Ed Miliband and the Economic Illiteracy Driving Britain's Energy Crisis

The Intellectual Yet Idiot class strikes again

The international committee responsible for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s official climate scenarios quietly delivered a bombshell last month: the notorious RCP8.5 ‘business-as-usual’ pathway — the extreme emissions scenario that has underpinned virtually every climate alarm, every Net Zero urgency claim and every justification for Britain’s ruinous energy policy for the past 15 years — has been declared officially “implausible” and eliminated from the next generation of models feeding into the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report. The “era of global boiling” speech of the UN Secretary General António Guterres in 2023 now sounds even more ludicrous than it already did then.

Roger Pielke Jr. – whose research has been heavily cited by the IPCC across all three Working Groups – analysed this stunning admission by the panel in his Substack the Honest Broker on April 29th. The high-emissions scenarios (RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0) that dominated research papers, government reports and headlines are now recognised as describing futures that will not happen.

Yet while the IPCC itself has finally abandoned the nonsense doomsday model it once promoted as the “baseline”, UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, his fellow Net Zero zealots in Whitehall and his globalist colleagues in power in the EU, Canada and elsewhere press ahead with Net Zero undeterred. Indeed, ‘Mad Ed’ and gang are doubling down on the very policies built atop that now-discredited foundation. This is “Intellectual Yet Idiot” governance.

The “Intellectual Yet Idiot” class and Miliband’s credentials

In a 2016 essay, Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term “Intellectual Yet Idiot” to describe the credentialed class — policymakers, academics, journalists and think-tankers — who impose grand narratives on society while bearing none of the costs.

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking ‘clerks’ and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think... and 5) whom to vote for.