The rich will soon pay a heavy price for net zero
By Paul Homewood
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Will net zero upend our lifestyles? Will we fly less, turn down our thermostats, become vegans?
The British public are already feeling the effects – from the push to buy EVs and install heat pumps, to Ulez, low-traffic neighbourhoods and the endless restrictions on plastics.
Although the UK became the first country to halve emissions over the last 50 years, many insist we must go further, faster to tackle the “climate breakdown”.
Consider a new Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) report on transport emissions. The think tank has created 12 profiles that describe the ways people travel now and the “opportunities” for different groups as we hurtle towards net zero. These include “flying less”, “more public transport” and a “shift to an electric vehicle”.
Those in the “car reliant” group, who overwhelmingly have children and are 10 times more likely to use a personal vehicle than travel by public transport or walk/cycle, are encouraged to use social leasing schemes and car clubs if they cannot afford an EV.
In other words, decades of rising car ownership, with all the freedom and independence it has brought, could come to an abrupt end.
Rishi Sunak may have insisted that net zero won’t be “forced” on us, but the legally binding Carbon Budget proposed by the Climate Change Committee estimates that around 10pc of our emissions saving by 2035 will come from “changes that reduce demand for carbon-intensive activity. Particularly… an accelerated shift in diets away from meat and dairy products…[and] slower growth in flights and reductions in travel demand”.
And soon, a Labour government – led by a self-professed “socialist” – may be in charge. Wars and pandemics aside, no policy has ever handed the Left a better excuse to meddle, spend taxpayer money, control, subsidise and pick winners than net zero.
Yes, Sir Keir Starmer has abandoned his £28 billion a year “green prosperity” pledge, but the party is putting plans for a state-led energy company – one that will, apparently, bring down both emissions and bills – front and centre of its campaign.
Shadow climate secretary Ed Miliband claims renewables are cheaper and more secure, though even the Tony Blair Institute thinks this is nonsense. The IFS is now warning that Labour’s clean energy drive won’t boost growth sufficiently to bring down debt.
For the first time, our society is trying to progress by embracing less efficient and productive technology. Heat pumps operate with lower power output than their gas-fired equivalents, meaning that they typically generate heat more slowly and at a lower level. The costs of EVs are mounting – last week it was reported that the extra weight of EV batteries means tyres are wearing out after less than 10,000 miles, a lower figure than for petrol equivalents – as demand slumps.
But perhaps the greatest fallacy is that net zero can be achieved “fairly”. Eco-warriors may relish in the thought of the entire nation regressing to a pre-industrial time, but the reality will be very different.
As the detrimental effects of decarbonisation on poorer households, who are less able to invest in new technologies or change their behaviour, become more stark, pressure to spread the misery more equally will increase. This week, one of the architects of the Paris Agreement insisted rich individuals in all countries must pay more to tackle the climate crisis, whether through taxes or charges on consumption.
Central to the IPPR’s research was the finding that the highest earning 1pc emit at least seven times more from their transport than average earners.
In response, politicians will reach for lazy, ill-conceived solutions. Targeted, economically irrational bans on activities enjoyed by the super wealthy – which will likely have a negligible impact on emissions – will be imposed.
Debate is already underway over a frequent flyer levy, with some suggesting it should exclusively be imposed on those travelling First and Business class – but this will just be the start. Helicopters or private jets, as Extinction Rebellion are already demanding, could be banned.
Restrictions on heating home swimming pools, or on the number of cars we can own, may be brought in. Or garage taxes. Or mandatory solar panels on large houses and higher VAT on luxury goods. Or higher excise duties on champagne.
Slowly and wearily we will adapt, just as we have to paper straws and congestion charges. But even then, it won’t be enough for the green zealots. As the economist Stephen Davies has written, there is no alternative to fossil fuels for a range of economically vital activities – such as steelmaking – and building the extra electricity-generating capacity will mean mining more copper than we have done in history until this point.
To make the windmills and solar panels we will need massive use of fossil fuels. When the limits of what is achievable become more apparent, will Labour retreat or double down?
