UK Govt must repeal meaningless net zero targets

Written by Allison Pearson on April 20, 2024. Posted in Current News

It was only a matter of time before the green bandwagon of pipe dreams crashed into the Jones family’s 12-year-old internal-combustion-engine people carrier with an almighty bang

The net zero target has vast social and economic costs, costs so dizzying, so deleterious to our way of life that few of its proponents have bothered to find out what they are.

Well, I have, and it’s terrifying.

You may have missed it, but at the G20 summit, Rishi Sunak just breezily wrote a £1.62 billion cheque from the UK to the Green Climate Fund to “support the world’s most vulnerable to deal with the impact of climate change… And this government will continue to lead by example in making the UK, and the world, more prosperous and secure”.

Was there really nothing better at home to spend that money on, Prime Minister?

You know, all those special needs children whose funding your government just cut by 20 per cent, or are 1.9 million kids struggling with talking/understanding language insufficiently “vulnerable”?

How about building a couple of new hospitals and creating bursaries for 1,000 desperately-needed nurses? Or maybe put up some new houses to deal with the pressure of the 606,000 immigrants you allowed into our country last year against the very specific wishes of the majority of the population?

Sorry, you’ll have to forgive me for not understanding how our gravely indebted country can afford to splash the cash on grand, almost certainly corrupt and futile, international eco-projects: maybe helping British people during a cost of living crisis doesn’t earn sufficient greenie points with Sunak’s globalist mates?

Honestly, I wanted to slap him. No, Prime Minister, “leading by example”, as you call it, will not make the UK more prosperous and secure.

The credulous pursuit of net zero by 2050 will leave us exposed and vulnerable, and very cold. We are already far too dependent on energy from other countries who are busy fleecing us for our folly.

The UK pays Norway a deafening £14 billion a year for gas while our PM struts on the world stage, boasting that Britain is leading the world in “decarbonising”. Like a man snipping the cords of our last remaining parachutes while bragging that we’ll hit the ground before anyone else.

Yes, Marjorie, I’m aware that most of this stuff is deadly dull and we’d really rather not think about hydrocarbons, whatever they are. But we absolutely have to focus now before the eco-zealots who have captured almost our entire political class do irreparable harm.

Take a recent report from Offshore Energies UK which warns that, by 2030, unless a fortune is invested in new North Sea exploration and production facilities, the UK will be reliant on other countries for 80 per cent of our gas and 70 per cent of our oil.

In what world is that secure? It sounds criminally stupid to me.

It gets worse. Steven, a Telegraph reader who has worked as a geologist around the North Sea for a quarter of a century, says that new investment has been scared off by the EPL (Energy Profits Levy, the additional 35 per cent on oil and gas profits imposed by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt).

“Before the EPL, my company ranked the UK below Pakistan on the above-ground (political) risk,” says Steven, “Not any more. Our economic models play out over 20 years. You simply cannot change taxes halfway through the game.”

Steven says the UK is now “completely uninvestable”. Bountiful natural resources beneath our silver seas remain untapped so the clever fellows on the Climate Change Committee can pat each other on the back.

Boy, it really is going to be squeaky-bum time in 2030. That’s also the date when the UK bans the production of cars and vans that use petrol and diesel. “Madness,” according to Karl McCartney, the Conservative MP for Lincoln and a long-time member of the Transport Select Committee.

“The Government’s electric vehicle target is unrealistic and dangerous,” he says. “It needs to be scrapped – and fast.” (The EU has already pushed back its target to 2035 while President Macron says “France has done enough”.)

I interviewed Karl for this week’s Planet Normal podcast and he explained how government policymakers have been “led by the nose by green zealots and the metropolitan elite – the EV evangelists, as they have been called”.

Karl, a delightfully sensible chap from Ellesmere Port, points out that there are 35 million vehicles on the road, a very small proportion are electric, and they’re not all going to be replaced in seven years’ time.

Not when the average salary of Karl’s constituents buys them an eight-year-old diesel or petrol Ford Mondeo instead of a Tesla, and not when there’s no place to charge it even if they could afford an EV.

There is already a shortage of electricity in Lincoln. People down South, the MP reckons, have no idea how much those in areas with very little public transport rely on the private car.

“I have spoken about this to senior colleagues and they know it’s madness,” Karl says. Even some members of the Cabinet are concerned, but no one dares challenge the sacred consensus. “It seems our government’s policies are based on green virtue-signalling and oneupmanship,” he despairs.

Karl had a big hand in the Transport Committee’s Fuelling the Future report which was published in March.

“We remain concerned that the Government has not fully thought through, or properly responded to, our scepticism about expecting ordinary motorists to bear the financial burden of transitioning to all-electric vehicles,” the report said, “We maintain that it is realistic and fair to expect a significant number of motorists to continue using hybrid or conventional-engine cars for years ahead. Synthetic low-carbon fuels that can be used in these engines without expensive modifications should be supported as a halfway house for a significant number of private car owners.”

There was a “woeful response” to that report from the Department of Transport. According to Karl, this was “an opportunity for the Government to climb down and save face,” but realism and practicality – a grasp of the impact of your deluded, undeliverable policies on millions of lives – are unwelcome in the net zero Cloud Cuckoo Land where much of our ruling class snoozes.

They’ll wake up soon. The vandalism of Ulez cameras in London will be as nothing compared to public anger when people realise the bill for net zero will run into trillions.

Even if you believe that a transition to ‘cleaner’ ‘greener’ energy is highly desirable and will surely come in the long term (the end of the century seems a realistic goal), you can still be alarmed by this crazy groupthink and its wilful blindness to looming consequences.

Covering half of Lincolnshire in solar-panel farms, and paying American firms huge subsidies to produce electricity when we should be producing food on good, productive land – who voted for that?

Not very long ago, this country went into Covid lockdowns without a proper cost-benefit analysis and with politicians bamboozled into believing there was only one possible course of action, instead of listening to a range of possibilities.

I’m afraid we are in great danger of repeating that historic error.

The Government should repeal the net zero legislation and switch its focus to achievable adaptations over a longer timeframe instead of coercing and bullying the British people into altering their lifestyles in order to hit a meaningless, unattainable target.

A bold change of tack may well yield electoral dividends, giving disillusioned Conservatives something we can actually vote for. “My polling suggests scepticism of expensive net zero commitments unites the 2019 Tory coalition,” says Prof Matt Goodwin.

So both Red Wall and Blue Shires have well-founded doubts about the green bandwagon of pipedreams; they’ll be sticking with their internal combustion engines, thanks.

At the G20, the Prime Minister said he wanted the UK to be a world leader.

Marvellous, Rishi, but who wants to be a world leader in shooting ourselves in the head?

See more here telegraph.co.uk

Header image: Getty Images

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