Dissecting Scotland’s economy-wrecking Net Zero plans

By Doug Brodie of Nairn

Preamble

This is my response to the consultation invitation (by 29/1/26) on “Scotland’s Draft Climate Change Plan: 2026–2040”. By proxy, it doubles as my dissection of the economy-wrecking UK-wide Net Zero agenda. The 31-page draft plan is available here with all relevant documents here.

Introduction

I have been campaigning since the 1990s against what I now call the climate change hoax. Over the years I have written to multiple MPs, MSPs and others trying to persuade them that their climate change policies and associated energy policies are misguided, futile and extremely damaging.

For all my efforts, I never once received a credible reply to justify their policies. Replies were typically pure boilerplate such as: “we have to show climate leadership … the science is settled … 97% of scientists agree … we are in a climate emergency … renewables are cheap, clean and secure”.

In other words, nothing but disinformation, distortion and denial of true science and engineering. Decades of politician replies always conforming to the obviously-dishonest “officially approved” narrative is proof that, for a malign deep state ulterior reason, the Net Zero agenda has always been a globally-coordinated deceit to mislead and bamboozle the general public, just like Covid.

The ministerial foreword to this plan is a typical example of intelligence-insulting climate codswallop. Unpacking every distortion and unfounded assertion would be a tedious and futile task. Is she bad (a treasonous Globalist puppet) or is she mad (having swallowed the Globalists’ false propaganda)?

I belatedly realised during the Covid “plandemic/scamdemic” that trying to influence Uniparty politicians (Lab, Con, Lib Dem, SNP, Greens) on Globalist-mandated issues was futile. I switched to trying to influence the general public, i.e. voters, through open letters aimed at gaining online circulation. I expect this response will be dismissed as usual, but hopefully it will get some online traction. The tyrannical, unaccountable UN would censor it as climate denial disinformation, if they could.

Summary

Net Zero has given us sky-high energy costs which are crippling business, rapidly hollowing out our industrial capacity and suffocating economic growth, all to no useful purpose. It has to be stopped.

The Scottish Government should never have embarked on its own Net Zero project in the first place. Energy is not even a devolved issue in Scotland and any progress (or the lack of it) is almost wholly dependent on UK government actions. Scotland is not included in world databases such as on national CO2 emissions and energy consumption, which makes it difficult to monitor progress.

For example, I suspect that the boastful statistics put out by the Scottish Government on the performance of Scotland’s domestic renewables-heavy intermittent electricity supply do not take proper account of the essential, largely fossil fuel balancing and backup electricity received from England. It’s all as silly as, say, similarly-populated Yorkshire having its own Net Zero project.

The delusion that Scotland can achieve Net Zero by 2045 is proof that Scottish Net Zero is a bureaucratic going-nowhere shambles. 16 years after Scotland enacted its Climate Change Act, here we are with supposedly just 20 years to go with a hopelessly wishful-thinking draft plan that only extends to 2040! Even the Lib Dem party, all 72 of whose foolish MPs voted earlier this year for the suicidal Climate and Nature Bill, has switched its virtue-signaling Net Zero 2045 target to still delusional 2050.

Future historians will find it hard to believe that Scotland and so many other countries were taken in on such an overarching, society-upending scale by such an obvious Globalist deception.

I suspect that the reason why the Globalist-captured Uniparty is so committed to UN-instigated Net Zero is because it is the bedrock of the UN’s tyrannical Agenda 2030 (a 3-minute overview). The Globalists and their complicit Uniparty puppets hope to use this agenda as a pretext to control all global resources (follow the money!) and subjugate the global populace.

They hope to enforce control through an enslaving mandatory Digital Id, as beta trialed via Covid vaccine passports. These are already being rolled out by the authoritarian control freaks of Starmer’s government, of the EU, various other countries and the UN itself. The USA has wisely opted out of both Net Zero and Agenda 2030 (and the UN’s pandemic-pushing WHO) and the UK should do likewise.

