The Stark Reality: Net Zero is a Tar-Baby

David Turver writes:

Outgoing Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), Chris Stark has been doing interviews with the BBC and the Guardian before his term finally comes to an end on the 26^th of April.

In his Guardian interview he seemed to suggest that all that was wrong with the Net Zero agenda is the name. He said, “Net zero has definitely become a slogan that I feel occasionally is now unhelpful, because it’s so associated with the campaigns against it.” He went on, “It’s the culture warriors who have really taken against it,” said Stark. “A small group of politicians or political voices has moved in to say that net zero is something that you can’t afford, net zero is something that you should be afraid of … But we’ve still got to reduce emissions. In the end, that’s all that matters.”

This is the language of a true zealot. What about the economic, and social wellbeing of the country Mr Stark? Net Zero policies are far more dangerous than climate change is ever likely to be.

He went on to say. “If it [net zero] is only a slogan, if it is seen as a sort of holding pen for a whole host of cultural issues, then I’m intensely relaxed about dropping it,” he said. “We keep it as a scientific target, but we don’t need to use it as a badge that we keep on every programme.”

According to Stark, we should just keep on with the same old immiserating policies, but just change the name and everything will be fine.

Stark also had this to say about heat pumps, “This is a remarkably sensible technology that we’ve known about for a long time, a straightforward technology to put in your house to keep it warm, or to keep it cool in the summer. But in this country, they’ve taken on a totally different totemic role, as a technology that is being somehow forced upon the populace. I think that’s very dangerous.”

He omitted to mention that when giving evidence to the House of Commons environmental audit committee in July last year, he admitted that his own flat still has a gas boiler and “heat pumps are a very difficult thing to put in there.”

Well, the Government was trying to force heat pumps upon the populace, just a bit more slowly than before. It is understandable that we are more than a little sceptical when the high-priest of climate change cannot overcome the difficulties of heat pumps and keeps his own gas boiler. Do as I say, not as I do is not a very convincing message.

Stark also claimed that tackling the “climate crisis” was not a massive change, “he world that we’ll have in 2050 is extremely similar to the one we have now. We will still be flying, we’ll still be eating meat, we will still be warming our homes, just heating them differently,” he said. “The lifestyle change that goes with this is not enormous at all.”

However, his own Climate Change Committee has said that nearly 60% of emissions reduction will come from what they euphemistically call “behaviour change.” Their energy plans call for a halving of per capita energy consumption; they want our homes to be cooler; they want to shift the cost of electricity subsidies on to gas, to make heating our home more expensive; reduce our car miles, even though they are supposed to be zero emissions EVs by then; they also want to ban airport expansion and impose guilt taxes on flying and cut our meat and dairy consumption. Again, his interview rhetoric is not in line with what he writes in CCC policy papers.

Read the rest at David’s substack here