This is an interesting analysis published by the Wall Street Journal regarding the state of the UK’s new budget in relation to “net zero” policy in particular.
[Please click on the image below to watch the video with Mark Kelly commenting on the UK’s budget which is embedded on the WSJ website.]
Governments are coming to regret net-zero carbon-emissions pledges, as their cost and impracticality come into view, but politicians still hate to admit it. The latest quiet escape plan arrived Thursday in the United Kingdom, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak published a raft of net-zero measures aimed at rebooting Britain’s green agenda.
The optimistic take is that the plans mark another admission that net-zero is unlikely to happen in Britain. The policy emphasis is on carbon-capture technology, to which Mr. Sunak’s administration previously announced it will devote £20 billion. Mr. Sunak is pushing hard on carbon capture because he appears not to want to do anything else.
The plan includes little new money beyond what his administration has previously announced. There are few new plans beyond previous duds such as a promise to convert households to heat pumps from gas-fired central heating. Tellingly, Thursday’s plan elicited few objections from net-zero skeptics in Mr. Sunak’s Conservative Party.
The government is also stepping back from the phaseout of internal-combustion cars. Their sale is due to be banned by 2035. But the U.K. now will introduce a system of credits to let some auto makers buy the right to make more internal-combustion cars than they would have been allowed during the phaseout. Britain could hardly do otherwise after the European Union recently scaled back its EV mandate.
This fiasco is happening as green aspirations and economic realities collide at high speed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The war, which disrupted Europe’s imports of Russian natural gas and caused global prices to spike, exposed the costs and inadequacy of wind and solar power as replacements for fossil fuels.
As a mandatory shift to electric vehicles approaches, it’s becoming clear that battery technologies don’t exist to make EVs a replacement for internal-combustion engines. The public is also noticing the shortcomings of proposed alternative fuels such as hydrogen. Nor are voters likely to be enthusiastic about having to pay higher taxes on domestic natural gas intended to steer them toward electricity.
Mr. Sunak is abandoning net zero in deed if not in word. Yet there’s a cost for what is becoming a global effort to escape net zero through the back door rather than admitting the plans won’t work. Witness the U.K.’s Rube Goldberg mechanism for keeping on the market the internal-combustion cars consumers want, or the subsidies for ineffective carbon capture. Both are set to become new corporate welfare on top of other green handouts.
Net zero is dying a slow death as voters and politicians realize its folly. Maybe someone will eventually admit it out loud.
The future could be brighter, ignited by this ……common sense prevail !!