Oops, Boris Johnson Told the Truth About Climate - WSJThe
bold plan he released this week for the U.K. to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 breaks the cardinal rule of climate activism: Never, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever, tell the public in one go how much they’ll have to pay and how much of their ordinary lives they’ll have to change to rein in emissions.
It’s not so much that this program is quantitatively different from climate-action agendas that other governments have implemented over the years. The British government admits it doesn’t know how much it will spend on the wide range of greenhouse-gas mitigations it proposes. But then neither does anyone else. No one has managed to total Germany’s spending on its long-running energy transition, although
one credible guess pegged it at €120 billion for merely the five years leading up to 2018. U.S. Democrats resisted putting a price tag on their climate fever dream, the Green New Deal.
Rather, Mr. Johnson’s plan is qualitatively distinctive in foisting substantial changes on the section of the energy market voters notice most: the proverbial last mile between the national energy system and households.
The centerpiece of his plan is a program to replace home heating systems en masse, pushing homeowners to abandon gas-fired boilers in favor of green heat pumps with some subsidy but at considerable personal expense. There’s also a vague plan to tie preferential mortgage rates to green home improvements, and dozens of other promises (or threats) such as to increase the average occupancy per vehicle on British roads, presumably by encouraging more carpooling or use of buses and the like.
One consequence is that voters seem to have startlingly little idea about what they will have to do if they want to reduce their emissions. A recent YouGov survey is suggestive: British households understand they should walk or cycle instead of driving, although this isn’t actionable advice if you live outside an urban area. But they overestimate the carbon reductions they can achieve by shifting to an electric vehicle, and underestimate the reductions if they took a bus instead.
