Net Zero: the unwanted revolution

By Pete North - July 31, 2023

Britain is a world leader in net zero fantasies and delusions says Tim Stanley in The Telegraph. There’s nothing here we don’t know – but he does make one pertinent point. “Sunak stands to out-triangulate Starmer, who cannot entirely shed the green agenda because without it the post-socialist centre-left has no vision to hawk at all.”

That’s certainly true. Labour has put great store in green jobs and building back greener. Starmer, Miliband and Reeves are all invested in the idea of green regeneration – and the wind industry, they think, is central to that. Only it can’t possibly work. We know this because it’s already been tried. There are major wind industry boondoggles in Hull and Hartlepool and it’s a sticking plaster at best. It’s also not going to work because the wind industry is quietly collapsing. Under the current CFD regime, wind developers simply cannot turn a profit – particularly now that input costs have gone up by forty percent.

Meanwhile, there is no headroom for a more favourable subsidy regime, and the industry industry is beset with expensive technical problems. Shares in Siemens Energy, one of the world’s largest wind turbine makers, plunged 30 per cent recently after the company warned it may have to spend more than €1bn fixing an array of technical faults. Investors are starting to look elsewhere. Net Zero delusions cannot withstand the onslaught of reality. It may even be that the wind sector has entered a death spiral. That Labour has fully embraced wind as a central pillar of their policy platform is perhaps the best indicator that it has.

But then policy malaise isn’t exclusively a problem for Labour. Labour’s green new deal shtick is no different to that of Boris Johnson. If Sunak is bold enough to bin this agenda (he isn’t), then he also will find the cupboard is bare when it comes to industrial policy and political vision.

Net Zero itself was symptomatic of that lack of vision. Brexit demanded a new policy agenda and industrial strategy and Net Zero was chosen for political expedience in the absence of a plan for post-Brexit Britain. What we needed, though, was a plan to pivot away from an over-reliance on low wage immigration and a plan to bring energy costs right down.

If Labour was remotely in touch, they’d have recognised this and would have no problem in taking back the red wall. If the Tories had recognised this, they wouldn’t now be fending off a total wipe-out. As it happens, neither party is prepared to gear their manifestos to people who might actually vote for them. Both are chasing a mythical centre ground and they’re listening too closely to Westminster blobbers armed with heavily massaged opinion polls and faked numbers about the low cost of green energy. Net Zero is an idea so stupid that only politicians, academics and imbeciles could ever buy into it. It’s an election loser.

It’s not that difficult to gauge where much of the public is (or will be) on Net Zero. Just this morning I looked across the office car park – situated in West Yorkshire. The two bosses have EVs (and they live locally). Everything else is in the decidedly average bracket, and there’s nothing newer than 2018. This is not a workforce that can afford new EVs – now or any time in the future. I trust a cursory survey of the office car park more than I trust an opinion poll commissioned by a green lobbyist. I’m also harbouring doubts that the people of Middlesborough are gearing up for the heat pump revolution.

Meanwhile, as our political class squanders political bandwidth on its eco-delusions, it transpires that the number of adults living in their family home in England and Wales has risen by 700,000 since 2011 – with about 30% of 25- to 29-year-olds now living with their parents. The trend has meant that those who move out are also far more likely to be paying their salaries to landlords; the number of households renting has more than doubled since 2001. In much of the country, renting is also becoming an unaffordable option.

It’s almost as though there is something radical politicians could do that would be both sensible and popular. First, though, we need politicians to realise there is a link between a shortage of housing and adding 600,000 people to the population every year. They could then do something about that too, and then all those people who currently do not vote for them might see their way to turning out at the next election. Labelling such people as “far right” doesn’t appear to be working.