Rishi Sunak raises the temperature
But there's no pragmatic, proportionate and realistic route to Net Zero
Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has announced some mild adjustments to his Net Zero policy and the roof has fallen in on him.
If there was any doubt that that the climate change cult has caused a mass derangement of the mind, the reaction to Sunak’s minor rebalancing act provides a graphic demonstration.
He has merely announced a five-year delay in the ban on petrol and diesel cars, bringing the UK into line with the EU’s 2035 deadline ban. New oil boiler sales were due to be banned in 2026, a deadline now delayed until 2035. New gas boiler sales will still be banned in 2035. A new exemption will be created for households where heat pumps would be ineffective, meaning that around one in five will still be able to buy a new oil and gas boiler even after 2035. To encourage people to continue to install heat pumps where they can, the cash grant from the government will rise from £5,000 to £7,500.
Er, that’s it. Those were the changes to policy. This produced mass hysteria, with cries that what Sunak had announced was “totally evil” , “dangerous and desperate”, “a betrayal of our planet survival plans” and a “moment of shame”. There was a call for an instant general election.
In vain, Sunak insisted that he was still committed to Net Zero but that it couldn’t be right to inflict intolerable costs on already hard-pressed families. In vain he warned:
If we continue down this path, we risk losing the consent of the British people.
But of course, the whole point is that climate change doomsayers don’t care about intolerable hardship. They don’t care about people. On the contrary, people are the problem. People are the reason that the planet is about to fry and die. And so if people resist policies to prevent the extinction of the planet, the state must force people to comply.
We are not dealing here with a cause whose proponents can process demonstrable facts and evidence. They are gripped by a certainty that is so overwhelmingly powerful, so apocalyptic and so absolute that no facts or evidence can be allowed to challenge it and those who produce it must be exiled from public debate. We are dealing with a quasi-religious cult; we are dealing with fanatics; we are dealing with a green version of Salem.
Various conservative commentators have hailed Sunak’s rebalancing announcement as a sign that he isn’t the timid technocrat they thought he was and that he may now be turning into a true conservative.
I’m afraid that I am somewhat underwhelmed.
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