This week, the UK government announced it would be scrapping the beleaguered Green Homes Grant scheme.
Launched at the end of last summer, the scheme was intended to subsidize the retrofitting of homes, so as to make them energy-efficient and help the UK reduce its CO2 emissions.
According to one report, bureaucratic inefficiencies have caused the scheme to be scrapped. Even the green lobbyists who campaigned for it said it was marked by ‘staggering ineptitude’ and ‘incompetent administration’ and was ‘shambolic’ and ‘botched’.
This is not the first catastrophic policy failure of this kind. And yet the climate agenda’s most powerful advocates have yet to admit to their mistakes or to understand their failures.
Take, for example, the big claims that increasing the energy efficiency of homes could create ‘hundreds of thousands of new green jobs’, create a ‘green industrial revolution’, a ‘green economy’ and ‘lower prices’.
These claims accompanied flagship policies championed by the governments of Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and Boris Johnson in the wake of the 2008 Climate Change Act, which required CO2 emissions reduction.
Yet the armies of green workers never appeared. Green growth turned out to be mere mold. And the green industrial revolution has amounted to nothing more than industries relocating overseas, where energy prices are lower.
In 2009, Gordon Brown announced a ‘green new deal’, which would create 400,000 ‘green jobs’ in the new ‘environmental sector’. He claimed that by 2017 there would be 1.3million such jobs.
It was welcome news in the recession-hit UK at a time when unemployment had hit two million. ‘Under the Great British Refurb we aim to have every loft and cavity wall in the country insulated by 2015 and smart meters in every home by 2020’, Brown wrote in the Guardian, in a torrent of unrealistic green technological promises.
The newly formed Department for Energy and Climate Change added the detail: ‘At least seven million homes will have been offered “whole-house” upgrades with energy efficiency and micro-generation technologies by 2020, and every home by 2030 – virtually eliminating carbon emissions from our homes.’
The subsequent Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition was just as keen on pursuing Brown’s vision.
At the 2010 Liberal Democrat party conference, energy and climate change minister Chris Huhne announced a ‘green deal’ (he could hardly call it a new green new deal, could he?), which would ‘create a whole new industry of up to 250,000 jobs, working on 26million homes’.
‘The green deal will be a revolution,’ said Huhne, ‘the first scheme of its kind in the developed world, the most ambitious energy-saving plan ever put forward – a once and for all re-fit that will make every home in Britain ready for a low-carbon future.’ Phew! ‘No more half-measures, going off at half-cock’, he promised.
But the scheme was less than a half-measure. And it went off at significantly less than half-cock.
It took the coalition more than two years to get the scheme up and running, and, when it was eventually launched in January 2013, it failed to impress consumers.
Not least because it allowed households to take out loans for energy-efficiency measures attached to the house, rather than to its owners.
The next Conservative government shelved the scheme in July 2015. In its two-and-a-half years of existence, just 15,000 homes had taken up the offer.
This brings us to the Green Homes Grant, which has folded after just seven months. Households were offered subsidies of two-thirds of the cost of retrofitting up to £5,000, which could help cover insulation, ‘low carbon heat’, such as heat pumps, draft proofing, and double glazing.
For all Boris Johnson’s ‘build back better’ hype, this scheme has proven to be no more enduring than Brown’s ‘building Britain’s future.’ It follows the Green New Deal and the Green Deal into the recycling bin.
No doubt, an army of eco-wonks and lobbyists are working on excuses for this succession of policy failures.
They will say Brown’s vision of eco-towns and millions of high-tech eco-jobs was undermined by the financial crisis, not rejected by the public at the 2010 General Election.
They will say the coalition’s Green Deal failed, not because the public could see that ‘efficiency’ retrofitting is a bad deal, but because the terms of the loan weren’t right.
And they will say that the Green Homes Grant has failed merely by virtue of administrative error, not because the public isn’t buying Net-Zero. But they would be wrong.
Governments have been formed by all three major legacy political parties since the mid-2000s. There is a cross-party consensus in parliament on all things climate-related. There is no debate.
Yet in over a decade-and-a-half of policymaking, spanned by four administrations, almost no progress has been made toward what MPs are all agreed is at the heart of climate policymaking: reducing CO2 emissions from homes.
Moreover, as I have noted before on spiked, those MPs have failed to check that the public shares emissions-reduction ambitions and broader green ideology.
