The green Titanic has hit the iceberg of reality, says Professor Gwythian Prins. The obsession with ‘decarbonisation’ over the past quarter-century has now been shown to be a grand illusion and distraction. https://t.co/o0zobd2oAd
— Toby Young (@toadmeister) May 13, 2026
https://dailysceptic.org/2026/05/13/the-green-titanic-hits-the-iceberg-of-reality/
BY DR GWYTHIAN PRINS
Excerpt: On Britain’s political voyage today, the opulence of the first-class passengers – who are the rulers now – is not exhibited in furs and jewels as it was in their predecessors’ day, but in their flaunted luxury beliefs. As night falls on the Starmer Government, steaming unceasingly onwards, only one Minister seems to stand erect, glassy-eyed and untouchable on the bridge, and it is, unfortunately, Ed Miliband. He alone seems to believe in something, and that something is ‘decarbonisation’.
The British ship of state is slicing through the political seas swiftly and blindly towards a terrible collision with reality – with the laws of thermodynamics, engineering and, insofar as economics has constant principles, economics too – and with the consequences of petulantly ignorant denial of the same. Thomas Hardy observed in his lines on another famous collision – that of the Titanic with the iceberg – that at the moment when nemesis for the pride that made her became unavoidable, “the Spinner of the Hours said – ‘Now!’” That fateful freezing night of April 15th 1912, other captains on the North Atlantic had prudently changed course, slowed down or stopped – but not Captain Smith; nor now, by the same token, our Energy Secretary, as he rings up the civil service engine room for full ahead to ‘Net Zero by 2030’ and orders his loyal long-time ally and helmsman – his equally deluded ‘mission controller’ Chris Stark – to hold course.
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Trump’s second administration began by dynamiting the self-sealing cult of ‘green’ energy which has, for two decades, sustained a cosy symbiosis of fanatics filling the God-shaped hole in their lives and rent-seekers filling their boots – the groups who attacked Rayner and me. The symbiosis is familiar from the years of Prohibition. Then, the bootleggers rode on the backs of the Baptists. This is not new news.
On May 21st 2025 the Senate Appropriations Committee held hearings with the new Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, on one of the biggest boondoggles ever seen. The incoming team at the Department of Energy discovered that in the 76 days between losing the election and leaving office, under the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden Department of Energy had pushed out $93 billion in loans and grants for ‘green’ projects – described by the Inspector General as “high risk” – mostly to recipients with no financials and without oversight.
