First, the good news. The Commons select committee on energy security and net zero has called on the government to drop net zero. Now the bad news: they only mean the term ‘net zero’ not the actual policy of trying to eliminate net carbon emissions by 2050.
They complain that the term has become a ‘lightning rod for opposition to climate action’, and that it has become a ‘distraction’, even though it describes perfectly what the government is – ruinously – trying to achieve. They want the policy to continue, but under a different name – though possibly not ‘net stupid’, which is Reform UK’s preferred term. Presumably it would be known by some propagandistic euphemism or other. How about a Sovietesque ‘glorious transition’?
Sorry, but changing the name isn’t going to negate the utter foolishness of legally committing ourselves to eliminating net carbon emissions by some random date
Sorry, but changing the name isn’t going to negate the utter foolishness of legally committing ourselves to eliminating net carbon emissions by some random date, 2050 or otherwise. Rebranding is what happens when a product is failing, and often fails even heroically once the rebrand is complete because it becomes open to ridicule. No one was remotely fooled that the Morris Ital was anything other than a Morris Marina (Google it if you are under 50), and they won’t be fooled by calling net zero something else.
The reason support for net zero is collapsing is that people are slowly coming around to realising the implications of something which at first sounded abstract and too far in the future to worry about. Now, however, voters can see that there is a link between our high electricity prices and the mess being caused by Ed Miliband’s target of decarbonising the national grid by 2030 (one of the staging posts on the way to the 2050 target).
They understand that building endless wind and solar farms without the storage to cope with the intermittency means we have to build two parallel, and extremely expensive, energy systems.
Voters understand, too, that net zero will mean the end of flying for foreign holidays. Maybe when MPs nodded through the net zero target in 2019 it was possible to think that conventional planes would be replaced with hydrogen ones or use biofuels. But it has become pretty clear since then that new technologies cannot be magicked into existence to meet some government target. People are starting to understand, too, that net zero is forcing us to offshore our carbon emissions, along with jobs and wealth, to China and elsewhere, to no benefit to the environment.
The energy security and net zero committee has another, sinister proposal. It wants Ofcom to crack down on what it calls ‘misinformation’, which we know from previous experience means anyone who makes any argument against net zero. The only example of ‘misinformation’ cited in the MPs’ report was a claim by a broadcaster that the Climate Change Committee had said that by 2050 a quarter of our energy would still be coming from fossil fuels. Actually, that was a former government interpretation of the Committee on Climate Change’s data. That hardly seems a huge piece of misinformation compared, for example, with Ed Miliband’s porky that his renewable energy policies were going to save us £300 a year on our energy bills. But of course the mainly Labour MPs on the select committee aren’t the slightest bit interested in correcting such stuff, only denouncing material which they find inconvenient to the cause of the climate lobby.
Trying to rename net zero is an attempt to regain control of a narrative which is collapsing: that eliminating net zero will bring us cheaper energy, more jobs, and just about everything else you could possibly want. It is a sign of desperation which will fool no one.
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