OPINION
Britain has long been a case study in the madness of “Net Zero”. The UK faces the prospect of widespread power outages for the first time since power was rationed in the early ’70s. Even barring full blackouts, tens of thousands of British households have to choose, every winter, between keeping the heater running or being able to eat. Thousands are forced to freeze to death every year. At the same time, power prices have nearly tripled.
Hopefully, Britain is also ahead of Australia in that a halfway-sensible PM is reining in the demented climate change policies of past leaders. In Australia, we’re currently burdened with the clueless Climate Cultism of Anthony Albanese and Chris ‘Boofhead’ Bowen.
We can only hope there’s a Rishi Sunak in the wings, ready to pull us back from the brink.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has fired the starting gun on a long campaign ahead of next year’s general election, abandoning two of Boris Johnson’s key environmental promises and scaling back on the country’s net zero ambitions.
In a dramatic about face on net zero announced on Wednesday, which puts pressure on Labour’s environmental position, Mr Sunak said the Conservative Party would no longer default to an approach “which will impose unacceptable costs on hardworking British families”.
Significantly he has pushed back the ban on sale of new diesel and petrol cars five years to 2035, aligning the UK with the European Union position.
One of the most contentious and hated net zero policies, making people pay tens of thousands of dollars for new electric heat pumps in place of oil and gas boilers, has also been pushed down the road.
It gets better.
Demands for households to upgrade their energy efficiency rating by next year have been scrapped.
Mr Sunak has also announced that there will be no ban on oil and gas production in the North Sea and the proposed ban on onshore wind farms is being reversed.
Another unpopular policy, of imposing seven different recycling bins on households, has also been abandoned.
That’s all a start, but the sad reality is that there are almost no political leaders with the guts to call out the lunatic lies and zealotry of the Climate Cult.
Mr Sunak said his environmental approach was pragmatic. While Sunak said he remained committed to the legally-binding target of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 he believed Britain could stall it’s [sic] progress because it was “so far ahead of every other country in the world”.
The capture of the political class by the idiocy of Climate Cultism is at odds with the direction more and more voters are headed.
Mr Sunak’s backtracking has caused a split among Tory MPs, but the decisions will be welcomed by large swathes of the electorate, especially among struggling households battling high mortgage and energy costs […]
Polling in European nations, including in the Netherlands which goes to vote on November 22, shows that net zero issues are becoming hotly contested and could be decisive in a national election. The UK is due to have a general election by January 2025, with the date expected to be in late 2024 after the northern hemisphere summer break […]
But Mr Sunak received support from the home Secretary Suella Braverman who said the difficult decisions by the prime minister had put household costs first.
She claimed the Government’s policies had been “bankrupting the British people”.
The mainstream media and the elites will go beserk, of course. But ordinary Britons are rebelling wholesale against the climate authoritarians.
He may have also had a hard look at the deeply unpopular ULEZ charges imposed by the Labour London mayor Sadiq Khan. The $25 a day penalty – for driving older vehicles inside the M25 – has disproportionately hit poorer Londoners, and also delivered a recent shock by-election win for the Tories in Uxbridge and South Ruislip.
The Australian
At the same time, thousands of Little Sadiq’s spy cameras have been vandalised by frustrated Londoners. To the screeching dismay of the media-elite, of course.