Why can’t Carla Denyer practise what she preaches?
Not even the co-leader of the Green Party is prepared to sacrifice her living standards to the eco-agenda.
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Greens are constantly telling us that we need to radically change the way we live if we are to avert a coming ‘climate emergency’. Yet very few seem prepared to actually practise what they preach and make the sacrifices they demand of others.
Now Carla Denyer, the co-leader of the UK Green Party, has been exposed as the latest flaming eco-hypocrite. In an interview on ITV last night, she admitted that she still has a gas boiler in her home and has not replaced it with an eco-friendly heat pump. She claims she would have had a heat pump by now, had the snap election not got in the way. This is despite the fact that two years ago, she said that ‘renewables, insulation and heat pumps’ were necessary ‘right now’ as part of the Green Party’s ‘emergency’ plan to tackle the energy crisis and mitigate climate change.
Of course, it’s not hard to see why Denyer hasn’t been in any rush to rip out her gas boiler. Even with vast amounts of government subsidies available, the cost of installing a heat pump is at least five times that of installing a gas boiler – setting you back between £10,000 to £15,000. For all that money, you still end up with a vastly inferior product. Depending on how well-insulated your home is, it can take up to 24 hours to heat a house to not-quite room temperature. Clearly, this is a sacrifice that not even the Green Party co-leader is prepared to make.
There is plenty of eco-hypocrisy to go around. Those impossibly posh activists from the likes of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, who warn us that our use of fossil fuels will kill literally billions of people, are often partial to global travel, drive diesel cars or own large, draughty, uninsulated properties. Delegates at every UN COP conference arrive by private jet, before preaching fire and brimstone about the dangers of climate change.
Perhaps these green extremists don’t believe their own hot air about the so-called climate emergency. Or perhaps they just think it should be the masses, not the elites, who should sacrifice their living standards to placate the angry Sun gods. Certainly, what these eco-hypocrites make clear, time and again, is that environmentalism promises us a miserable future – of less comfort, less convenience and less material wealth. It’s a vision we must reject wholeheartedly.
Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.
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