Boris’ 10-point Climate Plan
By Paul Homewood
h/t Robin Guenier
New cars and vans powered wholly by petrol and diesel will not be sold in the UK from 2030, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said.
But some hybrids would still be allowed, he confirmed.
It is part of what Mr Johnson calls a "green industrial revolution" to tackle climate change and create jobs in industries such as nuclear energy.
Critics of the plan say the £4bn allocated is far too small for the scale of the challenge.
- Offshore wind: Produce enough offshore wind to power every home in the UK, quadrupling how much it produces to 40 gigawatts by 2030, and supporting up to 60,000 jobs.
- Hydrogen: Have five gigawatts of "low carbon" hydrogen production capacity by 2030 – for industry, transport, power and homes – and develop the first town heated by the gas by the end of the decade.
- Nuclear: Pushing nuclear power as a clean energy source and including provision for a large nuclear plant, as well as for advanced small nuclear reactors, which could support 10,000 jobs.
- Electric vehicles: Phasing out sales of new petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2030 to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles and investing in grants to help buy cars and charge point infrastructure.
- Public transport, cycling and walking: Making cycling and walking more attractive ways to travel and investing in zero-emission public transport for the future.
- Jet zero and greener maritime: Supporting research projects for zero-emission planes and ships.
- Homes and public buildings: Making homes, schools and hospitals greener, warmer and more energy efficient, including a target to install 600,000 heat pumps every year by 2028.
- Carbon capture: Developing world-leading technology to capture and store harmful emissions away from the atmosphere, with a target to remove 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2030 – equivalent to all emissions of the industrial Humber.
- Nature: Protecting and restoring the natural environment, with plans to include planting 30,000 hectares of trees a year.
- Innovation and finance: Developing cutting-edge technologies and making the City of London the global centre of green finance.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54981425
There is actually nothing particularly new in any of this, other than filling in a bit of detail. We really need to await the forthcoming Energy White Paper, which will hopefully include some proper detailed costings.
The buffoon Ed Miliband naturally complains that the government (ie taxpayers) should be spending much more:
Shadow business secretary Ed Miliband criticised the plan, saying that the funding "in this long-awaited" announcement does not "remotely meet the scale of what is needed" to tackle unemployment and the climate emergency.
"Only a fraction of the funding announced today is new."
Mr Miliband, who served as energy and climate change secretary from 2008-10, said Labour wanted the government to bring forward £30bn of capital investment over the next 18 months and invest it in low-carbon sectors to support 400,000 additional jobs.
But in reality, the £4bn quoted by the BBC is only a tiny part of the overall cost. For instance, installing 600,000 heat pumps annually would cost in the region of £6bn a year alone.
Recently there seems to be widespread, incredulous astonishment in the media about the government’s climate policies. I fail to see why, because they were all published in the party’s manifesto a year ago!
https://www.conservatives.com/our-plan
Labour’s manifesto, of course, went even further, promising by 2030:
https://labour.org.uk/manifesto-2019/a-green-industrial-revolution/
While the Lib Dems policies were just as potty:
https://www.libdems.org.uk/plan
As for the ban on petrol and diesel cars, the Environmental Select Committee was calling for this to be brought forward to 2032 two years ago.
And all of this has been inevitable since the Climate Change Act was passed in 2008.
Where has the media been the last few years?
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
“including a target to install 600,000 heat pumps every year by 2028”
Are there even that many heat pumps in the world never mind installing that number every year. Totally “emperor’s new clothes”. I find this whole CC/Green stuff so totally depressing. When will we ever wake up? The only aspect of his 10 point plan I can agree with is to increase the nuclear energy option.
Heat pumps dominate in countries like Japan and Korea, so manufacturing capacity probably would not be an issue. The availability of qualified installers in the UK might be, though.
Not to mention grid capacity.
“Heat pumps dominate in countries like Japan and Korea”
Because they’re not blessed with as much low-cost dependable natural gas which is 1/4 the price of electricity 24/7.
So loads of nice green jobs – just in Japan and Korea!
Can we please swap our Emperor BoJo for Bjorn Lomborg?
+1
+2
Never mind Lomberg.
Even Sponge Bob Square Pants would be a big improvement.
