Boiling over: government greenery is going wrong

Move over Dominic Cummings. The gun-slinger the Prime Minister should be even more wary of is Steve Baker, the MP who is gathering ammunition for what promises to be a fascinating shoot-out to query one of his hallmark policies: reaching Net Zero by 2050.

Baker has started his media blitz with an attack on the PM’s wheeze for gas boilers. In an article for the Sun this week, Baker warned that plans to ban gas boilers within 14 years and replace them with more eco-friendly heat pumps would land thousands of people in poverty.

What’s more, he warned that going ahead with such a barmy plan would trigger a political crisis bigger than the revolts over the Poll Tax in 1989.

Baker is particularly furious that householders who refuse to install new boilers by that date with greener – and more expensive – alternatives are being threatened with financial penalties of some sort. An earlier policy to fine those who refuse to replace them has apparently been dropped by Downing Street.

He writes: “The process is going to hit everyone but let us be under no illusion, the poorest will pay the highest price for these carbon neutral fantasies.” The most likely alternative to a gas boiler, he points out, is an electric heat pump which costs around £10,000 to install. In older properties, that might cost more because of the new fittings required.

Gas boilers are the G-spot of the government’s ambitious going green campaign. Pointing out that it is the poorest that will be hurt the worst is a clever populist move.

Yet Baker is right. The government’s plan to force people to replace boilers with some sort of sophisticated heat pump is – at the moment – simply daft. Sadly it reminds you of previous government attempts to plead with drivers – with financial incentives – to give up petrol and go for diesel instead. Look how that one turned out; disingenuous at best if not downright deceptive.

Baker has form in campaigning, and picking the ambiguities around boilers as his first line of attack is a way of bringing the whole issue of the exorbitant Net Zero programme to the red tops and stirring up support. He knows how to go for the gullet, having chaired the European Research Group (which pushed for a hard-Brexit) and, latterly, the Covid Recovery Group.

But Baker is taking on a bigger battle, one which will pit him against what can only be described as Borisnomics: the PM’s promise to go Net Zero by 2050 which could be one of the most expensive policy pledges in British economic history. In another article for The Critic magazine, he explained why the government’s climate change policy needs more investigation and why he had joined Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation. As he puts it, “one of the very few organisations that has been challenging current orthodoxies, one which government and officials have been trying hard to ignore.”

An engineer by training, Baker explained he felt compelled to look more closely at the Net Zero pledge after seeing the way green issues dominated the last election. He reckons the bill for decarbonising the economy is estimated to surpass £100,000 per household.

“Whitehall claims the number is lower, but won’t let anyone see their calculations. Figures like these may be tolerable for the zoomocracy who govern us today, but what of the rest of the population? Ordinary families — not least in the former “Red Wall” seats — are going to
suffer most.”

“The more I study, the more concerned I become that we are launching a ruinous economic experiment when we can least afford it. With their radical plan to fully decarbonise the entire economy by 2050 — “net zero” — that is just what Conservative ministers are embarked upon.”

And we know that decarbonising will cost billions – if not trillions – as no one has yet costed it. It won’t just be replacing heat pumps, that will be beyond the wallet of most UK householders, but electric cars, holidays abroad and so on.

The point about the debate that Baker is stirring up is precisely this: we don’t know the cost of going green. And it doesn’t matter how green you are or want to be, what we know is that the cost will fall on the taxpayer. There is no green god or goddess who will hand down the greenbacks in a free-for-all. The cost will fall on us, as we have already seen from rocketing electricity prices which have doubled over the last 20 years because of heavy government subsidies going to wind farm operators.

That is why Baker’s questions deserve proper rigorous due diligence and investigation. It is not honest to demand that householders replace their ageing gas or oil boilers with new green ones without government subsidies, at the very least.

The problem is very few people dare stand up and say they query what’s going on and it takes someone brave – some would say bonkers – like Baker to do so. By contrast, it’s easy for Boris and his Borisnomics to make these promises as he knows he will have been long gone when he has to face up to the bill.

Yet we need to know what the costs are of switching over from fossil fuels – and make the choice freely. If consumers are duped as they were over diesel, then they may well rise up and protest and they would be right to do so.

Core to this debate is technological innovation. Weirdly, it’s this that is being ignored in the race by politicians to be seen to be the greenest, with Johnson being one of the prime offenders.

As Carlos Tavares, boss of Stellantis, the world’s fifth biggest car maker, said a few weeks ago, one of the problems with government-issued deadline diktats is that engineers are not being given time to come up with more efficient technologies than electric batteries.

Like Baker, Tavares also warned that cars will become so expensive that only the wealthy will be able to afford them. We are nowhere near having sufficient renewable energy to power either the heat pumps or the batteries that charge the cars.

Hydrogen is still too expensive and other technologies are in their infancy. But they will come. They always do.