As the Guardian has reported this morning, the government's headline plan for greening the UK's housing stock is this:
Ministers have unveiled plans for £5,000 grants to allow people to install home heat pumps and other low-carbon boiler replacements as part of a wider heat and buildings strategy that some campaigners warned lacked sufficient ambition and funding.
The grant is, of course, much less than the cost of a heat pump. In many cases it is a tiny contribution towards the cost. So, the bias towards gas boilers remains.
And, to compound the matter, the total budget available is £450 million over three years, or 30,000 boilers a year, at most, when we know we need 600,000 a year to achieve climate change objectives.
This is not a serious policy. It is an insult to those who know we must transform the UK's housing if we are to beat climate change.
But it does contextualise Johnson's comments in The Sun. His language there confirms that he remains a climate sceptic opposed to the action required to save our planet for human habitation. The policy is wholly consistent with that.
We are in a deeper climate crisis than I realised.
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Cop26?
‘Cop out’ more like.
There is no serious intent is there at all?
My worry is that Boris’ bullshitting capacity is giving other countries the chance to slow down as well. I worry that they’ll all hide behind him.
You are totally incorrect, Richard, This IS a serious policy. The policy is to offer the media a favourable headline (£5000) while ensuring that nothing effective is done. Now, in every interview, “We have poured £450 million into green energy for households, even at a time when public finances are hard pressed.”
If there is one lesson to draw from “More or Less” on BBC Radio 4, it is to ask “is that a big number or a small number?”.
Particularly when politicians try to distract us with how much public money (they say) is being spent, rather than outlining the results they hope to achieve with it. Measuring inputs is easy; measuring outputs is much harder.
By most measures, £450 million is a big number. But by reference to the scale of the task – or indeed the resources of the UK – it is tiny.
There are about 30 million households in the UK. Many will need better insulation before they get air-source heat pumps. UK public spending last year was over £1 trillion (i.e. a thousand billion, or a million million). Every little helps, but this is a very small acorn.
Agreed
This sounds rather like the situtation regarding fox hunters and those demonstrating against it. Except that fox hunting with dogs is illegal.
Fig leaf policy devised by imbeciles, aimed at generating short term positive media coverage.
I don’t think Johnson IS a climate sceptic. A climate sceptic is someone who denies the exstence of climate change despite the overwhelming evidence. Probably stupid but, apparently, a genuinely held belief. Johnson deoesn’t bother considering the evidence: he just does not care whether climate change is real or not, as long as he can find a financial or political advantage in the position he takes.