If you logon through WordPress reader there is a LIKE button
“Carbon capture: Developing world-leading technology to capture and store harmful emissions away from the atmosphere, with a target to remove 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2030 – equivalent to all emissions of the industrial Humber.”
Ten million tons? What can that trivial amount possibly do to save the planet? One ppm of CO2 is 7,800 million tons. Last year the world added ~40 billion tons to the atmosphere.
10 million tons cannot be worth all the trouble and costs it will take in the next ten years.
And, by the way, where will they put all the ICE vehicles that will become useless when the biofuel-driven economy is shut down? Solar panel farms on top of corn and sugar cane with rusting cars stacked up over in the next lot? The inmates must be in charge of the asylum.
B: A curious thought occured To me. 10M tons is 0.025% of 40 B. But, the 10M is over ten years, so really it’s only 0.0025% of emissions. Now, 0.0025% just happens to be the level of CO2 in the atmosphere…..I wondered if some idiot politician was confused between emissions and levels and thought that removing 0.0025% was the solution. 😀
0.04% is the atmospheric concentration of CO2.
Or one inmate is sleeping with the PM
Sorry Paul, you have this completely wrong. This is not Boris’s plan it’s Carrie’s and her mates. I know someone close to No 10 who despairs that every time Cabinet/Johnson makes a decision, he goes to Carrie and, if she disagrees, she changes his mind. It can be as little as an hour.
I didn’t realise that when I voted for Boris, as the only way to stop Corbyn, I was in fact voting for Carrie.
Yes, it is fine for the PM to use their wife/husband as a sounding board occasionally, but what we have learned of Johnson’s style of govt. over the past week is entirely unacceptable. The situation is not retrievable; it has become clear that she can always talk him to death and any respite in that will be cosmetic. He has to go, in January preferably.
“Vote Blue get Green”, well FRO to that.
This stuff isn’t really any different from what May and Cameron were doing. The issue isn’t Carrie. The issue is the Tory Party.
millipeed was right about one thing, the money quoted is a pin prick compared to the real cost of doing this rubbish. Which I hope meand that is more of a Princess nut nuts offering for PR purposes than a real policy statement. Most of the stuff is just ‘wishes’; there are only 3 main points; cars, nuclear and subsidies for offshore wind. The first will not go ahead simply because the third will not provide the power. Nuclear is fine but then money quoted is a joke.
At least natural gas heating/cooking in homes looks like its going to be around longer than we perhaps feared.
It just seem to be an offering to green activists. Pay them a few billion on projects that are never going to work anyway, so maybe they’ll calm down for some time. Ultimately it won’t change anything. Wind will be built anyway, for as long as the CfD subsidies keep flowing. And those green bonds and carbon markets are serious business, bankers will not miss their opportunity to get richer by trading literal air. The rest is simply never going to happen though, money will be spent, but to no noticeable result.
Look
I have this plan for wind powered aircraft. I need help working out the sail area and there are a few other trifling details that need sorting out. Who should I apply to for a large grant?
“We’ve managed to develop the first practical electrically-powered airplane, but we’re having severe problems with its range — if it flies too far away it pulls the plug out of the socket, and the cord keeps smashing into buildings.”
Erm, carbon (ugh – carbon dioxide ) capture? Is this ATMOSPHERIC CO? So at vast expense we will be capturing Chinese CO2? There must be quite a lot of that.
It’s already been done …
zero emissions flights = kite, glider, parachute.
zero emissions sea voyages = yacht, canoe, lifeboat.
And for land, bicycles and horses.
When the apocalypse really happens, the Mad Max films will sure look silly.
Coming to a place near you, in the not-too-far-distant future: Militia signing up posts.
(Sign me up, please)
I think its time that we joined our French cousins.
You can get a yellow gilet for about a tenner on ebay
So its official. The Tory Party is now the political arm of Extinction Rebellion. Who’d a thunk it.
Clearly items 1,2,5,6,8 and 9 are vanity projects, of little economic or practical significance.
Item 3, SMRs could really take the UK forward, but it looks like we will in fact buy another mega-unit from France.
Item 4. EVs are simple lunacy. The relaxation of the hybrid ban would be a small improvement on a massive waste of money.
