Yes, Net Zero is a culture war issue
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Net Zero exposes the absence of democracy
I am sorry to keep banging on about Net Zero. I would like to cover more subjects but Net Zero is turning into the defining issue of our times whether the wider public realises it or not.
In fairness I can see why it’s attractive. One enormous harmonic integrated system is an exciting idea (just as the EU is to many). The point of dispute is the government wants to fast track it on a completely unrealistic and arbitrary timetable and with a blank cheque, failing to appreciate the technology just isn’t there yet, just like their push to make self-driving cars happen.
It involves enormous behaviour change, and the political class is completely oblivious to, and hopelessly naïve about, the kind of sacrifices it demands. They’re doing it with no regard to things like public consent, which is what makes this a culture war issue.
Primarily the agenda is a revivalist desire for a grand economic plan (build back better), and they don’t care if it works or not just so long as it creates pork barrel jobs in the marginal areas like Hull and Middlesbrough. Meanwhile the money men cream off billions in risk free subsidy. Personally I don’t want them to build back better. I just want to be able to affordably heat my home, yet this is a distant secondary concern to the people inflicting this on us.
The realities of people’s lives just doesn’t seem to permeate into the bubble of policy wonks and activists. Even if you could say that heat pumps and electric vehicles were cheaper to run, that’s not use to people with no disposable income or a poor credit rating (which is one in five of us).
The proposition just don’t match the real world experience of most people. I recall vesting friends in Reading a little while back, where the streets are so rammed full of cars, sometimes you’ll be look to park within half a mile of the terraced house you’re visiting – and you’re not even guaranteed to be able to park outside your own house. There is no way these houses can accommodate charging infrastructure, nor is there the free space to take all the internal apparatus that goes with a heat pump.
The assumption that everyone has a driveway and free space available comes from the same “I’m alright Jack” trait found in remainerism. That’s why the battle lines over Net Zero are forming up along the same lines as Brexit. Again it’s those who have the power doing something to us without us having a say in it. And they’ll deploy the same tactics too. In the same way they called leavers racist, they’ll call Net Zero sceptics climate deniers. Just like anyone who questioned the government’s Covid strategy became an anti-vaxxer overnight.
And of course, we have been here before. When the EU launched the Euro (the last big transformative idea) they knew they didn’t have the necessary powers to make it work, and they knew exactly what sort of problems it would create, and then used the Euro crisis to push for more powers. Net Zero is the same.
Wind power without massive grid redesign doesn’t work, They know it doesn’t work. But they introduced it anyway, and now they argue more capital is required to stabilise the grid. Similarly, the crisis we’re now in is a direct result of the very deliberate decision not to build gas storage, exposing us to global gas shocks, and now they argue for more wind power to notionally fix a problem they created.
There is no end to their galactic arrogance, and just as with Brexit, they are appalled by the very idea than any of us should get a say in it. There are no checks and balances on it, and our political class is in full agreement that this is something that must be done. The only opposition comes from political outsiders.
As it happens, the wheels are already falling off as decades of policy neglect means the government can’t afford not to explore any and all fossil fuel options, and so because we made wind central to our energy policy instead of nuclear, we’re now going backwards in terms of carbon emissions, while having to pay for both concurrently. The green agenda has been an absolute disaster and takes the lion’s share of the blame for the biggest drop in living standards since the outbreak of World War Two.
Fundamentally, the primary obligation of government is ensure abundant affordable energy. Everything in the economy rests on that. Without it, none of our other ambitions can come to fruition – but our political class sees the national grid as their own private trainset and something by which they can impose their own ideologies, toward a future where we have to modify our lives around the needs of the grid rather than the grid serving us. This is “stay home, save the NHS” all over again.
That we have no say in it again underscores that our democracy is broken, and our ruling class prefers it that way. They dishonestly imply that because Net Zero was on the Tory manifesto that it has a mandate and there is consent for it, but most people have no real idea what is meant by Net Zero. There most certainly isn’t informed consent, and when the realities of the boiler ban and the phase out of ICE cars begins to bite, we are going to see a major pushback. But in the meantime, there is no telling how much damage the Net Zero fanatics could do.
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