Net Zero: An Open Letter to Rishi Sunak

A direct appeal to the UK Prime Minister to end this dystopian madness

Dear Mr Sunak

I write to you as a 40 year veteran of the power industry, with unparalleled professional experience in all areas of the energy sector both in the UK and globally. I provide further details of my credentials at the end of this letter.

As you prepare for your keynote speech at the Conservative Party Conference, you will be acutely aware that your Party is fractured along multiple lines, and that support for you from both the grass-roots party membership and the public at large is, to put it mildly, sub-optimal.

The nature of your ascent to the party leadership and hence to Prime Minister of the UK lacked proper democratic legitimacy. As a result, you began your premiership at a monumental disadvantage, made worse by the prevailing geopolitical circumstances - the aftermath of the Covid omni-shambles, the war in Ukraine, out-of-control immigration and, of course, the hysteria around climate change and the cult of Net Zero, which you belatedly appear to have noticed is a disaster in the making.

Your recent tinkering with the timetable for banning the sale of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, together with some minor adjustments to grant arrangements for heat pumps and implementation details of the gas boiler ban, show that you and/or your advisers know that the objective of UK Net Zero by 2050 is a fantasy. And yet…

You continue to insist publicly that your overall goal is a “pragmatic” Net Zero by 2050. You have provided no details of how you think this can be achieved (it can’t). You continue to deceive the British public about the true costs - £2.5 Trillion at 2022 prices by my own estimate. Approximately £90,000 per household, not the £10-15,000 per household you claimed in your press conference a couple of weeks ago. You have given no serious indication that you intend to unwind any of the legislation that mandates both the 2050 end goal or interim 5 yearly carbon budget obligations. You have taken no action to curtail the far-left alarmist propaganda from the Climate Change Committee, far less disband this dystopian quango entirely. And you have appointed Claire Coutinho - a political rookie with no experience of the energy industry - as Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero.

Your credibility is in tatters Prime Minister. No one believes you.

You have one final chance to regain the trust of the British people. To do so, you must - as I am sure, somewhere deep down, you realise - address all of the issues outlined above:

• Extract the UK from the madness of the escalating proxy war in Ukraine. I worked in Ukraine, with Kyivoblenergo, the electric power company serving the Kyiv Oblast. I was in Kyiv in the midst (literally) of the Orange Revolution in 2004/5. I also worked previously in Tbilisi, Georgia, with Telasi, the power company serving Tbilisi.

  I know more than most about the separatist movements in the Donbass region, South Ossetia and Abkhazia - which both Putin’s Russia and the West have tried to influence and politically exploit over the years. I am no Putin apologist; but I know that your government’s approach in Ukraine is insane.

• Stop the boats and take control of immigration more broadly. The British people have had enough of excuses and word salad. Only action is acceptable now, and that starts with withdrawal from the ECHR.

• Come clean with the British people on the disastrous mistakes that were made in the farcical response to Covid - a mostly harmless virus that could and should have been largely ignored by any sane government and “public health” establishment.

And, of course:

• Consign Net Zero to the dustbin of history.

Net Zero is unachievable, by 2050 or by any date this century. In theory, a programme to achieve Net Zero would cost the UK the astronomical sum of £2.5 Trillion, doubling our national debt in the process. In practice however - as an undertaking at least 2 orders of magnitude (100x) more complex that the HS2 farce - it is completely undeliverable. At present, we do not even have the core of a credible plan.

You either know this, or you have been deceived by disingenuous, ideologically left-wing, advisers and the mainstream media narrative - just as you were deceived about the threat from Covid, just as you were deceived about the practicality and costs of HS2, and just as you have been deceived on Ukraine.

So, finally, why would someone who has been so deceived on (or perhaps complicit in?) so many scientific and political frauds believe for a moment that they have not been deceived on the greatest issue of them all - that of civilisation-threatening anthropological climate change?

