Will we ever wean the elites off their Net Zero addiction?

Net Zero fundamentalism is biting the UK big-time. Britain’s energy is the most expensive in the developed world. Taxpayers’ money goes on green vanity projects, such as subsidies on unwanted electric cars and immense solar farms owned by foreign investors. We have no growth – jobs, industry and capital are elbowing each other aside in a race for the exit door. And the answer of the establishment class? You guessed it: more Net Zero – even harder and faster.

Last week’s report from the House of Commons’ Environmental Audit Committee confirmed this direction of travel. Its advice on how the UK government should meet its carbon targets makes for depressing reading.

Whatever it takes, these MPs say, we mustn’t let up on the rush to Net Zero. The UK must keep within its arbitrarily declared CO2 limit, no matter how much it hurts. In fact, the report suggests that green policies haven’t affected British people’s lifestyles nearly enough – except by making them gasp at their electricity bills. Net Zero may have wrecked British industry and household finances, but it is only just getting started.

The thrust of the report is perfectly clear: the public must be pushed, by bullying if not compulsion, to change the way we live, travel, work and eat in the quest of decarbonisation. Of course, ordinary people can’t afford to transition from the Asda to the Ocado lifestyle, from the runabout car to the electric, from boring but reliable gas boilers to exciting new heat pumps. These MPs’ solution? Get the government to subsidise these lifestyle changes, and tax the rich more. And what about local authorities who are unhappy with swallowing the green agenda (such as Reform-run Lincolnshire, which scrapped its carbon-neutrality targets last week)? The report says the government should pass a law to force them to adopt it.

The wishful thinking is obvious. The idea that a government can magically create Net Zero jobs out of thin air may give politicians good soundbites, but it’s for the birds. Just as delirious is the notion that the working classes of Swansea or Southend will give up the conveniences of ordinary life without a fight. Like it or not, the proposals being put forward by the born-again green lobby will sooner or later give us genuine social unrest.

Behind all this, however, lurks a much more frightening reality. Overtly under Labour, and more clandestinely under the Conservatives, the technocratic and lanyard classes have deftly annexed the political process. Willing politicians have simply been co-opted to play along. This report shows this in spades.

For one thing, it’s not written in plain English, but rather in HR management-speak. It’s all about ‘behaviour change’, ‘core delivery challenges’ and ‘place-based approaches’. The other giveaway is the list of those invited to Portcullis House to give evidence to the committee that produced it. Overwhelmingly, they came from green pressure groups, university centres for climate change or organisations like them. Almost nobody was there who might have been minded to suggest that the Net Zero emperor had embarrassingly few togs on.

Equally tell-tale is the stress placed on legal, technocratic concerns throughout the report. Much emphasis is given to the Paris Agreement, the apparent need for Britain to be an international ‘leader on climate governance’, and the imperious demands of the Climate Change Act. The idea of the state giving ordinary people like you and me a say over whether we want to do any of this is nowhere to be found in the report. If ordinary people are sceptical or downright hostile to this agenda, then they must be coerced. As the committee puts it, neatly letting the cat out of the bag: ‘In practice, measures relating to home energy efficiency, low-carbon heating, transport choices and diet are most effective when framed through impacts on comfort, affordability, safety, health and wellbeing, rather than emissions metrics alone.’ In short, stress the nice bits, gloss over the nasty ones and with luck ordinary people will suck it up.

And that’s before we even get to the mailed fist. ‘Behaviour change should not be treated as an adjunct to technology deployment or as a matter of individual responsibility alone. Delivery planning should make full and explicit use of policy levers to shape prices, incentives, defaults, infrastructure and markets.’ Or, translated, the public must be made to go along with Net Zero, whether we like it or not.

There is opportunity here. The Tories have explicitly promised to return decisions on Net Zero matters to the political process by repealing the Climate Change Act, and a Reform UK government would do the same. This move alone will do a good deal to stop the climate-change obsessives immiserating the rest of us. It cannot come soon enough.

The Net Zero lobby is vulnerable. Those who understand what the British people really want now need to give it a hard kick.

Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of commercial law and a former Cambridge admissions officer.