Reposted by NOT MANY PEOPLE KNOW THIS
JULY 27, 2021
By Paul Homewood
The media is finally waking up. Shame they didn’t do it years ago:
Boris Johnson has always tried to be a “cake maker” at Net Zero. We can drastically reduce CO2 emissions while increasing the standard of living, he claims. But the truth is that the sacrifices that are being made of us on behalf of Net Zero are incompatible with democracy, and the Prime Minister knows it.
Just look at the agony the gas boiler ban is causing the government. Johnson has now admitted that the ban must be postponed from 2030 to 2035. It has to be another prime minister’s problem.
The boiler ban was a core part of the government’s net zero strategy. Gas boilers should be replaced with heat pumps. These heat pumps are not a sensible alternative to boilers. While a boiler can heat your house relatively quickly at the push of a button, a heat pump can take around 24 hours to heat your house to 17 to 19 degrees Celsius – not quite room temperature.
For the pleasure of living in your not entirely warm home, you will have to spend around £ 10,000 on the unit and installation. Then, according to the Climate Change Committee (CCC), you can expect to have to spend an extra £ 100 a year on your energy bills.
If you own a heat pump and want a house that is more than tepid, you need a lot of extra insulation. That means another tens of thousands of euros in renovation costs. The Energy Technologies Institute estimates that “major retrofitting” could cost as much as building a new home. This is not money that every normal person has on the arm of a sofa – or that taxpayers can reasonably cover for millions of households.
Getting used to this reduced lifestyle “will require a change in attitudes,” says Chris Stark, CEO of the CCC. That is quite an understatement. It means giving up what was once perfectly normal in a developed country: having a warm home in winter.
In our net zero future, we can also forget about a stable and affordable power supply. Boris wants to make Great Britain the “Saudi Arabia of wind power”. But we should be wary of experimenting with green energy. Places like California, which are hastily replacing nuclear and fossil fuels with renewables, face regular blackouts. Electricity prices in Germany have been among the highest in the world since the beginning of the energy transition, but ironically, this has not done much to reduce CO2 emissions.
Net Zero is by far the largest national project Britain has embarked on since World War II. But even when politicians brag about it on the world stage and flaunt their tough “goals” at every opportunity, they have tried to downplay their importance to the public. It’s just a tax hike here, a subsidy there, maybe eating a little less meat or not rinsing the plate before putting it in the dishwasher. The rest will be done by the technology anyway, they say.
But if the public really does find out what Net Zero means, will they tolerate it? The Gilets jaunes protests in France were the most significant public revolt since 1968. They were triggered by an ecological tax. This tax had no effect on the big city liberals who came up with it. They were amazed that someone would stand in the way of carbon neutrality. But they had to turn back. Compared to net zero, this tax was only a drop in the ocean.
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