Dependence on the UK is the Achilles Heel of Scotland’s Net Zero because UK Net Zero will hopefully be ditched after the next general election. If they have any sense, the Scottish Government will disregard the endless blather of COP30, note the IEA’s return to energy reality, note the rising tide of opposition to Net Zero around the world, accept that Net Zero is a dead duck and drop their damaging Net Zero plans.

Debunking the climate change hoax

Striving to reduce CO2 emissions is a needless and pointless endeavour. Even if it were possible to eliminate Scotland’s miniscule ~0.1% share of global CO2 emissions, which it isn’t, that would have negligible impact on the global climate even if the unvalidated hypothesis of man-made CO2 global warming were valid, which it isn’t.

In my May 2024 post Debunking the climate change hoax I gave a comprehensive account of how the Globalist establishment, working through compliant national politicians (the “Uniparty” in the UK), has for decades pulled the wool over the eyes of the general public on their confected scare of alleged man-made CO2 global warming, aka “climate change”. It’s an easy-to-read synthesis of the work of many experts and I defy the Scottish Government to refute its conclusions.

A simple analysis of the UAH satellite temperature series shows that man-made CO2 is having negligible (if any) impact on global temperatures. This is the only series which has not been corrupted by the global establishment to exaggerate warming in the global temperature record.

The series is dominated by natural warming spikes, all far too sudden to have been caused by man-made atmospheric CO2. The graph shows global temperature flatlining on average from 1998 to 2014 followed by a couple of warming El Ninos which had all but dissipated by the time the massive 2023 warming spike came along, caused by the combination of an El Nino and the MSM/Met Office-censored Hunga Tonga undersea volcanic eruption which exploded a huge quantity of water vapour, a potent greenhouse gas, high into the stratosphere and which has still not dissipated.

Discounting these natural events shows that there has been negligible “climate change” over the past 25 years. This means that the climate fearmongering put out by the Minister and climate propagandists like the lying BBC on alleged human-worsened extreme weather events has no credibility.

The Draft Plan Figure 1 shows Scottish emissions falling steadily from about 2000 to 2020, since when the trend has levelled out somewhat. UK emissions have followed a similar trend, as shown in this Our World In Data graph which very plainly shows the utter futility of attempting unilateral UK Net Zero.

Uniparty politicians never admit that emission reductions to date have come about largely from unrepeatable “low hanging fruit” expedients such as the Dash for Gas, self-rationing to save money (heat or eat) and deindustrialisation, i.e. the forced offshoring of businesses and jobs (and the emissions to produce and deliver the replacement imports!) as a direct result of our sky-high Net Zero energy costs.

The Draft Plan projections for future emissions reductions from 2026 to 2040 are pie in the sky. You are not going to coerce the already hard-pressed populace to adopt expensive unwanted heat pumps (not currently mandated) or other “clean energy” heating systems; nor expensive user-unfriendly EVs or rationed travel; nor will you reduce energy emissions to almost zero by deploying “bonkers” carbon capture and storage; and hopelessly-expensive green hydrogen is never going to take off.

Your Net Zero strivings are hugely damaging to the productivity of the economy as they divert valuable manpower, resources and money into building and maintaining two parallel energy systems, one of which, based on so-called renewables, is very expensive, not at all “green”, insecure, unsustainable and totally redundant. There is nothing “just” about your wrecking-ball “transition” to energy penury.

Debunking Net Zero, the supposed “solution” to climate change

The “cat out of the bag” UK FIRES project spelled out the impoverishing, nihilistic, anti-humanity reality of absolute Net Zero, exposed in this post. This trend is confirmed by the shocking statistic that 33% of Scottish households are currently in fuel poverty.

In August this year I published The Charade of Net Zero which gives a short debunking of the engineering aspects of our Net Zero energy malinvestments. It shows that the UK could not hope to “transition” to Net Zero before sometime next century (most probably never). It lists examples of UK and Scottish deindustrialisation caused by the Uniparty’s self-flagellating Net Zero policies which will inevitably only get worse through ongoing ruinously-expensive Net Zero malinvestments.

It describes the April 2025 pan-Iberia power blackout which caused multiple deaths and a day of nationwide chaos, yet the Net Zero-obsessed authorities never saw it coming. It has been put down to the inherent lack of inertia of wind and solar power systems and confirmed that such renewables are dangerously incompatible with the way the electricity grid was designed to operate. It strongly suggests that the already-struggling Net Zero holy grail of grid decarbonisation is an engineering impossibility.