Item 6 Aeroplanes and Shipping. Will the UK own either aeroplanes or ships by 2030 to implement these pointless policies?
Item 7, Homes. The UK needs to double its build-rate, this will further reduce it apart from being a waste of money.
Item 10. Finance = mega-bonus for cronies.
The direct and consequential costs of this lunacy will exceed the damage done to UK manufacture by Thatcherism many times over.
Sadly, Boris is now clearly past his use-by date.
He’s even further past his ‘best before date’! Fooled me.
Command economy – Tory style.
Why am I reminded of the film “Sleeping with the Enemy?”
It seems we have a lady PM now. By proxy. When we’ve cut out all this Co2 and all the plants are dead, what then?
On Pt 8, Carbon Capture and Storage, here’s a BBC report of January 2017 on the government’s two previous attempts to kick-start CCS. The first one cost £68m and the second £100m; both for no real result. Maybe they think it will be third time lucky. Here’s what was reported less than 4 years ago:
“About £100m was spent on a competition for developing carbon capture technology before it was scrapped, a new report has revealed.
Peterhead power station and the White Rose scheme in North Yorkshire were in the running to win the £1bn contract before it was cancelled in 2015.
The National Audit Office has been looking into why the project was axed. It found a failure by the UK government’s energy department to agree the long term costs of the competition with the Treasury led to its cancellation amid concerns over the price to consumers.
The carbon capture and storage (CCS) competition was the second bid by the UK government to support schemes that capture pollution from power stations or industry and store it underground – potentially helping meet greenhouse gas targets. At the time it was cancelled, the competition had two preferred bidders: the White Rose consortium in North Yorkshire which planned to build a new coal plant with the technology, and Shell’s scheme in Peterhead, Aberdeenshire, to fit CCS to an existing gas plant operated by SSE.
The NAO report said the department initially estimated it would cost consumers – who would subsidise electricity from the schemes – between £2bn and £6bn over 15 years, but by 2015, this estimate had risen to as much as £8.9bn. The report found the Treasury was concerned over the costs to consumers, and that the competition was aiming to deliver CCS before it was cost-efficient to do so.
A first competition to kick-start CCS was cancelled in 2011, the government having spent £68m on it.
Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, said: “The department has now tried twice to kick-start CCS in the UK, but there are still no examples of the technology working. This is why the government ended the funding for the CCS competition, and ensured taxpayers were protected from significant costs when the competition closed.”
So what’s changed that will make it viable this time round? And why should the costs have become acceptable? Repeatedly trying things that fail in expectation of a different outcome is a classic definition of stupidity……
Mike, a much cheaper solution is for the buffoonery proposing this lunacy to read a physics text book and also learn some geological history. They would find that not only is CO2 not capable of making the problems claimed for it but that it is a critical part of the process of photosynthesis and the source of the oxygen we breath. CO2 has only a positive effect in the atmosphere and far from there being too much, the looming danger which even I learned the basis of at University comes from there being too little.
For 160 million years the Carbon Cycle has been out of sync caused by the evolution of marine organisms which sequestrate CO2 to combine with Calcium to make Calcium Carbonate shells (CaCO3). Their success at doing this is show by the huge volume of organic carbonaceous rocks around the world, which are the Planets main reservoir of life giving CO2 by many orders of magnitude. This CO2 has been removed from the Carbon Cycle and locked away.
This 160 million years and counting process of removal of CO2 from the Carbon Cycle and locking it up in rocks has resulted in a relentless and linear decline in atmospheric CO2 from a level which was close to the average over the whole of geological time (2500ppm approx) to a point during the first part of the current Ice Age when it fell to around 180ppm which is 20ppm above the death of plants and consequently the death of all life on Earth.
What we actually should be doing is putting MORE CO2 into the atmosphere by grinding up carbonaceous rocks because the very brief uptick seen recently probably as a result of you and me driving our SUV’s will end and the decline will recommence.
The pseudo science in the pay of the climate cult deliberately does not consider all information but rather only partial information that suits it’s purpose. How such projects were ever conceived beggars belief because their promotion, support and funding requires willful and criminal ignorance on the behalf of those making decisions and their advisors.
