This is not about climate change. It’s not even about that desire to get to net zero by 2050. It’s about the Net Zero plan. Which is, as we insist, idiocy.
Within the next three years, rural households who have relied on heating oil for decades could be forced to spend tens of thousands retrofitting their homes to accommodate a heat pump.
By 2026, replacing a broken oil boiler like for like is set to be banned, leaving homeowners not connected to the gas grid with no choice but to dig deep and buy an electric heating system. A similar proposed deadline for homes reliant on gas is not until 2035.
It is one of the policies put forward by the Government as it marches towards its goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Heating oil, the Government argues, is an incredibly carbon-intensive fossil fuel and must be abandoned if Britain is to meet its green pledges.
We can even leave aside the logic being used there - that it’s net zero or be cold. Our aim is the maximisation of human utility and yes, that probably does mean another mm to two of water in Bangladesh as against freezing in a British winter. But as we say, leave that aside.
For two years now, residents of Kehelland, a hamlet near Camborne, have been taking part in a landmark trial using cooking oil recycled from factories.
Hydrotreated vegetable oil is a form of renewable diesel, created by taking waste fat and feedstock and processing it using hydrogen.
The mistake - the insanity - is that they’re proscribed a base technology, the oil boiler. But they can be run on a number of different fuels. Here, the cooking fat. Or green hydrogen gussied up by Fischer Tropsch. Or other things that we don’t know about perhaps.
That is, even if Net Zero really must happen banning the oil boiler isn’t the right way to do it. Banning the use of things that emit is. But what’s the way that the plan has been written? Quite, some combination of bureaucrats and politicians banning all the things they don’t understand. Which isn’t, we suggest, the correct method of running a country.
Even if this is all necessary it’s only ever the goal that should be planned. On the obvious grounds that we 67 million out here will come up with some interesting ways of reaching it, things that simply never would occur to the average PPE graduate who writes these national plans.