Independent energy consultant Kathryn Porter has done excellent work on analysing and documenting such hitherto “swept under the carpet” grid frailties. Her full body of public work is available here.

Of particular relevance to Scottish Net Zero, Kathryn Porter notes in a recent post that Scotland is allowing its national grid to become dangerously unbalanced. The problem is that when the Torness nuclear power station is closed down for good, the Scottish grid will be supplied overwhelmingly by fickle renewables with very little conventional inertia to provide resilience against a potential cascading nationwide grid shutdown. Clueless Sturgeon should never have been allowed to blow up Longannet.

We also face the danger that a heavily decarbonised grid could have insufficient dispatchable backup supplies to cope with Dunkelflautes, days or even weeks on end of next to no wind and sun in cold, dark midwinter when power is needed most. Supplies from interconnectors will be uncertain when such weather systems extend into the continent. Controlled, possibly prolonged power cuts appear inevitable and these could start quite soon if Uniparty Net Zero sleepwalking continues.

The establishment “green blob” puts out a constant stream of disinformation and blatant lies on the costs of Net Zero and “NOT cheap, UNclean and INsecure” weather dependent renewables, aided and abetted by the provenly-dishonest BBC. Independent energy analyst David Turver has done excellent work on debunking such false narratives and exposing the madness of the Net Zero energy policies.

His full body of work is available here. His important posts include:

Net Zero for Dummies, a parody post with sub headlines: How to make the most expensive electricity in the world; How to crash the economy; How to export jobs to China; How to be a laughing stock on the world stage.

UK electricity prices are the highest in the world, Oct 2024 and still true: “… the UK has the highest domestic electricity prices in the IEA, some 80% above the median … UK prices are 2.8 times those of the US and 3.5 times prices in Korea. Prices in Germany are slightly lower than the UK, with France’s prices just above the IEA median.” [The 2023 UK industrial electricity price was around a shocking 4 times higher than Canada and the USA. How can UK industry hope to compete?]

Why is my energy bill so high? This debunks the false establishment narrative that our high electricity bills are due to having conventional gas [“dependent on dictators like Putin”, distorts Miliband while sabotaging North Sea oil and gas and buying in costly LNG from abroad] in the electricity generation mix rather than green blob-supported all-renewables. It also lists all the reasons why renewables are so expensive. [Kathryn Porter manages to debunk the lies in 90 seconds.] It refers to the “Trolley Problem” and the survival choice dilemma of sacrificing either the green blob or society (it’s a no-brainer).

Net Zero crumbling slowly at first, then suddenly This documents how the hitherto all-party electorate-disenfranchising consensus on Net Zero is thankfully now collapsing.

Mitigating the risks of Net Zero This is relevant to the situation the Scottish Government will find itself in when UK Net Zero is finally abandoned. I’ll finish by imagining how the “trolley problem” dilemma might unfold in my own neck of the woods.

For months we locals have watched massively expensive construction and dredging works to prepare the nearby Port of Ardersier for use as a manufacturing hub for China’s Ming Yang company to build and supply outrageously-expensive floating offshore wind farm projects, if finally consented.

The floating wind subsidy alone, excluding all the associated additional costs which get added to our bills, is about 3.5 times the price of conventional gas generation which is itself burdened by a ~32% “carbon tax” which ought to be scrapped.

Local sentiment towards the development soured when we learned that it would despoil 36 sq km of our littoral starting just 1 km offshore for use as a staging area for wind turbine foundations. Concern has been expressed on the loss of amenity, the impact on fishing and the local dolphins, the national security aspects of China’s involvement in this project and over-dependence on China in general.

It looks as if UK Net Zero will be cancelled before long which makes this extortionate and pointless wind farm project a prime candidate for being cancelled by the next UK government, if legally possible. The developers and Ming Yang might be wise to cut their losses sooner rather than later.

Your faithfully,

Douglas Brodie BSc, Nairn, 21 November 2025