Few would challenge the need to decarbonise, but our current approach will be needlessly costly and disruptive – however much politicians may try to downplay it.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/net-zero/rich-will-soon-pay-heavy-price-for-net-zero/
Actually many already do challenge “the need to decarbonise”, and many more will do so when they find out the impact it will have on their lives.
But I can make one prediction – the ultra rich will continue to live their luxury lifestyles just as they do now, even if they do have to pay frequent flyer taxes.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I live in a rural area. There is one bus a weekday to the nearest shops, 6 miles away. It leaves mid morning and comes back mid afternoon, so it is for all practical purposes useless. The bus stop is a hilly quarter of a mile away, and there is no possibility of lugging a weekly shop from it to home. I need to tow trailers with animals in off fields. How do I do that with an electric vehicle that is remotely affordable?
You’ve got a bus! Lucky. Our bus was discontinued 10yrs ago. Now they’ve discontinued the local polling station. Its a 20min drive or over an hour walk to cast a vote now. Its postal vote or no vote now. This is Oxfordshire. Must be even more difficult in truelly rural areas.
Of course, when I say “bus,” I mean a rat infested cardboard box you put over your head while you walk, but it’s a bus to us.
With thanks to Monty Python.
Jeremy,
the weekly shop for those in rural areas is a minor problem compared to that of going to work and returning five days a week.
Going to work? Easy solution – destroy your job so you have to stay at home and grow food to avoid starving. Snap up books on food preservation such as brining, pickling, drying etc.
There is NO CLIMATECRISIS just the terrorist groups of GREEN TALIBAN the only ones who will benefit from the wests stupidity of believing a nonsense myth of 1.5/2.0 degrees C destroying the world. When are politicians going to understand the whole clime panic is a LIE.
”Few would challenge the need to decarbonise” states Ms Dunham….she is much a part of the problem as the green zealots and 🤡s like Ed Miliband. After all the pain the climate will do what it always has …….change.
“Few would challenge…”
The DEPTH of the delusion is astonishing. I was reading an apparently sane comment in a communication about something or other concerning the economy, when, lo and behold, a subsidiary sentence appears, “…as the Climate Catastrophe continues to sweep over us causing crop failures everywhere…” People are not predicting disaster anymore, they are convinced they are living it. I suppose they will eventually believe they are dead from it. My cleaning lady attended an elderly man with who did believe he was dead. It was his only foible.
Meanwhile, there is an immigrant living next door to a friend of mine and being very annoying, as he is spending £200,000 burrowing underground snd making everything shake ominously. I wonder if he is a climate refugee?
I’m reminded of a chap who, when told he couldn’t have peat compost, because digging up peat was releasing dangerous CO2 into the atmosphere, he said, that’s OK, I’m going to bury it again in my garden.
What IS happening is that the Tories, and now Labour, have driven, and are now driving away the remaining investment in gas, oil and coal exploration and investment in this country. That will not come back. This will mean that we will be totally reliant upon imports of fossil fuels in order to run our economy, despite having plentiful economically exploitable reserves of coal, gas and oil right here in the UK. This will mean a catastrophic loss of energy independence and security and is a clear and present danger to our economy and well-being in the immediate and medium term. This is because a modern economy CANNOT safely rely upon weather dependent ‘renewables’ with the technology currently available. Well done to our useless, treacherous politicians. More than the failing NHS, more even than immigration, this issue should be top of the political agenda in the lead up to the General Election, but it isn’t.
The NHS is not “failing” any more than it always has done. It performs the same number of operations, treats the same number of cancer patients, sees the same number of people in A&E. There’s no increase in people under 65 dying. Arbitrary targets and Left-wing scare stories should be ignored.
Sorry, Phoenix, but the NHS is failing miserably when compared with other systems.
Through prostate cancer, hip replacement, currently a complex problem with lower limbs and a bladder condition which my urologist wants investigated as soon as … I have never had to wait more than a month for diagnostics and thereafter more than two months for treatment.
That’s how it is in France. That is normal! And the hip replacement was done at a specialist orthopædic clinic at a total cost to me of 300€! In a private clinic in the UK, I’m told, the bill would have been well into four figures!