If they did, they would discover that the public has spoken. They did reject Brown’s eco-town Utopianism. And they did reject the coalition’s green loans.
The public manifestly has not volunteered to decarbonize their homes without government incentives.
And whether or not Johnson’s offer of free £5,000 subsidies failed because of mismanagement or public appetite, what it signifies all the same is the sheer inability of an incompetent Westminster to deliver on the most basic of human needs: domestic energy.
It can’t even give away free money. What these things have in common is politicians’ catastrophic misjudgment, both of the public and its wishes and of their own aptitude.
The public’s willingness to meet the costs and consequences of Net-Zero remains untested, and there exists no evidence of support for it. Meanwhile, there exist three policy failures in a row, with each government only building on the failures of the last.
Given that politicians seem to be the last to learn from their failures, the next step will likely be a much more aggressive intervention, which will fail all the more catastrophically.
Read more at Spiked Online
The public did buy the ozone agenda so maybe there’s still hope. Of course there is less pain involved in changing refrigerants than overhauling the world’s energy infrastructure.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/03/31/list-of-posts-on-ozone-depletion/
Global Warming/Climate Change the bigist scam since the Trojan Horse and for the very same Reason
There are some clever comments here and it’s fair to say, the public can smell a con 5 miles away. I refer to “climate change” of course and for those of us who have been around a while and witnessed the climate NOT changing, we simply shrug our shoulders, move on and ignore what politicians have to say. And the dopes who think they know everything about earths climate keep on telling us it’s a serious problem? That makes them look like bigger dopes – if that is possible.
The American People have better t hings to think about then fake crisis like Global Warming/Climate Change after all it was Global Cooling and new Ice Age as coming back in the 1970’s the same liberal rags Time and Newsweek was giving it front page coverage
“…it was marked by ‘staggering ineptitude’ and ‘incompetent administration’ ”
I’m sure it was a model of efficiency compared to the U.S. government bureaucracy.
Consider the promises in the UK of “create ‘hundreds of thousands of new green jobs’, create a ‘green industrial revolution’, a ‘green economy’ and ‘lower prices’.” There was also the promise, “a ‘green new deal’, which would create 400,000 ‘green jobs’ in the new ‘environmental sector’.” Now consider what the Biden administration is promising in the US, “offshore wind energy and create good-paying union jobs.” Other aspects of Biden’s climate change agenda are supposed to create thousands of jobs. The UK experience tells that the promised jobs will not be created here. As I have said many times, liberals are incapable of learning from the mistakes of others if in doing so it undermines their political agenda. In the UK, it is obvious those in power are incapable of learning from their own mistakes.
Don’t forget that we also import thousands of tons of American forest annually to burn as “biomass” in a power station. The UK Government pays a subsidy to the generator for this apparently in the order of £2M per day!
Politicians never learn because they are always spending other people’s money. What do you learn when you never feel the consequences of your actions?
Despite all the false stories blaming everything from Hurricanes to Burnt Toast on Global Warming/Climate Change
Joe Biden will be in Pittsburgh today to unveil his $2T “Build Back Better” infrastructure plan. Looking at the preliminary details disclosed from the White House yesterday, my head almost exploded. Basically, the U.S government has foolishly decided they are the best allocator of resources, strategy & energy development rather than industry experts, consumers & markets. In effect, progressive Democrats, environmental activists & their media enablers will (now) dictate & determine the direction of our energy transition & fate of our domestic economy. My prediction is this will prove to be one of the biggest strategic blunders & COLASSAL wastes of taxpayer dollars in our nations history. Most likely, it will blow through the Senate on budget reconciliation without ANY thoughtful & informed debate & the American public won’t even blink an eye. Bluntly, the old song line comes to mind…”I see a bad moon rising.”
glad to see the east side of the Atlantic is generally catching on. Over on our side of the Pond our pols are using the Green Blob as the fallback position for people control now that the scamdemic is getting revealed for the sham it is. Folks here were finally starting to tire of the BS predictions of climate gloom and doom if we didn’t stop barbecuing and using lawn mowers so when the fascists bring out the burning planet nonsense again it will generally be met with the derision it deserves.
“Meanwhile, conservatives are said to have rejected science if they won’t believe that taxes control the weather.” from moonbattery.com
“Green jobs” is the catchcry of those politicians who don’t know what work is.
Darn … and to think Greta had convinced me humans altered the climate …
https://newtube.app/user/RAOB/Z2odgVf