A key thing to understand about liberals is that they don’t actually care about the results of their policies. If they don’t work out as planned, it’s not their fault; it is due to some flaw in implementation, reality itself, or the human beings who (predictably) couldn’t make their utopian plans work.
“Real communism hasn’t been tried” is the classic example, although hardly the first. “Social Justice” and “Defund the Police” were supposed to reduce crime and improve society, but stupid humans didn’t cooperate. Decriminalizing drugs in Portland was supposed to make drug use and the streets safer, but the city instead turned into a shell of its former self and ground zero for the overdose epidemic.
They never learn because they refuse to acknowledge reality’s limits. The pretty words–even if they have to redefine them and twist their meanings into pretzels–don’t translate into a better world, but they don’t care a whit.
🇫🇷 Low winds leave south of England reliant on French powerhttps://t.co/m2JxFBxsW2
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) May 6, 2025
NetZero policies are yet another example of this phenomenon. Liberals can expound until they are blue in the face about how renewable energy is cheaper and better than nuclear or gas power, but when the rubber meets the road, it always ends in disaster. Ask the Spanish about that, and then look at Reuters’ spin and you see exactly this phenomenon at work:
Reuters: “Don’t blame renewables for Spain’s power outage”
The 2nd sentence: “the issue appears to be the management of renewables in the modern grid.”
This is why no one trusts the media. The headline is completely undermined by the 2nd sentence.
What ridiculous language… pic.twitter.com/xTBAIZbn9t
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) April 30, 2025
“Don’t blame renewables; blame their implementation.” For God’s sake, man, give it up. If relying on renewables requires building an entire secondary infrastructure to keep the system going, it is the most expensive energy source, not the cheapest or best. You buy your power infrastructure twice.
As Germany is deindustrializing at a record pace due to impossibly high energy prices–one way to deal with the reduced reliability of power is to eject power consumers, I suppose–other countries are watching their power grids groan under the weight of energy policies that don’t take into account little things like reality.
Southern England has been left reliant on French power after low winds curtailed domestic energy supplies.
More than half of the electricity used in the South East was imported on Tuesday morning, according to data from the National Energy System Operator. The bulk came from France, alongside imports from Belgium and the Netherlands.
Similarly, the North East also imported 52pc of its electricity, largely from Norway, as wind power contributed to just 2pc of the region’s power.
It comes amid mounting pressure on Ed Miliband’s clean power revolution, as the Energy Secretary has vowed to turbocharge the roll-out of renewables to hit net zero by 2050.
An increasing reliance on wind and solar has sparked fears of energy shortages across Britain, particularly after net zero was blamed for recent blackouts across Spain and Portugal.
Overall, around 25pc of the power consumed by the UK over the last 24 hours came from overseas, with France providing around 12.7pc.
France, which is also pursuing NetZero policies, is at least not insane: 65% of their electricity comes from nuclear, and another 12% comes from Hydropower. Beginning with almost 80% of your electricity generation being carbon-free makes decarbonization pretty easy compared to countries like Germany–which closed its nuclear power plants and scuttled them to prevent reopening–and Britain, whose economy was built on coal.
In other words, committing to NetZero may or may not be smart for France, but it sure isn’t nearly as suicidal as the plans other European countries are implementing. The UK plans to decommission its current generation of nuclear power plants, and has altogether too vague plans to replace them, especially given the ridiculous amount of time it takes to build and commission them.
Hence the growing instability of the grid and the increase in power imports.
The UK’s reliance on imported power has grown in recent years after the mass closure of coal and gas-fired power plants.
Strain on the UK’s energy supplies has also been exacerbated by the power grid’s inability to transmit large swathes of power from northern wind farms to cities in the South.
Pressure often builds during periods of low wind, such as this week when speeds dropped to as low as 1mph.
The UK’s growing reliance on electricity generated by its European neighbours is both politically awkward and expensive.
The system works via an expanding network of subsea, high-voltage power cables connecting the UK to France, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Ireland.
In theory, electricity can be exported or imported, but the UK’s lack of reliable generation means the traffic is largely one-way.
This means the UK is increasingly reliant on costly energy imports from Europe, which are ultimately paid by consumers.
Normally you would make policy decisions based on cost/benefit calculations, but today’s liberals grossly underestimate costs and mislead on the benefits. That leads to constant failures and excuses.
It’s not that conservatives don’t often fail to calculate these costs, or distort them for political reasons. The Iraq War is a great example of an utter failure to calculate the costs and benefits properly. I would call that failure a big miss, to put it mildly.
But this is a common thread in all liberal policies. The “War on Poverty”–fail. High-speed rail–fail. NetZero policies–fail. “Defund the Police”–fail. Open borders–fail. The “Inflation Reduction Act”–fail. Obamacare reducing costs–fail. It’s hard to find a major liberal policy that isn’t a failure. Compare that to “Broken Windows” policing.
The common threads here are pretty obvious: most of these policies are based on false assumptions that any smart 5th grader could tear apart, and the implementation of these policies is almost always used as a massive graft scheme. NetZero is stupid, but it sure provides a steady stream of subsidies to favored individuals and groups.
There is no such thing as a low-energy-use/high income country. That is not a thing. And “renewables” are simply not a substitute for baseload power generation. If you want to reduce carbon emissions–we can argue about how quickly we should transition away from fossil fuels and how vital it is to do so–nuclear is the only place to turn.
Biofuels are stupid. Hydrogen is a joke. Solar SHOULD be a niche, not a grid-level power source, and wind is grossly unreliable and has secondary effects that were unpredicted and pretty awful. Ask the whales and birds about that.
Faith in renewables as a solution to our power problems is a luxury belief, and countries can’t afford the luxury.