I am curious to learn why my above post requires “moderation”? Is Critical Thinking and Empiricism now “controversial”?
PMFB: A great comment as usual. Thank you.
You’re out by at least 200 million years, since the Carboniferous era started at the end of the Devonian Period 358.9 million years ago.
When they say ‘invest’, read ‘waste’.
There is no point st all in capturing the UK’s atmospheric manmade carbon becsuse, as a proportion of the global total CO2, it would be hardly enough for the lead of a pencil!
I do hope that at some point the Cabinet and the Tory MPs will issue Boris with an ultimatum that he governs with them and for the people (rather than his partner) or he will be subject to a party leader challenge.
It’ll only occur sometime in January, once the effects of failing to get a worthwhile agreement with the EU hits home.
And who would you wish to have as his replacement?
I think the best way to compare party manifestos on Green issues is to let Greenpeace do the comparison work for you, and then use Greenpeace’s results in the opposite direction.
https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/labours-plans-for-climate-and-nature-score-twice-as-high-as-the-conservatives-according-to-election-manifesto-ranking/
In the case of the 2019 UK General Election, Greenpeace gave the Green party 19 (out of 20), Labour 16, Lib Dems 15, Conservatives 7 and the Brexit party 1 for their manifestos.
The anti-Green voter would therefore have to prefer the Conservatives over Labour and the Lib Dems as their score is quite a bit lower. The best party for the anti-Green voter in 2019 was the Brexit party. They got an impressively very low score of 1 from Greenpeace despite not being notably anti-Green in the way that UKIP was.
Nigel and co. have just renamed the Brexit party as the Reform Party to expand the scope of their policies. It is now the only realistic party option to counter this lunacy i reckon.
And so I thought until I heard Richard Tice, Chairman of the party, on Radio 4’s Any Questions on 6 November. Listen here, from 34mins 30 secs and despair as he announces that ““We’re all desperately concerned about climate and climate change and global warming”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000p0ts
Just read that Biden is saying to the ustralian government that he will impose tariffs on trade unless they have a zero ‘carbon’ policy in place.
I presume he said the same to Boris , so it will have prompted the quick press release. Boris can not afford to be waging trade war with both EU and US at the same time.
Actually JimW it would be far cheaper to dump the UK Climate Change Act and all it entails and to take on EU and USA simultaneously. Palmerston (perhaps you will need to research) would have done it without hesitation. Pity we don’t have politicians with any courage these days.
We could invite Macron to jump into one of the many rubber boats leaving his countries shores and “try his luck” but I doubt he will have a chance lacking as he is the medieval ideological or melanin based grounds required by those who bestow victimhood.
Insightful intelligence is lackin from politicos too.
Absolute madness is the predominant mark of greeney.
“Critics of the plan say the £4bn allocated is far too small for the scale of the challenge”.
Given that there is NO quantification in respect of units of climate change avoided/slowed down/speeded up/turned into rocking horse doodoo per £million, £billion, £trillion spent BY THE UK, HOW can anyone point to a number and assess its value quantitatively? How? I suggest whatthe ecoloons just want is 100% of GDP to bankrupt the country while we head to the caves? Is that their plan?
As for Ed Minibrain….. I will not dignify any utterance he makes with a response!
If you take EIA figures for 2020, 40 GW of offshore wind should come up to about $11 billion a year if you spread their costs over their lifetime.
Using the numbers from the recent GWPF report on hydrogen, 5 GW of electrolysers should cost somewhere close to $550 million annually to build and maintain (again, spreading the capital cost over the operational lifetime), excluding the cost of electricity to power them.
In the FES report you can find that annual gas consumption for heating is about 350 TWh of primary energy. If you were to replace all that with “blue” hydrogen, you’d need 45 GW of steam reformers with CCS working at 90% capacity factor. From the data in GWPF paper again you can calculate that it would cost $3.5 billion per year to build and maintain them, excluding the added costs of conversion losses and energy wasted to run capture and storage.
It’s hard to compare the costs of electric cars, but the main reason why they are so much more expensive are the costly batteries. Battery prices are about $150/KWh according to Bloomberg, so if a typical electric car has a 100 KWh battery, the excess costs of replacing 32 million vehicles with battery alternatives would round up to $480 billion, or $48 billion a year assuming a lifetime of 10 years.
