Thread by @clim8resistance

Good points raised in this report, but "awareness" & "explanation" won't be enough to persuade people to accept consequences of #NetZero.

Consent for ambitious policies must exist before they are made law. Since the 2000s, there has been no democracy in UK climate policymaking.

https://twitter.com/SMFthinktank/status/1323175215229247489

An example. The report finds that "retrofitting the home requires a significant upfront cost estimated at up to £15,000". This won't make a home 'net zero'.

How many homeowners and/or landlords are going to have £15K lying around between now and when? Nobody's saving!

To make a home truly #Netzero WRT heating will cost multiples of £15K.

The consumer does the quick calculation. How many years will it take to pay back the £15K?

Back-of-an-envelope: 30 years.

That doesn't sound like a good deal. And it's not going to be the only expense.

If the £15K retrofit only reduces the heating bill by half, then it will take 60 years to pay back the cost.

And if the cost of electricity (now that gas is abolished) doubles -- as seems increasingly likely -- then the cost is never recovered.

Rough figs, but you get the idea.

No amount of "explanation" or political "leadership" is going to do anything to persuade homeowners forced to part with multiples of £15K that #Netzero is in their interests.

Most people don't have that sort of spare money.

And as for "political leadership", it is a woeful euphemism for what has been lacking from British politics during the rise of environmentalism. It is cowardly politicians that have enacted climate legislation, unable to offer the public any positive agenda.

The current contenders for "political leader" are Boris Johnson and Kier Starmer. The political parties are not capable of producing "political leadership" sufficient to persuade people to part with multiples of £15K.

That's why they turned to the greens in the first place.

The report claims, "the Government must have a central role in leading the public and industry towards seeing the importance of and achieving the Net Zero target by 2050".

The primary legislation is now 12 years old.

The time for persuasion was 15 years ago.

By the time this stuff is starting to be felt, the legislation will be 20 years old.

We will be in the depths of the economic fallout from the lockdown fiasco.

It will be mirrored by increased transport costs, rising costs of living & prices, increased tax burden.

I.e. the "political leadership" required won't just need to persuade to part with some multiple of £15K for home retrofitting. It will also have to explain why people are paying many times more for transport, food, utilities & basic services.

People who were children when the primary legislation was passed will ask their parents will be middle-aged parents. They will ask the grandparents of their children, "why did you vote for the party that created this nonsense?"

"We had no choice", the grandparents will say.

It is an interesting report. But it falls flat on its face.

This is just going to be pissing in the wind.

"Leadership", "information" and "stimulation" are just hollow words.

What counts is the bottom line. The £s.

This is a snapshot of opinion *now*.

The don't-knows will polarise over time, and the opposers will grow.

Even if they got it to 50/50, there will be a LOT of very angry people, who will have been denied a voice for decades.

"Leadership" will not be able to cope.

The only plausible lever of persuasion available to "political leadership" in the future is to convincingly argue that #Netzero policies will save the consumer money. But that's already a non-starter, as is shown above.

The only opportunity to persuade the public of such a thing passed in 2008 -- when the Climate Change Act was passed.

The caveat to *all* green policy *should* have been that costs may not be increased.

But this was anathema to environmentalism, which hates low prices.

For e.g., the 2005 Labour Party manifesto made a commitment to abolish 'energy poverty'. At that time, the Climate Change bill had already been all but fully drafted, and was waiting to be heard.

The Labour government and MPs from all parties abandoned the commitment.

The Milibands et al made it explicit. They put global agreements before the interests of the elderly, the poor, and the low waged -- the people who experience 'energy poverty'.

They put their global political ambitions ahead of those they claim to help.

"You must live within your ecological limits" David Miliband told grandmas on state pensions.

This is going to haunt every attempt at "political leadership" for decades.

This is the bedrock of the climate agenda: a *huge* FU to ordinary people.

You can't spin it any other way.

Never mind decades, it took MPs just two years to abandon its commitment to abolishing energy poverty.

Here's Labour's 2005 manifesto...

*That* was when MPs should have made a commitment to providing cheaper energy.

They instead lied. They said that we'd be richer.

They knew it was a lie because the green organisations that they had let draft climate change legislation have long campaigned to make things more expensive.

Rather than test the policies democratically, MPs took instructions from green NGOs.