Think Tank’s Net Zero Survey Concludes the Public is the Problem
A report by the Social Market Foundation (SMF) think tank published this week reveals some polling data that advocates of the green agenda will find uncomfortable. It shows that most people really have not bought into the green agenda because, even if they are broadly supportive, “almost half of people think that Net Zero is something being done to them rather than something they are taking an active role in”. But besides some interesting polling data, what this overlong and disingenuous report better exposes is the fact of a widening gap between lofty think tanks and the public – and also reality.
The SMF’s report, ‘Whose energy transition is it anyway?‘ is a very long-winded tour of the failure of policies intended to deliver “clean heat”. Over 60 pages, a disorganised rabble of establishment talking points are assembled in an attempt to identify the causes of Britain’s 28 million households failing to do as they are told. “Clean heat” means the extremely expensive retrofitting measures, including the installation of heat pumps that, according to the survey, have only been taken up by 4% of respondents.
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Good, they’re failing, and they know it. Once again, it is demonstrated that you cannot argue with physics or economic reality. These people live in a self-congratulatory bubble, totally isolated from those realities.
This may well pin point the real problem with the public.
Public policies tend to be presented as goals or ideals and seldom if ever as trade offs.
So it’s, do you want to save the planet? Or do you want better healthcare? Or do you want higher pensions? Or do you want the government to tackle crime better? Or immigration.
Great, but at what cost? What has to be sacrificed?
I put that on the public. A grown up, serious person knows that you don’t get something for nothing. And when a public policy is presented with no accompanying trade off, they should immediately reject it as dishonest and unserious.
A statement of support for more renewable energy is not equivalent to…
Have you stopped beating your wife yet?
Policies are presented as unassailable conclusions without any evidence supporting them, but a shaming mechanism to castigate all who do not kneel and worship at the alter.
Everything is a compromise. For the money spent on eco madness, we could have airconditioned everyones home for when the heat got too much. We could have built reservoirs and irrigation systems to improve our water management and food production, We could have built nuclear plants to provide cheap and abundant power etc etc. How silly we’ll look in 15 years when all the wind turbines need replacing…
And the heat pumps. Many British homes are unsuitable for them, I read.
Most not many. And our damp climate does not help.
The external heat-exchanger elements ice-up when it’s cold and damp (night time mostly when the unit has to work hardest) reducing efficiency until it has to stop, reverse, in order to de-ice itself.
Radiators have to be messed about with; no room for them inside and out; many older houses are too draught. Other homes in Europe (Sweden) are more hermetically sealed.
I completely agree. Until the fantasy that things can be “free” is utterly discredited in the minds of the vast majority of people, we are lost.
But the NHS is free…
So people keep telling me
Lenin in 1917: the proletariat does not have enough class-consciousness to understand the great things we are doing for them! They just want to have enough to eat and keep warm! We have eliminate those who do not embrace our ideas. Then we can establish prefect society.
Net Zero movement in 2025: the proletariat does not have enough green-consciousness to understand the great things we are doing for them! They just want to have enough to eat and keep warm! We have to eliminate those who do not embrace our ideas. Then we can establish prefect society.
Hitler declared in 1945 that the German people had betrayed him and they did not deserve him or deserve to survive.
Enter the dreadful Kim Leadbeater and her Bill to kill off as many as possible. “For their own good” naturally…. my *rs*
If they want me to believe in the Climate emergency, show me the evidence, give me the raw empirical (unadulterated) data used to arrive at your conclusions. Let me verify that data, using the methods and algorithms YOU used, see if I can consistently replicate and confirm your findings. Make this available to everyone, and anyone that wishes to verify your claims.
Don’t give me output from computer models, or extrapolations with cutoffs at some (seemingly) arbitrary point in history.
Don’t bullshit me with some claim of consensus. Real Science, as opposed to the cultish “The Science” requires proof and evidence, and the means to prove the Null Hypothesis.
Consensus is propaganda, it has no place in Science.
Maybe then , I’ll listen!
Dissolve the People and elect a new one!
One in 12 in London so far…
Sorry to say that the people pushing this hardest are the sort of narcissistic sociopaths that we have in every generation. They really just like to latch on to ‘the popular thing’, and think their role in life is to tell us, the hoi poloi what to do. It is they who have a special gift of understanding, of things far beyond our ken, and they have been singled out to save, whatever it is they’re saving’. 150 years ago, they put on black garb and went to Africa or the South Seas to spread the word of God to peoples who were quite happy as they were and didn’t need God, thank you very much. Some saw sense, killed and ate the missionaries. Others bottled it and decided Christianity was the solution to all that ails them, and embraced a one sided relationship of dependence. Its a bit like the pet cat, who waits to be fed every morning, and has its fur stroked and sleeps by the fire. It is free but chooses not to be. Anyway, I’m sure these people are well meaning as the last lot of doomsayers were and the time before that, ad infinitum.… Read more »
People who are good at learning and reiterating suffer in the belief that such an ability is intelligence. They are confident that information from qualified authorities should be trusted and cannot comprehend why anyone would question received wisdom from trusted authority instead dismissing them as foolish.
