Given I'm a 40-year old, straight, white, binary Englishman with a penchant for drinking Guinness, watching Top Gear and eating steak, it's highly unlikely I would ever be invited to give a speech at the UN COP26 summit in Scotland this week in the same way Daft Punk would never be invited to play on MTV Unplugged.
However, if I did, it would probably go a little something like this ...
"Dear attendees. I am, like all of us here, a normal, bog-standard, pretty average, everyday citizen of the world. Whilst I am not the Prime Minister of the UK and have a duty to all, my primary responsibility is to my own. Fortunately we can improve the lot of the former and the latter at the same time.
The forecasts of climate science are no more accurate than our Government's recent efforts on Covid – In fact only one of the climate models gets anywhere near matching real world data and that’s not very near, predicting only half the warming we’re panicking about. So we have time to make the world economy more resilient.
We Brits will demonstrate how this can be done, and we can lead the whole world into a brighter future based on the time-proven skills of entrepreneurship and engineering, beginning by teaching this in schools rather than letting our children think that waving placards around like windmills with the hiccups and blindly accepting backdoor communism will make a blind bit of difference.
Renewable energy is not the answer. By making fossil fuel and nuclear power stations provide expensive backups for cloudy and windless days - which we have rather a LOT of here in the UK, it forces up all energy prices and overcharges those who use most energy, the old, the poor, the sick, and those with a job. No new renewable schemes should be approved unless the operators guarantee delivery 24/7/365 at a reasonable price. We should instead right the wrongs of past agreements by imposing a windfall tax on wind and solar schemes which exactly matches their subsidies.
But what can give us the energy we need to power our factories, warm our homes, grow our food, while still being cautious about the demon carbon – if, that is, it turns out to be a demon? It must be nuclear. We should cancel all work on European Pressurised Water Reactors in the United Kingdom – given they were designed by EU committees they are as much use as Pope's testicles — but our greatest British engineering company, Rolls-Royce, is developing Small Modular Reactors. Once the design is optimised we should order SMRs in batches of four, with half of them exported as aid to nations which are energy poor.
We keep hearing from various green organisations that we are near the climate tipping point and we 'must do something now'. If these scaremongerers are right we don’t have time to wait for fusion, and if they’re wrong we don’t need to worry if we wait for it to become a viable technology.
New technology needs time to settle down, and even though the SMR concept is not entirely new – our nuclear-powered submarines have operated for decades with no problems – we must allow for time in adapting the designs. Besides, we need reliable, cheap energy now, not in ten years’ time. Fortunately the answer lies literally beneath our feet. There are billions of cubic metres of natural gas in the Scottish Midland shale, billions in the Bowland Shale in Lancashire, and billions more in the rest of the UK.
There has been opposition to fracking for gas, some from locals but mainly from bearded, cagoule-wearing socialists, those hairy chaps and chapesses who squat around the edges of our civilisation in a bid to take us back to the Stone Age, who wish to keep us in fuel poverty because all profit is bad, yo.
We can't address the concerns of these amateur hermits any more than we can persuade them to have a bath, but for people who might live near fracking sites the Government should mandate compensation. Any damage caused by tremors – we don't expect any but we wish to reassure worried residents – should be compensated at three times the cost of repair. Furthermore, all houses within five miles of a fracking site should receive ten years’ free supply of gas for space heating, cooking etc, or an equivalent cash payment.
Now let’s talk about a REAL climate concern: air pollution from transportation, starting with rolling out a programme to convert all heavy goods vehicles and buses, trains etc to hybrid electrical power and/or compressed natural gas fuel. This will cut CO2 emissions from those sources by nearly half, while reducing NOx and particulate air pollution but a similar amount.
As a bridge fuel, shale gas is natural, clean, cuts our CO2 emissions and will be good for our balance of payments while we build up the SMR fleet. Finally, we should establish a think tank of both environmentalists AND climate sceptics, people with legitimately different ideas and opinions.
For too long eco-fanatics, socialists, and teenage doom goblins have acted as self-appointed climate gatekeepers. Now is the time for the issue to be properly debated in public, time to stop the hysteria, time for a difference of opinions to be allowed to speak out and allow entrepreneurs and engineers to play a greater role.
There is our roadmap to the future. The UK will travel that road alone if necessary, but we will welcome those who understand that reliable, low cost energy is vital if we are to preserve our way of life if we move carefully to a low carbon future.
There are countries who have representatives in this room whose emissions dwarf the UK’s measly one per cent, countries whose increases every day wipe out any yearly savings we might make. I won't name them, but I can tell you they rhyme with Bina and Chindia. Let them come clean and admit that they have no intention of banning coal and oil in their power stations, then do what we are doing, travelling into a clean and low carbon future without killing our people and economies and sleepwalking into backdoor global socialism.
Now, if you will excuse me I will stop here and decline to attend the rest of this talking shop. Like all its predecessors it will fail to come to any useful conclusions, and some of us have lives to lead."