By Paul Homewood
A Hole-in One for Tom Slater!
.
Far be it from me to give advice to the Green Party. From their insistence that ordinary people put up with being poorer and colder to ‘save the planet’ to the alarmingly high number of Israelophobic, 7 October-denying cranks on their candidates list, I’m really not a fan. Still, I’d gently suggest that the golden rule for any Green vying for election is to practise what you preach on climate. If you are standing on a manifesto of national immiseration, you’d better be willing to go without the fossil-fuelled comforts you want to rip away from everyone else.
The Greens co–leader has been caught out as an eco-hypocrite
Not so for Carla Denyer, it seems. The Greens’ co–leader (apparently running a party with one MP is too much work for one person) has been caught out as an eco-hypocrite. Denyer has admitted to ITV, as part of its party-leader interviews series, that she still has a gas boiler. She is ‘in the process of getting quotes for replacing it with an air-source heat pump’, natch, but Rishi Sunak’s snap poll scuppered her plans. ‘I’ve had to put that on pause during the general election as you can imagine, but I, yeah, literally have quotes in my email inbox’, she said.
This would perhaps be more convincing if heat pumps had only come to market this year, or were a relatively minor part of plans for ‘decarbonisation’. In reality, they’ve been at the heart of the discussion, given domestic heating accounts for about 14 per cent of UK emissions and the government has been throwing money at people to install them for years.
Despite this, uptake remains much slower than hoped and the Tories’ plan to ban new gas boilers by 2035 is so unpopular even the Labour party has just pledged to scrap it. No one will ‘be forced to rip out their boiler’, shadow energy secretary Ed Miliband told the Daily Telegraph last week. Given Labour is almost certainly going to win this election, I guess that’s one fewer incentive for Denyer to finally get her act together.
She’s hardly alone in failing to live her life as she expects the rest of us to live ours. ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ has been greens’ unspoken mantra for years. From Prince Harry taking private jets after lecturing others on climate change to Sadiq Khan presiding over Ultra-low emission zones while taking a three-car convoy to walk his dog to Extinction Rebellion co-founder Gail Bradbrook driving a diesel when she’s not flying off to Costa Rica, eco-hypocrisy appears to be a feature – not a bug – of elite environmentalism.
You can’t help but conclude that green austerity is just for the plebs. Even paid-up Greens are bristling at the expense and privations they claim to support. Indeed, forcing people to pay more for poorer outcomes is at the heart of the Net Zero mania. Heat pumps are a great example. They can cost anywhere between £10,000 and £15,000 to install, compared to £2,000 to £4,000 for a new gas boiler; they can cost more to run; and they aren’t particularly effective at heating your home – unless you’ve got even more cash to splash on insulation and other expensive adjustments. No wonder Denyer was putting it off.
This is the fundamental flaw of greenism – the reason it only appeals to a privileged few. It wants to rip up the unwritten contract between government and the governed. Where politicians once pledged to make life that bit easier, cheaper and more convenient for ordinary folk, now they are offering us higher bills, colder homes, fewer foreign holidays and expecting us to be happy about it. Deep down, no one – not even the co-leader of the Greens, it seems – wants to live like that.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
June 24, 2024 at 04:15PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 