Friday, 8 March 2024
After fierce debate
Heat pump push to proceed as energy secretary bows to ministerial pressure
Plans to impose targets for electric heat pump sales on gas boiler manufacturers could be confirmed as early as next week, after fierce debate within government and intense lobbying from industry to abandon the policy.
Sky News understands energy secretary Claire Coutinho had intended to ditch the policy, known as the Clean Heat Market Mechanism (CHMM), but will now proceed following objections from ministerial colleagues, who argued that it is crucial to decarbonising home heating and meeting wider net zero policy.
A chap is bound to wonder what the fierce debate was about as the policy is unambiguously stupid. After the general election, Starmer will probably tighten it I suppose, but without the fierce debate. Which probably lands him with a policy millstone for the following general election.
Strewth, even an attempt to credit the Tories with a modicum of political cunning just highlights how awful they are.
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9 comments:
Part of the problem is that people like "energy secretary Claire Coutinho" don't resign when colleagues force a bonkers policy on them.
Just when you thought a tiny bit of common sense might have broken through… They’re not called The Stupid Party for nothing, are they?
See also, extending the “windfall” tax, thus handing several NE Scotland seats to the SNP.
Really you could not make it up.
There's an interesting argument ( https://newsfromuncibal.substack.com/p/a-world-built-for-men ) that currently the world is run by people who live by an abstract map of reality rather than the real terrain.
From that article: "we mistake the territory for the map, and think that our task is indeed to inhabit the map itself, where everything makes sense, where there are no contradictions or subtleties, and where we understand readily where it is we are to go."
So, to mix metaphors, it is far more important to see that boxes are ticked than that real stuff happens in the real, messy, world. Which is why all sorts of activists can indulge their beliefs secure from the icy blast of reality.
At the elite level it's only a box ticker's world. Force people to switch to inadequate heating - tick. A man can declare himself to be a woman - tick. Net zero makes perfect sense - tick. Promote Electric Vehicles (without the infrastructure to charge them) - tick. Defund the police - tick. Allow Free Speech as long as no-one objects - tick. Do as I say, not do as I do - tick.
In the end you have a map with many ticked boxes and annotations on it, but the real terrain is hidden from sight.
I'd like to add my voice to DiscoveredJoys' recommendation of the News from Uncibal site. David McGrogan is usually excellent, especially when his writing is influenced by Iain McGilchrist and his theories about left and right brain hemispheres. There's a good general introduction in the article there called "The Conceptual Conditions of Ruin". Some intriguing angles to the sort of issues that we talk about here.
dearieme - yes, it's a resignation issue and she bottled it. I don't know why because by staying on she is relegated to just another stooge.
Peter - common sense seems to have become uncommon. Hard to explain how it came about, but The Stupid Party it is.
DJ - I like the map versus terrain analogy, it works well and does remind us that we need analogies to handle this level of stupidity because we aren't flies on the wall. I have a not dissimilar post partly written because the stupidity is so extreme that we do need analogies.
Sam - I recently watched an Iain McGilchrist video about left and right brain hemispheres. Quite long but interesting. I think we are faced with a range of valid explanations and analogies because the situation to too complex for a single explanation to work. As if the stupidity is an emergent property of the complexity, but that too is an analogy.
I live now on the East coast of the South Island of New Zealand. We have been here just over 9 years and although it gets chilly here especially when a South wind is blowing straight from Antarctica it never gets really cold.( A lot of water supply pipes for houses are on the surface and never seem to freeze.)
My house is heated by a heat pump and manages to keep the living room and kitchen at a comfortable temperature, it is also useful to cool the place down in the height of summer.
I just cannot see a heat pump keeping a house warm in a real hard winter such as those experienced almost every year in the UK.( I can remember the 1947 and 1963 winters) particularly if there is a big fall of snow likely to cover the external part of the system in a foot of freezing snow. And how big does the system have to be to heat a 3 bed Victorian house
with single glazed sash windows?
I can see children in the near future waking in the morning to ice on the inside of their bedroom windows as I did back in the nineteen forties.
John - thanks, that's interesting. Experiences with heat pumps seem to vary across the world as we'd expect. A neighbour had one installed about a year ago to replace the gas boiler. They say it works okay but costs about the same to run as the gas boiler so they won't see any return on the cost. Their house is about 25 years old, so should be fairly easy to heat. Having it forced on us is the problem of course.
"Experiences with heat pumps seem to vary across the world": I gather that one problem for Britain is that much of our cold weather is also damp, leading to icing of some surfaces in the heat pump. Does anyone know better?
dearieme - I've heard that, but haven't come across examples of it happening.
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