to skyrocket. China has spent the last twenty years cornering the global market in rare earth minerals and metals while there is major global competition for them for all manner of uses. A pivot away from Russia means a pivot towards Communist China and slave labour.

Net Zero is not a transition to clean energy. It is (notionally) a shift away from fossil fuels, but more accurately, it's a transition to a mineral intensive energy system. A typical electric car uses six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car, and an offshore wind farm uses thirteen times more mineral resources than a similarly sized gas powered plant – according to the International Energy Agency. I have yet to see a single renewables evangelist grapple with this reality. We get plenty of obfuscation and misdirection, but no acknowledgment that the costs of renewables could never stabilise.

Alarmingly, these green blob activists are in influential positions, dominating the flow of information in the media and politics, ensuring our politicians are misinformed and misled about costs. The metric of energy costs (Levelised Cost) is deeply misleading in that it does not account for the massive system externalities created by wind (ie. the need for grid balancing and transmission costs) while ignoring that wind is heavily subsidised and gas is subject to massive carbon taxes. The renewables lobby makes Boris Johnson look like a pillar of truth and integrity.

The national grid was never designed to cope with a wide array of intermittent sources, requiring hundreds of billions of investment to solve a problem the green lobby created. Society is being redesigned to meet the needs of the Net Zero ideology rather than the needs of the people. We’re going from relatively affordable energy when we want it, to unaffordable rationed energy.

The green lobby is turning the clock back on human progress. We could not afford this at the best of times, but to double down on it now, as the Tories are intent upon, is not only economic suicide, it is profoundly sinister. It will exacerbate hunger and extreme poverty, cause a jobs emergency and plunge the country into darkness – while refusing the public a meaningful say in it. We could be heading for a constitutional crisis as well as an economic one.