The climate industry has turned guilt into its own renewable energy source. Endless, cheap and utterly useless. In the process, it keeps blasting penalties into Row Z while the open goal of abundance sits right there, waving its arms and begging to be scored.

We are told not to water our lawns, not to drive our cars, not to boil our kettles and, if possible, not to breathe too heavily. Meanwhile, the country that invented the modern sewer system now has Thames Water circling the drain. A taxpayer-funded utility drowning in £17 billion of debt, spewing sewage into rivers and so broken that ministers are openly preparing to take it into public ownership. A nation surrounded by water can’t even keep the taps on.

Perhaps the most absurd idea of all was covered in our sister publication this week. The academic eco-nutters want to breed a plague of blood-sucking ticks that will make us allergic to red meat, because of course cows are the new weapons of mass destruction and the only path to climate salvation is to turn our Sunday roast into a war crime.

Yet look at those who write the rules. Private jets to Davos, convoys of black SUVs, plates of rare fish flown halfway round the world. They burn fossil fuels like they’ve got a spare planet in the garage. They waste water like there’s an ocean plumbed straight into their swimming pools. Then they wag their fingers at us for flushing twice. It’s hypocrisy on the scale of London run by Victorian slumlords. Manicured square and fountains spraying water for the elites while typhoid spreads in the streets.

Our politicians throw billions at green vanity projects yet global emissions keep climbing because China, India and half the developing world are burning coal like it’s an Olympic sport. Meanwhile here at home, Britain boasts of being a “renewables superpower” while serving up some of the highest household energy bills in the Western world. The wind drops, the sun hides and families pay through the nose for the privilege of living in the dark.

The alternative is obvious. Technology, not theology. Desalination plants and large-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) aren’t hair-shirt penance. They’re power tools for civilisation. The difference between a monk with a candle and a bloke with a light switch.

They do not shrink the human footprint; they make it more resilient. That is why the West’s refusal to build desalination plants and accelerate battery technology while lecturing the world about “sustainability” is such a scandal. It is like Brussels telling farmers to cull cows in the name of nitrogen targets while subsidising diesel for German carmakers.

To question the orthodoxy is to risk heresy. To admit failure is to invite career suicide. So our leaders don’t lead. They double down on dogma and pour billions into projects that don’t work because it’s easier to waste money than to say the three words that terrify modern politics: We were wrong.

Yet history is clear. Progress has always come from imaginative engineering. London stopped cholera not with sermons on hygiene but with sewers. America defeated the Dust Bowl with irrigation, not homilies on rain dances. Israel now gets more than half of its domestic water from desalination. Far from being punished for prosperity, Israelis drink it daily.

The West could do the same tomorrow. It isn’t carbon guilt that will save the West but the courage to turn seawater into fresh water and sunlight into stored energy. We know how to do it. Desalination plants and batteries big enough to keep the lights on when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. But instead of investing in storage, our leaders throw billions at vanity projects that only work when the weather cooperates.

Part of the problem is that too many reputations, careers and egos are nailed to the Net Zero cross. Bureaucrats, academics and politicians have built entire identities on it. Genuflecting before Saint Greta of Stockholm, a sulky teenager elevated to oracle because she scowled at world leaders and told them they’d ruined her childhood. Add to that the spoiled brats of Extinction Rebellion, gap-year anarchists in £300 trainers who glue themselves to Lamborghinis before popping home to Chelsea for an oat-milk flat white. These are the people our political class listens to.

But true innovators, true leaders, aren’t afraid of failure. They know when to cut their losses and change course. That is the very essence of progress. Yet the West, entranced by teenage doomsayers and a rabble of privately educated eco-hooligans, has chosen pride over pragmatism, image over impact, theology over technology. The result is a civilisation that could be resilient tomorrow but insists on being fragile today.

The truth is brutal. The West doesn’t lack the means to solve its water and energy problems. It lacks guts. It is led by a generation of politicians who would rather be admired than effective, who prefer to moralise than to build. They have turned abundance into austerity. Progress into penance.

Until leaders find guts and imagination, they’ll keep wielding spanners like toddlers with Ikea instructions. Fixing the smoke alarm while the house burns down. The oceans will still be there, the sun will still shine and the engineers will still be ready.

Enough of the theology of guilt. The only thing missing is the courage to stop building monuments to vanity and start building the things that keep the lights on and the water flowing.

Until that day comes, forgive me if I treat every ministerial speech on climate with the same respect I give the seawater they refuse to desalinate. Undrinkable.

Clive Pinder is the host of CeaseFire on KVEC TalkRadio and a columnist for the SLO Tribune. He offends Islamists and the metropolitan political establishment in equal measure on Substack.