In Rishi Sunak’s speech yesterday he is clearly still committed to “net zero” by 2050 to tackle climate change, even though the UK cutting carbon emissions is unlikely to have any significant impact on the worldwide figures. It’s a pointless gesture which will mean we incur enormous costs which the public has not been informed about and to which they have certainly not consented.
But reality has been creeping in after people have discovered that their gas boiler plus their radiators will need replacing by inefficient electric heat pumps. Likewise new sales of oil/petrol powered vehicles were to be banned from 2030, ahead of most other countries, when electric vehicles are still more expensive, don’t hold their resale values and are inflexible in use.
Rishi’s speech is seen as a vote winner but it’s in essence a more pragmatic approach to reducing carbon emissions and relieving the burden on certain households.
It’s certainly worth reading his speech in full (link below) which was only reported in simplistic sound bites in the national media. He concludes by saying: “We are going to change the way our politics works. We are going to make different decisions. We won’t take the easy way out. There will be resistance, and we will meet it”. That surely means he is going to face down the idealists who don’t live in the real world.
But will Rishi manage to take the Conservative Party and Civil Service with him? That is the key question the answer to which we will see in due course. That’s assuming the Labour Party don’t win the next election and reverse the direction of travel.
My view is that this speech is well argued and veers well from extremes. But he will have difficulty convincing the environmental fanatics who have not been listening to reason for some time.
Rishi Sunak speech in full: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-on-net-zero-20-september-2023
Roger Lawson (Twitter https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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