An unpalatable choice

Ross Clark has CAPX piece on Net Zero, heat pumps and electric cars. A neighbour of ours recently had a heat pump installed. All the central heating radiators had to be replaced and a water tank installed in the garage. Extremely disruptive with little obvious gain apart from an ugly box outside the house.


From heat pumps to electric cars, there’s little sign the British people can afford Net Zero

Thursday was supposed to be ‘green day’, when the Government was going to reveal its latest plans for reaching net zero by 2050. But what was delivered merely served to underline how far that Britain is from achieving that target.

The public simply isn’t taking up the bait. As Sir John Armitt, chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission, put it this week: ‘Government comes forward with these big ideas but what you don’t see is the necessary detail to back that up’.

Familiar stuff but worth reading, because how would anyone vote against Net Zero at the next general election? That's the interesting question. Net Zero is just one of those issues which suggest we may as well treat UK government as a nascent one-party state.

At some point the Government is going to have to be honest and admit that, contrary to what they have been saying for years, net zero is not going to save you money. At that point it will have an unpalatable choice: force us, cajole us into switching to electric cars, heat pumps and the like – or drop its 2050 target and allow technology to catch up to the point where it offers solutions which really do make economic sense.