Allister Heath: Net Zero is a Trojan horse for the total destruction of Western society
By Paul Homewood
Bit by bit, the resistance grows:
Prepare for a people’s revolution against policies that will abolish choice and impoverish millions
I love my electric car, dear reader, I really do. The driving experience is revolutionary, the acceleration mind-blowing and there are no nasty exhaust fumes or engine noise. After almost three years, I’m not going back: it is far superior, for my purposes, to a petrol-powered vehicle.
But I’m lucky. I can easily charge it and I never drive long distances with it. The Government’s plan to impose a UK-wide ban on the sale of new, pure petrol cars in just six years and nine months’ time is insanely detached from reality. The country and the technology are nowhere near ready for a full roll-out. Sticking with this preposterous timetable will impoverish and inconvenience millions and trigger a seismic, anti-green popular revolt.
The EU has already backtracked: after lobbying from Germany, Brussels will allow some internal combustion engines powered by e-fuels. We must go further and scrap the deadlines altogether. The future of driving is zero emissions, but we should trust capitalism to deliver it when the time is right.
Longer range yet affordable models need to be available for people who need to drive hundreds of miles a day for work or leisure. Only 65 per cent of UK homes have off-street parking and, in some cases, only for one car, according to the RAC. In London, this falls to 44 per cent. Millions of on-street and at-work charging points will therefore be required; the roll-out to date has been pathetic. Electricity consumption will surge and yet the country is already on the brink of blackouts.
The cheapest new petrol-fuelled cars begin at around £12,500 for a Dacia Sandero; increasingly steep, but just about affordable on credit for Middle England. Will electric cars with a range of 300 to 400 miles be available at that price by 2030? I doubt it, which means calamity for millions. Eventually, cheap, long-ranged electric models will flood the market and an affordable second-hand market will develop, but not yet. If we really need a binding deadline, the Government should legislate that new electric cars will only be compulsory when there is sufficient on-street charging and generation capacity.
Until now, the costs of decarbonising society have been disparate or borne by industry – one reason why voters remain supportive. Fuel duty has been frozen. Home energy bills have gone up, but other factors have had a far greater impact on the cost of living. Taxes on long-haul flights have been hiked, hurting British-Asian and African communities, but the general public hasn’t really noticed. Voters have accepted the shift to reusable bags and paper straws and are happy to recycle. But those were easy – in some cases, costless – tweaks that haven’t required massive behavioural change and they fooled our elites into believing that voters will put up with endless misery to go green. They won’t.
Given enough time, a seamless transition to zero-emissions cars that don’t impact a person’s quality of life or their pocket is eminently possible. The same cannot be said of the proposed shift to heat pumps, or decarbonised air travel, or low-carbon construction, or reduced meat diets. These are likely to end up being explosively expensive and unpopular. We will eventually crack a new way of powering planes, but not a commercially viable one by 2050. The public will go wild if every home is forced to stump up a five-figure sum to retrofit a heating system that doesn’t even work properly when it gets really cold, or if foreign holidays are effectively banned.
The growing civil disobedience and furious rejection of low-traffic neighbourhoods and other anti-car diktats is a harbinger of things to come, as is the anti-Ulez movement which is galvanising many outer London and Home Counties demographics. These are notable given how few protests advocating explicitly centre-Right policies there have been over the past 40 years: the Countryside Alliance march, which failed, the fuel protests, which succeeded spectacularly, and the pro-Brexit demos, which eventually triumphed.
The speed at which the pro-car movement has grown is remarkable, as is the diversity of its grassroots leadership. The political elites and the net zero movement need to pay close attention: their policies have barely started to be implemented and yet they already risk triggering the British equivalent of the Dutch farmers’ party, which won the most seats in the provincial elections in fury at a savage green crackdown on agriculture.
There are two kinds of environmentalism. The first is the one exemplified by conservationists, nature lovers, green technologists, free-market environmentalists, Elon Musk, Boris Johnson before No 10, or my colleague Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. They love human civilisation as well as the natural world. They believe that new technologies – hydrogen, nuclear fusion, geoengineering, carbon capture, electric cars or cultured meat – are the solutions to environmental degradation. They dream of near-free, abundant clean energy and high-yielding agriculture; they seek new ways of enhancing our quality of life, feeding the world and growing our economy while not disrupting the environment. They support democracy, reason, choice, international travel, rising living standards and the universalisation of consumer goods.
The second kind of environmentalist are control freaks who have hijacked and warped a great cause. They don’t want to save the planet so much as to control its inhabitants. They love net zero – an extreme vision incapable of nuance, trade-offs or cost-benefit analysis – because it is a form of central planning. They are eternally disappointed by real-life human beings and their individualism.