10 year plan to no fossil fuels in the UK he says. No, that’s a going out of business plan. I like the “Making cycling and walking more attractive ways to travel” bit. LOL. It won’t take long for people to realize only the masses will be impacted by these “Green Energy” plans as they watch politicians motor around town and their travel to and from work and shopping take up the free time fossil fuels gave them. This will take their lifestyle back a century.
I think that Boris has forgotten that horse-back can be an attactive way to travel!
We need a plan to deal with this madness.
Hydrogen: Have five gigawatts of “low carbon” hydrogen production capacity by 2030 – for industry, transport, power and homes – and develop the first town heated by the gas by the end of the decade.
HYDROGEN is flammable
Nuclear: Pushing nuclear power as a clean energy source and including provision for a large nuclear plant, as well as for advanced small nuclear reactors, which could support 10,000 jobs.
http://www.kiddofspeed.com/
I think the fact it was in the manifesto is pretty irrelevant, no one was looking at it – everyone was distracted by Brexit, and there was no way to vote against it anyway, as Labour was for the same nonsense. The reaction links on GWPF twitter are worth a look.
Fawkes quote of the day, Lord Lawson:-
“If the Government were trying to damage the economy they couldn’t be doing it better.
Moreover, the job creation mantra is economically illiterate. A programme to erect statues of Boris in every town and village in the land would also ‘create jobs’ but that doesn’t make it a sensible thing to do.”
I’m afraid Paul’s been reading the wrong research. Don’t you know that nothing’s done without the input of experts who really know what they’re talking about? In establishing its “Active Travel” policy, our local council engaged one such expert. One of the conclusions they came to, after serious consideration was:
“What the surveys indicated, were that the main barriers to participating in active travel are associated with the high cost of cycling and the lack of access to a bicycle, closely followed by safety concerns and the lack of cycling infrastructure, …”
See? Listen to the experts!
The survey continued….”and the rain and the cold and the dark and the hills…”
Words fail me on the crap that comes out of Boris’s mouth when he opens it. I cannot hardly see any of this happening. The Country is virtually bust from the Government’s mishandling and spending on Covid. Yesterday is was said the £200 billion on Covid spending will have to be recouped, from tax payers of course. So increased taxes and reduced services will be on the way. The GWPF have said the decarbonising of Housing will cost £2 trillion. I can’t even comprehend that sort of figure, how on earth can that come from a heavily overtaxed population. Then there is the cost of all the extra wind farms, and upgrading of the grid. One GWPF report said every road in the country will need to be dug up for power upgrades for EVs and heating decarbonisation. Again I cannot comprehend that in time cost and disturbance. These costs are going to be astronomical. And then we have to remember that the Government’s record of successfully handling infrastructure projects on time and on budget is virtually non existent.
Having said all that we need to rely on the press to challenge and hold the Government to account. Well here again, we cannot rely on that. The MSM now is useless, they no longer have any investigative journalists, just University degree journalists who are only good and cut and pasting.
Since when have ANTIFA been writing government policy?
Johnson must go. And NOW!
When Boris goes home at night, the first thing he does is take off his trousers, and he gives them to Carrie.
Has anyone, at all, ever, anywhere in the UK been harmed by climate change?
Yes indeed, all taxpayers!
The Tax payers have not been hit by climate change but by the Climate Change Act. It is usually argued that the delta for climate change is 30 years. On that basis in the UK it would be quite hard to argue for any significant change. I think that 30 years is two short. The positive and negative phases of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation add up to circa 60 years and as the PDO is so important I would argue for a delta of at least 60 years. On that basis coming out of the LIA was a modest change of climate. I suspect those alive 20,000 years ago would not have recognised the difference between the climate now and that in the LIA.
An electric car stuck on a smart motorway with a flat battery. The road would be shut for a couple of hours before the AA arrive with a mobile charger and will the driver survive this long? And all this probably hundreds of times a week!
