Futile climate obsessions over 0.01% of the Earth’s atmosphere have clouded the political world so badly that thinking straight seems to have gone out of the window. Bad news for voters, left with no-one sensible to turn to.
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Boris Johnson has always tried to take a ‘cakeist’ position on Net Zero, says the Telegraph (via The GWPF).
We can drastically cut carbon emissions while boosting living standards, he claims.
But the truth is, the sacrifices being demanded of us in the name of Net Zero are incompatible with democracy, and the PM knows it.
Just look at the anguish the gas boiler ban is causing to the government. Johnson has now conceded that the ban will have to be pushed back from 2030 to 2035. It will have to be some other prime minister’s problem.
The boiler ban was a key plank of the government’s Net Zero strategy. Gas boilers were to be replaced with heat pumps. These heat pumps are not what anyone could call a reasonable alternative to boilers.
While a boiler can heat your house fairly quickly at the flick of a switch, a heat pump can take around 24 hours to heat your home to between 17 to 19 degrees Celsius – i.e., not-quite room temperature.
For the pleasure of living in your not-quite warm house, you will have to fork out around £10,000 for the unit and installation. Then, according to the Climate Change Committee (CCC), you can expect to spend an additional £100 per year on your energy bills.
If you want to own a heat pump and have a house that’s more than lukewarm, you’ll need lots of extra insulation. This means yet more tens of thousands of pounds in renovation costs.
The Energy Technologies Institute estimates that a ‘deep retrofit’ could cost as much as building a home from scratch. This is not money that any ordinary person has down the back of the sofa – or that the taxpayer can reasonably cover for millions of households.
Getting used to this reduced lifestyle ‘will take an attitudinal shift’, says Chris Stark, CEO of the CCC. This is quite the understatement. It means abandoning what was once a completely normal expectation in a developed country: having a warm home in winter.
In our Net Zero future, we can also forget having a stable and affordable supply of electricity.
Full article here.
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More from The GWPF on ‘net zero’ here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
July 27, 2021
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