ANDREW NEIL: Everywhere, there’s a growing public revolt against net zero, forcing politicians across Europe to renege on green virtue signalling
The headlong rush to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, pursued for so long by democratic governments across the globe regardless of cost, has finally hit the buffers of voter resistance.
Mainstream politicians of the left, right and centre still mouth their consensual net zero platitudes but they are rowing back from the policies required to achieve it at some speed, not least here in Britain.
It has at last dawned on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak that a population already reeling from a vicious cost of living crisis does not need to be lumbered by the extra burden of the expensive and intrusive green agenda of a political elite which will not itself suffer any hardship from it.
So he has delayed the ban on new petrol and diesel cars and the fatwa on new residential gas heating systems until 2035 (from 2030 and 2025 respectively). Expect more delays to come.
Sunak and his team justified his U-turn because ‘governments of all stripes have not been honest about the cost and trade-offs’, because the drive to net zero would impose ‘unacceptable costs on hard-pressed British families’, and because ‘we’re not going to save the planet by bankrupting the British people’.
Rishi Sunak has delayed the ban on new petrol and diesel cars and the fatwa on new residential gas heating systems until 2035
Fair enough. Better late than never. But we must still file the PM under ‘slow learner’.
When I interviewed then Chancellor Sunak in June 2021 during my mercifully brief broadcasting career at GB News (only eight shows over two weeks), I asked him to tell us the cost of net zero.
He couldn’t. I suggested it would be in the trillions and it was surely the Treasury’s duty to come up with a price tag. He obfuscated. He said after the interview that nobody had ever asked him the cost before. He’s taken his time to find out, if he has.
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The fact is net zero was backed by such an overwhelming political consensus and a cheerleading media (which failed to do its job challenging the consensus) that questions of cost were regarded as an unnecessary spanner in the works by unhelpful naysayers.
Rough estimates turned out to be hopelessly optimistic.
Three years ago, Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, whose analysis of all things economic are lapped up unquestioningly by journalists, opined (as a member of the official Climate Change Committee) that the overall cost should be ‘more than manageable’ and might even be ‘remarkably low’. That turned out to be nonsense, as he now recognises.
Johnson now admits there is a ‘fog of uncertainty over how we are actually expecting to decarbonise household heating, further massively increase zero-carbon electricity production and distribution, revolutionise agriculture and all the rest’.
Far from being ‘rather low’ he now warns it’s going to be ‘costly’ requiring ‘vast amounts of money . . . not in the billions, but in the trillions’.
From the start it is people and families on modest incomes who’ve been expected to pay for the transition to net zero, which is why there has been a growing public revolt against it.
Far from being confined to Britain, the pushback is everywhere, forcing politicians to renege on their green virtue signalling and slow or even halt the process.
ANDREW NEIL: It has at last dawned on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak that a population already reeling from a vicious cost of living crisis does not need to be lumbered by the extra burden of the expensive and intrusive green agenda
In France, President Macron has ruled out banning gas boilers and refused to give a date for phasing out of fossil fuels, bar coal, which France barely uses. His first term was almost derailed by the ‘yellow vest’ protests against ‘green’ increases in fuel duties. He has no desire to repeat that upheaval.
New Zealand’s Labour government is almost certainly heading for defeat in next weekend’s general election after its plans to tax livestock emitting methane (a Kiwi global first!) and turn sheep and cattle farms into pine plantations provoked a revolt, with 58 per cent of those living in rural areas telling pollsters they will vote for right-of- centre parties.
Anti-net zero Dutch farmers have shaken their political system in response to anti-farming measures by the Dutch government. The right-wing Farmer-Citizen Movement, only four years old, is now the dominant party in the Dutch Senate (upper house) and every provincial assembly.
The net-zero revolt is Europe-wide. Even the centre-left Politico website is forced to report that ‘as the 2024 European election approaches [for the European Parliament], a notable shift is occurring across major countries in the EU: voters are turning away from Green parties amid a rising tide of right-wing populism and anti-EU sentiment . . . a significant portion of this shift can be attributed to voter dissatisfaction with the EU’s climate transition policies’.
The revolt is most stark in Germany, which has long thought itself in the vanguard of Europe’s transition to net zero and whose Green party is a prominent member of its ruling coalition government.
Plans to phase out oil and gas heating in homes nearly broke the government this summer and had to be watered down. Pressure is growing for further concessions on the EU’s 2035 ban on combustion vehicles. Stricter energy efficiency rules for buildings have been shelved.
Germany’s green credentials are somewhat in tatters. It plans to bring on stream this winter several moth-balled coal plants; otherwise, the government fears it can’t keep the lights on.
It’s a repeat of last winter but more serious since the coalition closed the country’s remaining nuclear reactors last spring. Seven out of the ten most polluting coal plants in the EU are German.
For sheer stupidity, British energy policy is hard to beat. But in the energy stupidity stakes, among a long list of candidates, Germany is the clear winner. The industrial powerhouse of Europe is being de-industrialised by energy policies emanating from Berlin and Brussels.
A debilitating cocktail of high energy costs, labour shortages and reams of red tape is forcing some of Germany’s biggest companies — including Volkswagen, BASF and Siemens — to seek friendlier business climes in North America and Asia.
For what? There’s a growing sense among ordinary voters that huge sacrifices are being demanded of them for nothing in return. The UK now accounts for 1 per cent of global CO2 emissions, China almost 30 per cent. What difference will ripping out a cheap gas boiler for an expensive heat pump make to the climate?
China claims its carbon emissions will peak in 2030 and hit net zero by 2060. But look at what it’s doing, not what it says: it is giving planning permission for two new coal-fired power plants every week (yes, every week).
Last year, it approved a record-breaking 106 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity. Permits are being handed out at an even higher rate this year.
The pace of construction is also increasing. China now has 243 GW of coal-fired capacity permitted or under construction.
One gigawatt is the equivalent of a coal power plant.
Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on 20 September announced changes in the UK government’s green commitments (file image)
America has the third-biggest coal-fired electricity generation capacity in the world. India is second (after China) and is building more coal plants too, as are Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea and Vietnam. The Asia-Pacific now accounts for 80 per cent of global coal demand.
Even if America closed all its coal capacity tomorrow, it would quickly be more than matched by all the new coal plants coming on stream in China.
The grim truth is that China and other parts of Asia are now building so many new coal plants so fast that the ‘energy transition to net zero’ which British and other western politicians so obsess about is effectively meaningless.
To go crazy over a few more oil and gas licences in the North Sea or one new coal mine in the north of England is absurd, given what is happening on the other side of the world.
This does not absolve us from doing nothing. Climate change is real and there are good grounds for continuing to cut our carbon emissions. But the bulk of the cost cannot always fall on those least able to bear it and there must be clear gains from doing so.
People have had enough of assorted billionaires and celebrities lecturing the rest of us on the need to cut our emissions while flying in their private jets from their mansions to their yachts, stopping off on the way at the World Economic Forum in Davos to parade their phoney green credentials.
As for Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion? Their efforts to disrupt the lives of ordinary folk trying to earn a crust have merely fuelled the anti-net zero backlash. The Chinese embassy in London is in Portland Place. Perhaps their protests would be better directed if they stuck themselves to its door. But I wouldn’t advise accepting any invitations to go inside for a cup of tea.
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