Our present systems promote such ‘exam champions’ to positions of authority and hence self-replicating nonscience feedback loops widely prevail.
see CV19 for an example.
Exactly, and these type of people naturally encourage the same with whatever they can influence, driving it further with the feedback loop you mention
And that surely will generate more and more resistance to the green agenda, as the consequences of that removal of choice – and democracy – are increasingly felt
I sincerely hope so.
I love the SMF’s amusing phrase “a Net Zero public engagement strategy”. Well, their strategy certainly does seem to encourage less and less public engagement, so the logical assumption is that public engagement will eventually reach net zero.
Or maybe I’ve misunderstood their words.
And so ‘lack of information’ now accompanies ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ as reasons for the ordinary people not immediately seizing the proposed aims of an activist group.
I guess it’s about time the hoary old chestnut of ‘false consciousness’ is re-born to explain why members of the proletariat and other class actors within capitalist societies stubbornly resist doing what their ‘betters’ want.
And yet, ironically, a lack of information, disinformation and misinformation are exactly why people would support the proposed aims of that activist group. Heaven forfend they should be given a selection of balanced arguments and asked to make up their own minds, lest they choose the inconvenient option.
“Clean heat” is a dirty lie put about in ignorance of the constraints of energy density, gradient and the laws of thermodynamics.
Physic, engineering and economics beat wishful thinking tanks hands down every time.
I think that there will be a ‘USA effect’ by the end of 2025. The UK will be experiencing a major economic depression and across the Atlantic people will see an Economy booming, due to one major factor – cheap energy. The Govt will try to hold the Green line but it’s not going to hold. No-one apart from Germany is following this stupid path, and even they are burning coal.
If they had any sense they would start to retreat now, but they haven’t..
Hubris. Sheer f***ing hubris.
The Social Market Foundation is classed as a charity. There are around 180,000 charities in the UK – it is an unbridled out of control industry in which activists abound. About time the definition of ‘charity’ was tightened up. If you look at the SMF website they are transparent about funding – up to a point. There is no mention of government funding but I expect they will be in receipt of a wedge. The SMF website tells you to contact the Charity Commission for complete details of its funding. Funding from all sources must be clearly available on every charity website imo. As it is, the SMF does declare interests from a whole host of organisations – many of them energy companies who are being subsidised to sell heat pumps. I was staggered to find that Amazon, Tesco, Santander and Meta also fund the SMF – conflict of interests, no? Upsettingly they are also funded by the RSPCA. Why is a charity funding another charity? Do the good people donating to the RSPCA realise that their money is being used to fund a chango (charity/quango)?
So I won’t give money to the RSPCA: what a waste that would be.
It’s dreadful how people are giving in good faith and it is being used on political projects and not going where it is supposed to be going. Charity laws must be tightened up.
Yes, I agree wholeheartedly. I have stopped my donations to certain charities after learning that they are spending large sums on “Diversity Officers” and suchlike. That’s NOT what I am donating towards.
Not forgetting salaries for so-called CEO’s consistently exceeding Kneel’s official salary. I think the highest paid charity CEO earns in excess of £500k pa. And there are scores like this.
It would be entirely sufficient to apply them. Charity law explicitly declares that attempting to influence general policy is no charitable purpose. Yet, that’s the express purpose of the SMF and no end of other pseudo-charities.
Always remember…
Donations to charities are just secondary taxation for the gullible.
There’s a case for charitable status being removed altogether.
I completely agree. The concept of “charitable status” is ridiculous. What does it mean? That the aims of the organisation are “approved of”. By whom?
Why should companies whose aims are approved of by the right people be exempt from the taxes that everyone else has to pay?
And the state should not fund anything either IMO. Just provide basic services that are in your scope – law and order, national defense including border protection, etc. Enough of the quangos and other bullshit jobs that would not exist without our tax money. If there’s demand for whatever it is, someone will start doing it and earn a living from it.
Because that’s how taxation works: You’re liable to pay certain taxes (or not) because the right people, a bunch of MPs, approved of that. Similarly, charitable status is relatively cheap state-support for a certain purpose as the state doesn’t need to spend money on it but just accepts a certain income reduction.
