Boris Johnson’s green revolution just got more insane.
Just three years from now he plans to make it illegal to install a gas boiler in any new home. It might sound innocuous enough but the consequences for freedom of choice, not to mention the cost of heating your home, will be devastating.
As Ben Pile points out in a must-read piece for Spiked, this is a virtue-signalling exercise whose costs and logistical implications have not been considered.
Some 84 per cent of Britain’s homes are connected to the gas network. It sounds obvious to say that they should just switch over to electricity. But the retail price of gas is less than a quarter the price of electricity per kWh. Heating a home with electricity is therefore currently four times more expensive than heating a home with gas. Moreover, switching simply defers the question of where Britain’s energy is going to come from.
The abundance of gas, and the ease with which it can be stored, transported and used, makes it the cheaper and more convenient form of energy compared with electricity. Hence Britain’s gas network transports nearly three times as much energy as the electricity grid (876 TWh vs 324 TWh). Furthermore, nearly 40 per cent of electricity is produced by gas-fired power stations. To replace gas with electricity implies scaling up the grid and generating capacity by more than five times.
This, and many other implications of Johnson’s incautious 10-point plan, make it perhaps the most absurdly expensive political folly ever to have been inflicted on a population.
So, just to repeat: this Conservative government wants to make heating your home four times more expensive than it is already – at least four times because, of course, the more dependent the grid becomes on unreliable, expensive, intermittent ‘renewable’ energy (backed up, of course, by fossil fuel), the more expensive electricity will get.
To get an idea of the mentality of the people pushing this green agenda, here is a terrifying letter to the Financial Times from a Cambridge professor of Engineering and Environment. [What a weird combination. It’s like being professor of Oenology and Prohibition]
Professor Allwood says that in order to achieve Johnson’s Net Zero by 2050 policy, we need completely to adjust our lifestyles:
Third, this involves us all. The pretence that climate change can be mitigated without societal participation is now blown, and some of the required actions – flying less, dietary choice, preferred modes of transport, using less water, retrofitting houses and offices – depend on us taking a journey together.
This is your occasional reminder that the Great Reset is not a conspiracy theory. The Great Reset is real and it’s already well advanced.
These eco-fascists don’t just want to take away your gas boiler (and thus, your least expensive way of heating your home). They are also after your holidays abroad, your meat, your car, your hot baths…