You need to experience the two systems to understand the difference. The reports about cancelled appointments, out-patients stuck in ambulances for hours, critical treatments delayed for months, diagnostics with a waiting time of anything up to six months and no guarantee the results will be there for the consultant at first appointment …
The list goes on, Phoenix; you know it does. And the money available to the NHS is not out of line as a percentage of GDP. Another 1% would make a difference certainly, but only if it was used to break the current mindset of NHS management.
Newminster
I spent 9 years in rural France, in Haute Vienne. What you say is basically correct. My wife had several hospital visits not as serious as yours but all done quickly. Any test up to Scans and X-Rays you got the results/pictures within a day or two if not actually at the time. A lot of these routine tests are done by private organisations.
My only real experience was a detached retina. Which was done and a cataract in that eye at the same time.
There are problems though. They too have problems getting GPs in rural areas. But we never had a problem seeing ours. The cost of drugs is an issue.
Earlier this year I developed a problem, posterior capsule opacification not unusual in cataract operations apparently. The optician sent me to a private company, in her words because it will be far quicker, for YAG laser capsulotomy 2 sessions were needed which took about 6 weeks from initial diagnosis.
Since we got back at Christmas 2020 my wife has had a hip and two knee replacements. There has a bit of a delay for the first knee but no complaints about waiting.
My opinion is that the NHS is suffering from the same ailments as the Post Office and many other privatised companies.
It’s good to see that the vast majority of comments under the Telegraph article are clear that we don’t need to decarbonise and that “climate change” is a scam, or a hoax as I called it in my recent paper “Debunking the climate change hoax”. Let’s hope the electorate thinks the same and declines to vote for the Con/Lab/Lib/SNP Uniparty who all want to inflict pointless Net Zero on us.
For details, see https://metatron.substack.com/p/debunking-the-climate-change-hoax.
The electorate ,when polled, were in favour of reducing immigration, but then it turned out that the vast majority thought (if “thought” is a word you can use in this context) that immigration was one tenth of the true figure. The stuff only hits the fan when you confront the electorate either with a bill (ULEZ protests only really took off a few days ahead of its introduction), or a referendum to give them a chance to kick the establishment in its veneers (Brexit).
Not Reform!
As Reform is the only party to oppose Nut Zero, can you suggest an alternative?
There isn’t, apart from None of The Above, but even if you don’t like any of their policies other than scraping Net Zero then if they manage to get rid of Net Zero, you won’t have to vote for them next time because once gone Net Zero won’t come back easily.
Net zero is insane. Who would want it back?
IPPR is very much a Labour think tank, even though it pretends to be independent for charitable status. David and Ed Miliband both have a long history with the organisation. “From 1989 to 1994, David worked as a Research Fellow and policy analyst at IPPR. He was appointed Secretary of the IPPR’s Commission on Social Justice upon its foundation in 1992 by the then leader of the Labour Party, John Smith.”
Ed Miliband was involved with IPPR as Co-chair with MP Caroline Lucas of the Green Party, of the IPPR Environmental Justice Commission, although was later replaced by Hilary Benn. The Commission is now defunct., but some interesting names at the link.
One of their “commissioners” was Farhana Yamin, Associate Fellow at Chatham House and Extinction Rebellion activist. “An international environmental lawyer, climate change and development policy expert, Farhana has advised leaders and countries for 20 years.”
She is also a visiting professor at UCL, a member of the Global Agenda Council on Climate Change at the World Economic Forum and a lead author for three assessment reports for the IPPC on adaptation and mitigation. [She is not a scientist but contributes to reports that are described as by “the world’s top scientists”]
In 2006 IPPR produced a climate propaganda instruction manual called “Warm Words: How are we telling the climate story and can we tell it better?”
From the conclusion, “…it is our recommendation that, at least for popular communications, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won.
This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that individual actions are effective. The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken.
The certainty of the Government’s new climate-change slogan – ‘Together this generation will tackle climate change’ (Defra 2006) – gives an example of this approach. It constructs, rather than claims, its own factuality”
Seems to have worked.