If they continue to exploit our goodwill then I agree. First, I would prefer the laws being robustly tightened up so those suffering at source receive the bulk of proper donations. And charities should not be funded by govt who are just outsourcing their own accountable responsibilities. And never should one charity fund another. This is so wrong. Charities funding other charities seems to be a very widespread practice. How can you possibly tell where your money is actually going?
Charities funding other charities is against the law unless the charities aims are linked. Doubtless some smart arse could stretch out a word salad confirming that cruelty to animals and heat pumps have much in common but ordinary folk like me would dismiss such a suggestion as a piss take.
Didn’t know charities funding charities was against the law. Like you say, they get round it by twisting semantics. Makes me utterly sick. Many of these fake charities ponce off the tax-payer via stupid govt grants or by tapping into trusts and foundations set up by good people who did not envisage that their money would be exploited in this way by woke activists. The Paul Hamlyn Trust and the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation are two sources usually exploited to cause mayhem and unwanted public policies. Charity laws should also address this – to ensure that money left for charity must reflect the wishes of the donors to a substantial and measurable degree. Ian Fairbairn set up the trust in his wife’s memory after she was killed by a London air-raid. He wanted the money to be used to further economic understanding in the populace so that they could manage their personal finances better and materially improve their prospects. One of the latest projects financed by the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation was to fund a website for St Paul’s Cathedral which attacked Nelson and Churchill – Fairbairn’s wife was killed in an air-raid for goodness sake. I expect he would be appalled… Read more »
It’s really Increase the perceived level of personal threat by hard-hitting emotional messaging again. Scare the people into believing that t
he health system will collapse in two weekssouthern England will be entirely underwater due to rising sea levels in ten years to make them cry for heat pumps to save them from this fate. A common enemy might also be needed. Hence, make up some story how they can accidentally catch deadly climate change from people whose homes aren’t cleanly heated. Just use something more plausible.I think some would believe your example as is, never mind any need to make it more plausible.
It’s a constant source of frustration for politicians that the public persistently seem to believe the wrong things. Apparently Sunak, in the dying days of his dismal rule, was heard to say ‘why can’t anyone see that I’m right’: answers on a postcard.
Surely, if 56% of people think that green energy is worth it, then let them get on with it and save money and keep warm – the rest of us will naturally follow. Just a thought…………
They assume the naivete of the plebs and yet they are so naive and so far away from ever being able to acknowledge it. Under such circumstances it is only a matter of time before their walls cave in. They are so cossetted that they think that they can just spout this stuff forever. It is easy to see that their candle is dying. It wasn’t just a lie it was a lie that provided the impetus for global depopulation.
In 1996 or so, Bill Bryson wrote a column about the kind of reasoning that takes Pope-is-Catholic survey data and turns it into something totally different. Here’s a quote from an airline representative, proudly explaining why they’d decided to respond to customer requests by no longer feeding their passengers:
‘About a year and a half ago,’ she says, ‘we took a survey of a thousand passengers . . . and they said they wanted lower fares, so we got rid of the meals.’
Keep pointing out exactly what net zero is…..a scam. The word scam should follow the words net zero every time.
I’ve “engaged” with the Net Zero SCAM.
I’ve decided not to participate as far as I am able. I won’t be getting a heat pump because my small, 3-bed terraced house isn’t suitable for one. There’s no space for a hot water tank; no space in the small garden to accommodate one and the construction of the property means that there is no suitable wall to place it.
No amount of “nudging and engaging” is going to change those basic FACTS.
“This is what the SMF believe constitutes (or reconstitutes) “individual agency”: a consumer choice.”
I think it is a mistake to imagine that “agency” means choice at all. On the contrary, “agency” to them simply means the power to take part in their “net zero transition”.
If people do not take part, it is because they don’t have the power (agency) to do it. They therefore need to be empowered by the likes of the SMF.
The people don’t make choices. They do as they are told (if they can) or do nothing (if they can’t). If they make “bad” choices it is because the poor dears have been fed misinformation.
This is normal thinking on the Left. All good people agree with us, so our opponents must be evil. Ordinary people only oppose us if they are misled by our opponents peddling misinformation. If the people oppose what we are doing, then they are victims of our evil opponents.
This is quite fundamental. It is crucial to understand: the Left literally do not believe in democracy.
There is a problem with ‘existing trusted messengers’. The Consumers’ Association has a good deal of text on heat pumps but has not actually tested any, which AFAIK is the main function of the CA. Since the Covid Panic too many ‘existing trusted messengers’ have become ‘previously trusted messengers’.
A lot of this stuff is coming from Sweden; I’ve read a couple of reports about their nudge thinking – prob funded by the EU but who knows. For example, see report: SNS Brief Research 69 Green Nudges as an Environmental Policy Instrument.