“OUR PROBLEMS DON’T AMOUNT TO A HILL OF BEANS IN THIS CRAZY WORLD…”

AS RICK IN - HUMPHREY BOGART ‘CASABLANCA’.

Compared with what the Ukrainians are going through, our troubles really don’t amount to much, but there’re lessons we need to learn, and changes we need to make to public policy, now, before it’s too late. Our Government is currently proposing that all new bikes and cars must be ‘zero emission at the tailpipe’ by 2035. For practical purposes that means electric – if practical hydrogen alternatives become available, I’ll be as glad as Greta, I promise, but I don’t see it happening on anything like that timescale. This poses a massive risk to our standard of living, our quality of life, and our personal freedom, as I shall set out in future articles. Right now, though, we need to recognise the more immediate threat that this Government’s foolishness also poses to UK national security. I first argued this back in 2019 at MAG’s annual conference, which passed seven successive motions opposing forced electrification and the adoption of self-driving cars. We live in a world where Russia and China are ruthless, aggressive, and expansionist. If they can seriously weaken the West they will, and the reality is that we in the UK have serious vulnerabilities. The UK’s National Grid is fragile, and a move to an electrified road vehicle fleet could give a state actor, such as Putin’s Russia, the chance to achieve an effect like the Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) of an airburst nuclear weapon without the actual risk of nuclear war. At the hightech end it might involve a cyber-attack, at the low-tech end it might be as simple as using drones to bring down power lines. Once a power outage makes charging impossible, gridlock will ensue, and our economy will find itself in an externally imposed version of the Covid-19 lockdown. One of the main inspirations for the creation of the Internet we know today was a 1960s RAND Corporation study of survivable networks for the US military in the event of nuclear war. It correctly theorised that decentralisation was the best way to prevent a knockout punch to communications. We can translate that to road transport, with internal combustion engined vehicles the automotive equivalent of Internet servers, each an independent entity not relying on the others for its operation. Short of an actual nuclear EMP, nothing could knock out even 1% of the UK’s 38.4m road vehicles. Taking out just five per cent of National Grid capacity, though, would disable millions of electric vehicles, with social, economic and military disruption, and chaos the inevitable result. If civilian transport does go all-electric, and Putin does decide to move his Western border nearer to Calais, and he does take down the Grid, leaving millions of vehicles stranded with flat batteries, what happens next? Despite Boris’ current battery electric vehicle obsession, he presumably intends allowing the Army, Royal Navy and RAF to keep their internal combustion vehicles (I should imagine a tank battery’d take a fair time to charge, and a solar panel on the turret might be somewhat vulnerable to enemy fire). Unfortunately, the Army convoys won’t get out of Catterick; the fuel bowsers won’t get to RAF Coningsby; and the sailors on leave won’t get back to Pompey, because all the roads will be blocked by disabled Noddy cars and their starving, dehydrated drivers. Meanwhile, Putin’s forces’ll be over the border into the Baltic states, in furtherance of his mission to rebuild the USSR. Eastern Europe, and maybe Western Europe also, will be Finlandised. And that’s only Russia, against whom we can deploy a certain measure of deterrence. Add into the mix the likes of Islamic State, North Korea, and every other set of anti-Western loonies with an axe to grind and, frankly, I don’t give much for our chances. The Green Party cabbages won’t have to worry, of course, because they’ll all be conscientiously objecting, while others do the fighting for them. Autonomous vehicles offer more opportunities to our enemies. “All cars will one day be self-driving,” said Chancellor Philip Hammond in his 2017 Budget, but driverless cars rely heavily for their operation on Global Positioning Satellites (GPS). The Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen sudden and massive interference with GPS signals in Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic States. Human beings make imperfect drivers, we know, however imperfect the system works. Do we really want to put Putin in the driving seat? Energy security. What security? ‘Hate to say it, but we need to increase oil and gas output immediately,’ tweeted Elon Musk on March 5th, 2022. I hate to say it, but he’s right. Since 2000 the UK’s National Grid has been moving from coal to gas generation, driven by the net zero dogma for which they tax us more every day. Successive governments forgot the lessons of the 1970s oil shock, choosing to believe technological innovation would make supply problems a thing of the past. The reality, though, is that in 2021 the wind blew consistently enough for renewables to contribute more than 50% of UK grid electricity on just seven days. Doubling capacity would still only meet the UK’s full needs on those same seven days each year. What do we do for the other 358? Hope that Putin doesn’t choose to attack on a cloudy day with no wind? Batteries won’t plug the deficit. The cost of an adequate renewables grid, backed up with storage, would cost more than 100% of GDP, even if we could mine enough lithium and vanadium, which we can’t. Sure, eventually, the world will have to find alternative energy sources and methods but, right now, there’re more pressing problems. Our Government must drop its net zero agenda, and heed the lesson of the 1940s defeat of Hitler, and subsequent containment of Stalin. Now, as then, our Government must deal with its problems in the right order. The invading Russians raped two million German women in 1945, and half the continent was enslaved for the next forty years. That must not happen again.