That claim that the UK reduced emissions by a half is misleading. From 1990 to 2021 production emissions fell by 46%. When the government talks about net zero this is the figure they are talking about. But consumption emissions fell only by 30%. You probably know this already. Production emissions are the home generated ones. Consumption emissions are emissions based on what we consume which includes imported stuff such as food and manufactured goods. It is interesting to look at how the difference in those two figures changed over time. In 1990 consumption emissions was about 11% higher. By 2021 that had increased to 42%. I think that difference is a measure of how much of our industry and jobs we have moved abroad. If a manufacturer here moves his factory from the UK to China our production emissions go down (hooray) but it makes no difference to global emissions (boo). We just moved them. We are sacrificing our economy for no benefit at all.
The other factor in that reduction is that we closed most of our coal fired power stations. I don’t know how much difference that made. Quite a lot I should think but that’s low hanging fruit. All other cuts will be much harder to mak.
UK emissions are halved to 0.4% of global – in a world where more CO2 is urgently needed, we are doing the planet its greatest harm, whilst China are to be commended
being a bit of a pedant; when global emissions are quoted it should be remembered that is anthropogenic global emissions, which from all I’ve read are between 3 to 5 % of total global CO2 emissions.
That puts a completeley different perspective on it. and illustrates the futility of trying to affect climate by a small reduction of a small part of total emissions. That is if you believe it is necessary which I do not.
The global poor cooking over charcoal, wood and dung and without reliable electricity and water will continue to suffer at the hands of the eugenicist lunatics. The rich will be fine of course. Just one more thing to whine about at dinner parties.
The think tank has created 12 profiles that describe the ways people travel now and the “opportunities” for different groups as we hurtle towards net zero. These include “flying less”, “more public transport” and a “shift to an electric vehicle”.
Those aren’t opportunities, they’re impositions that many people won’t like.
12 ways the state can coerce people and make them poorer (doing less of what they value) in order to pursue a meaningless target.
And it rapidly moves from ‘don’t like’, to ‘doing something about it’
“But I can make one prediction – the ultra rich will continue to live their luxury lifestyles just as they do now, even if they do have to pay frequent flyer taxes.”
The plan is to use CBDCs and carbon credits so that the plebs can sell their saved carbon credits and afford to eat meat once a week whilst the rich will buy the carbon credits to fly each weekend to their Mediterranean villas.
Well, yeah. That’s the value of being ultra rich.
But they aren’t the only target. Even being middle class gives you freedoms. And all freedom must go.
No, the ‘society’ isn’t. It’s government pushing this mess.
And how long do you think that inequality will last? The masses are not hurting enough yet as reality is only just starting to bite – once real poverty, hunger and cold starts to really affect them, human instincts will kick in – Westerners have become quite pliable because of improving living standards, once that erodes, you can look at many poor, socialist nations around the world to see the result of enforced poverty
The question is what format will our coming civil war take – anti global fascism or anti islam?
It will have to be torches and pitchforks, since you banned guns.
“In response, politicians will reach for lazy, ill-conceived solutions. “
All solutions are ill-conceived because they are not needed. What a shame she does not understand this. All solutions so far are not only lazy but harmful and useless. Closing local production businesses and importing similar goods from SE Asia and China cause an increase in Carbon Dioxide, not a decrease. Who knew? Ah, everybody! [She has expressed some interesting ideas. What else does she have to say?]
The old “Ingenious solution to a non-existent problem.”
I first heard that on the factory floor 50+ years ago.
The old aphorism about feathers and camel’s backs springs to mind.
may be and could be. Quit your scare tactics. You have become the other side of the same, rotten, coin.
I wonder if the cave door will have hinges on it?
The main downside of net zero and there are many, is that generation will be severely affected – electrons won’t be going to rich elites, or poor paupers alike and societal breakdown will ensue – it won’t be pretty, reality seldom is, but it’s needed sometimes to regain common sense and finally end an epic mismanagement by nefarious, self serving leaders
Whether natural or Asian coal burning the rise in the Keeling curve cannot be checked. So all emission reduction measures are pointless. Fortunately it’s good for the planet.