By now we should be used to one wacky conservationist idea after another being foisted upon us, but they retain their power to create outrage. Last week we learned that a tenth of the smart meters in British homes, or around three million of them, are faulty. Technology, it seems, isn’t as wonderful as those who foist it on us—in this case, geek virtue-signalling politicians oblivious to the economic realities that keep families, businesses, and the country solvent—like to pretend.
And as with many green fantasies, there is incompetence. The government is far behind its target of putting these faulty meters in 80 per cent of homes by 2025, not least because of a shortage of installers. And the installers are accused of prioritizing quantity over quality, which is why so many people get confused.
My objection to such things is not based on the Luddism of newborns, but on the repeated evidence of supposed ideas to save the planet being profoundly economically destructive: and smart meters are only a small foretaste of the horror to come. We reported on Friday that due to the government’s reckless obsession with banning all new oil boilers, people in rural households – those of us who don’t live near the gas mains – would suffer a 70 per cent increase if they were forced to use heat pumps in their energy bills.
At a time when many people are struggling to feed their families thanks to a huge rise in inflation, caused in part by the frenzied infusion of money into the economy during the pandemic and the too-slow rise in interest rates in its wake, the idea of the cost of keeping warm is growing by more than two-thirds, if you’ll excuse the expression, must be blood-curdling.
But grinding poverty is, as far as ministers are concerned, a price worth paying for the cult of net zero. Few independent experts pretend that solar or wind energy is sufficient for the heating and power needs of a country of nearly 70 million people. We are facing this serious crisis because of the insane opposition to nuclear power that has taken root over the last 20 years – a bacillus that entered the bloodstream of the Conservative Party under the leadership of Dave Cameron – and the chronic determination to make promises to improve the environment, a record that would has undermined the economy of every advanced country that relies on generating electricity, heating buildings and water and, of course, moving people and goods from A to B.
Perhaps sometime in the 2030s ministers will be appointed not only to tell us to brush our teeth in the dark – as the late Patrick Jenkin famously did during the energy crisis of 1973-74 – but to put one or two extra jumpers and to snuggle with other people or, otherwise, pets like hot water bottles. We can gather brush for campfires to cook with and to huddle around for warmth, at least until the carbon fascists catch up with us.
The net-zero fetish and growing respect for environmental activist groups (who have now gone from taping roads and climbing motorway ladders to protesting in the luxury of Glyndebourne, where they dropped a possibly biodegradable confetti bomb during a Poulenc opera on Thursday) seems paralyzes our rulers into inaction.
This must stop because otherwise there will be growing public outrage and economic collapse as we give up even trying to compete with, among others, the rampantly polluting Chinese.
The government plans to introduce 600,000 heat pumps a year – for now with consent – but there are no plans for what to do in households where it is completely impractical. As Sir Bill Wiggin, the MP for North Herefordshire, pointed out, it is not just the disconnection that requires many rural households to heat with oil, but the fact that many properties in such areas are listed. Without destroying some of their protective tissue, they often cannot absorb these pumps.
And above all there is cost: the average oil boiler costs £2,500, the average heat pump £13,000, according to the Energy and Utilities Alliance. In a depressing extension of the government’s willingness to step in and spend money recklessly, it offers grants of between £5,000 and £6,000 to those willing to install such pumps – although the public is so uninterested in this pointless scheme that the millions set aside for subsidies, are returned to the Ministry of Finance. Will ministers offer grants in perpetuity to cushion running costs too? What would this do to Britain’s already suffocating tax burden?
In other respects, Rishi Sunak has shown that he is ready to depart from the ill-advised policies of his predecessors and urgently needs to rethink his environmental policy. The post-2026 boiler ban must go: it is an outrageous intrusion into domestic life, and when thousands of Tory heartland voters find they are being forced to buy devastatingly expensive heat pumps, they will riot accordingly.
And for similar reasons, Mr Sunak should postpone indefinitely the 2030 ban on the sale of new non-electric cars, the economic and practical damage of which he cannot continue to ignore – whether by not having enough electricity to drive them , the slow charging of them, the destruction caused by lithium mining or even the potential collapse of multi-storey car parks under the sheer weight of electric cars. God knows, his party needs a relaunch and to cheer up the people who think he lives in a parallel universe. What better place to start than to drop all this nonsense and announce a new nuclear program?