You might not be able to open this but in it the Boss of vauxhall said it will cost billions in incentives to get people to by EVs in the numbers needed to achieve Boris’s, sorry I should have said Carrie’s, plan for cars but we all know that already.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/11/18/billions-subsidies-needed-electric-car-switch-industry-warns/
I read this
“Making cycling and walking more attractive ways to travel and investing in zero-emission public transport for the future. ”
The only way cycling and walking will become more attractive is if the UK climate changes for the better, mostly a bit of warming.
There is something to be grateful for in the “plan” no mention of legislation to tell us what we can and cannot eat. How did he get that through “that woman”?
I want to know more about transatlantic jet-zero. I just love the idea of airplanes running on . . . something other than evil CO2 producing fuel. . . hmm.
Mad #MarieAntoinetteBoris
says
“Let them not fly
Let them pay extra for electric cars
Let them have one less nurse in each ward, to pay for wind/solar energy extra costs”
And MarieAntoinetteMedia keep pushing these metropolitan liberal elite dreams
Boris seems to be introducing new sudden drastic fake-green policies on a whim
..without any proper form of democracy and debate.
This is wrong in fact it’s Stalinesque
bottom line their green ideas don’t work, so they are going the COMMUNIST way of banning their competition.
Capitalism : If you like green stuff FINE
Use your OWN money buy what you like, a green car, green power, green home, green control systems etc.
And if they were SUSTAINABLE in a free market they wouldn’t need any government support like SUBSIDIES and special market privileges.
eg hydro dams are a functioning green idea in the right circumstances
Fusion when it works will be the same
No subsidies needed, big corps will just do it to make money and be prepared to pay some extra tax.
What Boris’s lot are doing
is saying, “we have some NEW green tech ideas
but they are NOT GOOD ENOUGH for the free market,
so we are going to force it on the public
we are going to ban the conventional competition or tie them down in red tape,”
FFS Drax sits on a coal field
but the idiot government has banned coal
so Drax ships in trees all the way from America
which produce MORE CO2 and burn DIRTIER
.. but we have this idea that eventually new trees will grow and theoretically re-absorb the CO2 over the next 30 years
but all the time they’ll be cutting down new trees and burning them and there is a 30 year lag before their CO2 is reabsorbed too
It’s all nuts
etc. etc.
The government is not really green at all
If they were they would stop all this shop yourself green BS
They’d stop open borders, discourage population growth, particularly in countries where it’s growing fast
and do better planning so that people can live near their job.
Not building Cross Rail or HS2 etc.
Buying an electric car is simply a “have your cake and eat it solution”
it’s not properly changing lifestyle
It still involves chopping down trees to build a one tonne box that you travel 60Km a day to and from work in.
Good grief and Golly! Is there nobody here who will stand up to support all this CO2 mitigation nonsense? Where have all the climate policy inmates gone? After all, those 40 billion tons of CO2 we all contributed for our energy needs have to be removed and put somewhere nice and safe. Why are we not all taking bold and decisive action?…and soon!
“Public transport, cycling and walking: “
I thought cars were invented to speed up transportation. Silly me.
Clueless Boris goes clue-negative.
https://more.talktalk.co.uk/news/2020/11/19/pm-vows-to-end-era-of-retreat-with-biggest-military-investment-since-cold-war
Expensive wasteful diversions, and the idea of an effective defence is fundamentally incompatible with net-zero when faced with enemies like Russia and China who will not nobble themselves with such nonsense.
Yes we need effective armed forces and appropriate spending, but this won’t give us that.
It always puzzles me why in a supposed climate emergency, space tourism for the super-rich elites, and duplicating space capability with allies, is considered OK, whilst simultaneously demanding your populace survives on in-season root vegetables, limits travelling for work and leisure, and spends all their money on insulation and expensive energy – for the sake of the planet! Can there be a more planet ruining resource intensive pursuit than ‘space’?
Apart from a few notable exceptions, politicians around the world have demonstrated their complete inability to understand and effectively manage the current natural challenge posed by the emergence of the Sars-CoV-2 virus.
And these same politicians really expect us to believe that they are capable of understanding and controlling the complexities of the global climate?!?!?
He’s got to go because he has become a Liberal or a Green.
?
Gove or Redwood (or Donald Trump!) to succeed him?
Redwood. I say more in hope than expectation.