I have news for you Prime Minister. There is no “climate emergency”. The entire thing is a fiction cooked up long ago by Long March neo-Marxists in order to destabilise society, so as to free the path to “proper communism this time”. It was based on a kernel of truth - that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas - but there is, and has never been, any genuine evidence either that CO₂ is the principal driver of climate or that a small increase in global temperature will be exclusively (or even primarily) a bad thing.

In a very real sense, all of today’s key issues are closely linked to the climate scam. Uncontrolled immigration is tolerated, even encouraged, because it makes everyone fearful of hundreds of millions of potential (fictitious) climate refugees. The war in Ukraine is tolerated, even encouraged, because it contributes to high natural gas prices and the deception that renewable energy is both cheap and necessary for energy security. Because the entire thing is underpinned by neo-Marxist ideology, all the “oppressed victim” cults and meaningless slogans (BLM, trans rights, “leave no one behind”, “no one is safe until everyone is safe”, etc.) are due, at root, to the same issue.

Over the past 50 years, the climate alarmist madness has of course developed a momentum all its own, aided at every step by funding from autocratic globalist oligarchs with delusions of philanthropic legacies. The road to hell is, as they say, paved with good intentions.

In conclusion, not only is Net Zero impossible to achieve, it is completely unnecessary. All you need to do to save your premiership, your legacy, and the socio-economic future of the UK, is accept this simple truth. The economy will flourish, society will blossom, and you will be remembered as the greatest peace-time Prime Minister - perhaps the greatest ever Prime Minister - that the UK has had.

It’s in your own hands Mr Sunak. The door is open, all you have to do is walk through it.

Yours Sincerely,

John Sullivan.

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Who is John Sullivan? Credentials/Resumé:

I am a professionally qualified electrical power engineer, a data architect, and a business/management consultant who has spent almost my entire career in the energy industry.

I began as a sponsored graduate trainee with what later became a “big six” UK energy energy company. After qualifying, I spent the early part of my professional life as a network planning engineer, working on the design of the distribution network at 11kV and below.

In my late twenties, the growth in IT capabilities was beginning to transform the business landscape and I transferred into the newly formed IT department as a business expert guiding the business side of new IT projects. I was instrumental in many projects on both the engineering (network) and supply (retail customer service, metering and billing) sides of the business.

In my mid-thirties, I left my corporate role and co-founded an energy industry consultancy with my long-term business partner. I remained in this role for the rest of my career, split broadly into two parts.

Before and after the millennium, I operated as a technical business consultant, working mostly overseas (Europe, North America, Republic of Georgia, West Africa and Ukraine) at director/CEO level supporting business acquisitions, organisation changes, process improvements, major project financing, management recruitment / development initiatives, and more.

Circumstances resulted in a subsequent return to UK based operations, where I became closely engaged for the first time in the wholesale markets side of the industry for several years, alongside business and industrial retail markets, Smart Metering, and a steady base load of network engineering projects, particularly in asset management for transmission and distribution networks. Aside from energy storage, other than a brief period involved in water management for hydro power in West Africa, I have direct and detailed technical experience in every aspect of the power industry, and of business/IT project management.

I have worked with many of the major UK, European and global power companies, including: SSE, EDF, RWE, ESB (Ireland) and AES (former Soviet Union and Africa). My broad, unparalleled experience of the industry puts me in a rare, possibly unique, position to assess the holistic challenges of Net Zero across the entire power industry.

I know what I’m talking about, and I know Net Zero is not possible.

As an engineer at heart, I believe passionately in technological progress, and enabling technical breakthroughs are possible at any time; for example in energy storage, ambient temperature super-conductivity, carbon capture and more. But as a project professional, I also know that - even if miraculous technical breakthroughs are achieved - the logistics of Net Zero are astronomically more complex than anything humanity has ever attempted to date.

As someone who has been instrumental in re-engineering the business model of entire countries’ power sectors, I certainly do not lack brave ambition - if Net Zero were achievable (and necessary) I would be first to put my shoulder to the wheel.

But HS2 shows the folly of naïve hubris in the hands of disingenuous amateurs and unaccountable bureaucrats. The disaster that awaits if the Net Zero juggernaut is not brought to an early halt will dwarf anything that HS2 has ‘achieved’.