Many have adopted a woke, quasi-religious worldview: we have sinned by damaging Gaia, we must repent, we must self-flagellate. They believe in “degrowth” and a weird form of autarkic feudalism. They dislike freedom and don’t want us to choose where to live, shop, eat or send our children to school. They want to reduce mobility. The Welsh government has banned road- building. One French minister called for the end of the detached house: we should all be forced into flats to minimise our carbon footprint, a cause now advocated by some UK commentators.
The public backs the first approach, not the latter. The net zero fanatics have already overreached. Our politicians must break with these extremists, or they will unleash a popular revolt that will make Brexit look like a gathering of Davos technocrats.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Shame about “drive hundreds of miles a day”. The range needs to be enough so that you don’t have to recharge EVs every time it is used.
Think about it. EVs have 2 to 3 hours of actual use and it takes as much time to recharge.
Proper cars with diesel/petrol engines have around ten hours of actual use and it takes maximum ten minutes to refill.
There is something fundamentally wrong with EVs if people have to be forced and bribed to buy them and simultaneous bans, regulations and taxes on competition
I only wish your last sentence was true.
Looks pretty accurate to me and – if the idiots in our political leadership classes (all parties) have their way – the same is going to apply to home heating very soon. This isn’t made up, precisely this is happening.
“Our politicians must break with these extremists…”. Our politicians are these extremists.
This part made me choke on my cornflakes:
> Boris Johnson…dreams of near-free, abundant clean energy and high-yielding agriculture;
[his policies deliver the opposite]
> … and seeks new ways of enhancing our quality of life
[lockdowns, forced vaccinations, endless wars, trans, CRT, skyrocketing inflation & taxes]
>… he supports democracy, reason, choice, international travel, rising living standards.
[After the last 3 years? Give me a break!!]
Spot on.
Apologies O/T – I’ve now seen that Climate Change (presumably ‘man’-made) is now sexist according to The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/26/climate-change-crisis-women-feminism-pakistan-floods
What really caught my eye was the statement that, “Women and children are 14 times more likely to die during a disaster, according to at least one study.”, with a link to a UN Development Programme report cited.
But some digging into the figure finds this was debunked way back in 2014, https://blogs.prio.org/2014/09/is-it-acceptable-to-lie-for-a-good-cause/ – finding the source to be an opinion piece by a US pastor from 1997 – with no original source ever provided.
The UNDP report – links the source for the claim to their own video on twitter!
I find this astonishing that a clearly implausible figure is still being printed in a national newspaper.
A lie oft repeated, becomes a truth !!
‘If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it.’ … (Isabella Blagden’s 1869 novel The Crown of a Life )
Styleyd,
The 2022 “1/3 of Pakistan is under water” story was very easily debunked at the time, and indeed it was with proof in this very blog. The Grauniad story – being printed in 2023 when all of the correct data is available – is thus a bare-faced lie. This is also compounded by the fact that Pakistan’s major flooding episodes – like 2022’s – are caused by intense weather patterns influenced strongly by La Ninas, and thus not climate change at all. For the publishers (not necessarily the gullible author who penned it – she may not know any better) to ignore these well-known facts is completely unacceptable but, after all, this is the Guardian.
The fourth word in the Guardian article is an equally debunked, obvious and unsubstantiated lie.
“I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, mis-placed, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a LABOUR Council! – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers”.
In all my long life I never, NEVER, dreamed that a Conservative government – a CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT – would become such a dictatorial, talent-less, corrupt, bought-and-paid-for ruling class who are committed to doing more damage to my country than anything that a jumped-up paper-hanger could do between 1939-1945. I honestly, truly despair for the future of it and my grandson’s future in it.
/rant.
I forgot to ascribe the quote above to Neil Kinnock.
In complete agreement Harry, I share your despair. For the first time in my life I don’t know how to halt this scam. Letters to my MP get government propaganda in return. Letters to the Press are ignored. Voting for other political parties will make matters worse – so, is it better to deface the ballot paper or just to stop voting?
Perhaps the minority Reform Party is one answer.
Mass abstention is the best policy and then if MPs are elected on less than 25% of the electorate we can question their legitimacy to form a government.
“so, is it better to deface the ballot paper or just to stop voting?”
1,00s of people died so YOU can vote;
writing ‘NONE OF THE ABOVE’ on the ballot paper sends a stronger message as All ballot papers have to be recorded.
If ‘None of the above’ gets a high % , then we can question their legitimacy to form a government.
