The BBC's 'Epiphany' That Net Zero is Failing is Not What it Seems

The aim, as ever, is to keep the green show on the road

In no less a place than the BBC website, no less a ‘Climate Editor’ than the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt has penned nothing less than the scoop of the century. Thanks to the peerless investigator’s unrivalled capacity for investigation, we learn that heat pump installations leave two-thirds of homes “more expensive to heat than before”, and that “while generating renewable electricity can be cheap, the system needed to deliver it is not”. The shocking evidence, unearthed for the first time by any journalist, anywhere, ever, causes him to reflect: “Is the Government chasing the wrong targets?”

It’s a timely investigation for Britain’s de facto state broadcaster. The war in Iran has triggered the third energy crisis since the inception of the Climate Change Act – the first coinciding with its beginning. Snow lay on the ground outside Parliament on October 28th 2008 as the final reading of the Climate Change Bill turned it into an Act, as if Nature Herself were mocking the MP’s unanimity to say ‘wrap up warm’. Eighteen years later, Rowlett observes that: “Electricity has to be available all the time – not just when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.” Who knew? Thanks to the perfect storm of many Western governments’ climate, energy and foreign policies creating a crisis that cannot be denied by BBC Verify’s glib smear-mongering as merely a ‘far Right talking point’, the reality facing every home and business in the UK needs to be explained.

Don’t get too excited. Rowlatt’s article, ‘Why cheap power could matter more than clean power in the green push‘, is hardly a new manifesto for independent journalism at the BBC. It covers merely the starkest facts. “Economically, it just doesn’t stack up,” explains Gavin – a disappointed Glaswegian “early adopter” of heat pumps. According to critics, explains Rowlatt, “the Government is obsessed with cleaning up electricity generation” – a reference to Ed Miliband’s Clean Power 2030 agenda. But electricity is the final form of just 20% of energy consumption. What about transport and heat? As policy forces the electrification of these applications away from hydrocarbons they will be forced into dependence on an increasingly expensive and increasingly unstable – i.e., weather-dependent – electricity supply. The rising costs of this ‘transition’ need no rehearsal here, even if they are new to the BBC and its audience.

Such an audience may be learning for the first time that our industrial electricity prices are the highest in the world. And they may discover too, that these high prices have exported jobs and industries to China, which burns a lot of coal to make stuff that we then import, and that thus our emissions have not been reduced as much as has been claimed. After a sit-down with energy economist at Oxford University, Sir Dieter Helm, Rowlatt acknowledges that “tackling climate change costs money”. And as the consequences bite, the “politics of climate change has begun to shift”.