No, imho, Tice & co are impaled on the spike of their contention that the so called SARS COV2 “vaccine” is down to personal choice; that spectacularly misses the fundamental point – does the/any “vaccine” do what it says on the information insert, answer: NO – when you take into account the side effects and compromised immune systems!!!
I think a more likely development is if the farming community combines with like minded (disaffected) people who are “countryside” folk at heart – just like BBB and similar movements throughout Europe which strangely are not getting the exposure they merit thanks to the commissars of the MSM local cultural re-education committees in their drive for a “fairer” outcome….it would be the only “non political” political movement I would ever consider joining. The existing gang of 656-1 are dead in the water along with their Blog acolytes.
Not a choice at all when it became mandatory to travel anywhere.
>>SARS COV2 “vaccine” is down to personal choice
“there are no nasty exhaust fumes”
The nasty exhaust fumes have already escaped at the coal/oil powered power stations that provide most of your energy. But I guess they are not in your back yard.
But there are extra particulates from tyre and road wear.
It should be obvious that an all-electric world being filled with renewables cannot be constructed using electric vehicles. Nor can a negative emission net-zero world. Conventional transportation cannot be replaced in making that transition.
Where’s the lithium coming from Alister (hardly enough for UK alone)?
I can’t believe that any of the tens of thousands of manufacturers of electrical goods are not making any noise about the potential lack of power for said goods. No power means no business.
Talking about corrupt and useless MPs, some may remember my comment on another thread where I complained to my MP about a jydges remarjs if support to a bunch of XR thugs. I had expected my MP to make representations on my (his constituent) behalf to the relevant powers that be. But oh no! In the reply I got it was actually stated that MPs can’t get involved in legal issues before the courts and I would need to take the matter up with them myself.
What is the point of MPs? And I say that with added frustration as my MP used to be the AG!!!!
I hate to think what this country would be like if we in this country took offence like the French. I often think we’re not far from it.
The big question for me is who is behind it? I watched (only on GB News) the counter protest outside a hotel in Newquay earlier this week. It started with about fifty locals protesting quietly about the hotel occupancy but then about 150 counter-protestors were bussed in and started yelling along “fascist” themes. They were all dressed head-to-toe in expensive looking black uniforms including smart black caps and all wearing identical face masks. The GBN reporter was really scared because they attacked his channel as well. That kind of organusation costa a lot of money. Where is it coming from? And why did no MSM news carry such an extraordinary story? Is China behind it as well as the usual suspects? I don’t have the answer but its getting really scary.
It’s going to require some very well coordinated investigative reporting to start to unravel things like that. Who paid for the hire coaches? etc.
The trouble with Heath – other than being an ignoramus over Brexit – is that he included AEP in a paragraph praising people….oh, dear.
Geoff Buys Cars ran a battery – diesel comparison the other day where he compared running costs per mile. However, he missed one important calculation that of miles per minute spent refuelling. For every minute on charge the battery Hyundai Kona went 1.8 miles. For every minute spent at petrol stations which Geoff said included toilet breaks and coffee and therefore time not spent actively refuelling, he still went 38.4 miles for every minute.
Is there any sort of organised campaign against net zero. I’ve been looking but the search engines seem to think I (should) support it.
Heath omitted the fact that the folks with no driveways will have to pay over the odds for their leccy at public chargers, even after there are 300,000 of them littering the countryside. If those with off-street parking pay less than those without, you can hardly call it levelling up.
In any case, I don’t see how public chargers can make money bearing in mind how many cars they will be able to charge plus the time they will be spent idle (those who can charge at home will)/broken.
” The speed at which the pro-car movement has grown is remarkable ”
At one time, the AA and the RAC would have been leading a pro-car movement
Not only the motoring organisations , but also the manufacturers have failed to fight the anti-car hysterics in recent years.
Yesterday I punched in the face one of these pieces of s**t who dared to block the PUBLIC road i was traveling on because he said so and because he is a stupid little ignorant prick who can’t think for himself and repeat the TV/big tech propaganda about the climate hoax.
I saw carbon flying out of his green fascist mouth.
Of course violence is not always a solution but this time it proved to be.
The other climate lunatics just ran away and I remove the road block with happy residents who thanked me for beating up this goon.
The rich middle class liberals who push EVs for atmospheric cleanliness have no knowledge of commerce – hell , it’s all there on the Waitrose shelf – so they forget giant diesel powered 12 wheel artics in their hundreds of thousands across Europe as well as millions of smaller lorry mvehicles. So what’s the point?
Allister: https://pm1.narvii.com/7344/e8b6f6273e82ff4fc6252672a4df2d201cd44745r1-1317-1244v2_hq.jpg