The public doesn't hate Net Zero as much as RW politicians insist they do

I think the negativity towards Net Zero is nuts. Dependency on fossil fuels just hands power to dictators. We have some modest and expensive to extract North Sea reserves, but the bulk of the oil and gas reserves are in Venezuela, the Middle East, Russia and the CIS. Most of those are not countries you want to be dependent on. Net Zero gives the U.K. energy independence and resilience.

Obviously I don't know where in the UK you are so here are a few examples:

From London, Eurostar will easily get you to Paris in three hours, including check-in, security and border control. The thing with Eurostar is that as long as you join the appropriate check-in line by the 30 minute cut-off (20 for Premier class) you'll get on the train. If there are delays in security or border control, the train will wait for you. Airlines don't do that.

From Manchester, 5h45 according to DB (though I've cut 20 minutes off of that time before by allowing less time to get from Euston to St Pancras and check in).

From Bristol, 5h40 according to DB (again I'd confidently shave 30 minutes from that time).

So how long does flying take? Well, firstly the airport probably isn't conveniently located. Less of an issue for London as there are several to choose from. Even so, more people will live closer to St Pancras than to their nearest airport, given that Gatwick, Luton and Stansted aren't actually in London. Bristol Airport is in the middle of nowhere whereas train passengers have a choice of two main stations, one in the centre and one just off of the motorway. Manchester Airport is on the south side of the city, whereas there are three stations in Greater Manchester with fast services to London (Piccadilly, Stockport and Wigan North Western) so the number of people who live closer to the airport than to a railway station are in a small minority. So if you live in Bolton or Rochdale, it'll take you twice as long to reach the airport as the railway station. If you're in Sale it's about even.

Then you have to allow time to get through security. The airlines generally seem to say a minimum of 40 minutes - but if there are security delays the plane will take off regardless, just look at what has been happening to people caught up in EES delays. In practice the airlines recommend you arrive around 2-3 hours before your flight.

Then flight time. From various London airports it's 1h20 to CDG, 1h35 to Orly. From Manchester it's 1h20 to Beauvais, 1h35 to CDG. From Bristol 1h20 to CDG.

Now you've landed, you need to go through passport control. EES is currently being implemented so it could take you anything from 90 minutes to 3 hours to get through. No such problems on Eurostar, you just walk out of the station.

Then you need to actually get to Paris. Not an issue with Eurostar, you're already in Paris. From CDG on the other hand, 40m. From Beauvais, 1h15. From Orly only 20m, but only one airline offers that route.

So, from any of the UK airports it'll take you at least 5 hours door-to-door. For Londoners this means that the train is far superior to flying. For Manchester and Bristol flying might be quicker, but only just.

So what about the cost then? What's actually included? Eurostar will let me (should I wish to) take two full-sized suitcases and a handbag onboard at no charge. The low-cost airlines by contrast make their money by stinging you for these extras, so unless you can live for a week out of a small purse you'll need to pay more than the headline fare.

Competition is coming to the Channel Tunnel too, with both Virgin and Trenitalia looking to take a chunk out of Eurostar's monopoly. That'll force Eurostar to drop fares.

As for the passenger experience, I'll take Eurostar over Ryanair any day.

This is really interesting, thamk you.

I don't want to sound down about AI. It has it's purposes but this line annoys me

"Rob Sturdy said one thing at the start that has stayed with me."

Stayed with who??? The LLM writing it? It's annoying because it's a genuinely awful situation for a supposedly real person. But it did not "stay with" the glorified predictive text machine.

Is that written by AI? Regardless

• putting solar panels over cap parks makes sense. But it ends up costing about 4 times more than putting them on fields because you have to factor in the cost of raising the panels and with it the need to add additional wind resistance etc. basically the more raised of the ground panels are the more expensive. So if you have a set amount of money you could argue it can go 4 times further building conventional solar farms. I do thing we should be putting solar on rooftops and car parks personally. But then we need to make that worthwhile financially

• in terms of long term sustainability, nothing happens to the soil under solar panels. It's not like building roads or houses on prime farmland. It might be out of action while the panels are there but in 20 years time the soils better than it started. A lot of UK farmland is overworked. Also, about 8 times more UK land is used for golf courses than solar panels

• The particular case cited is the plight of a tenant farmer. That's someone who doesn't have any power over what happens to the land they work, and doesn't benefit from any land changes. Personally I think the amount of land concentrated in the hands of very few people in this country is a big problem. It's particularly hard for tenant farmers who know the most about the land and are skrewed over constantly. But it's odd that normally any attempts to address this are shouted down as far left. The only time a tenant farmer being removed from his land matters is when it relates to solar. Not golf courses, different farming uses, a different tenant. The tenant farmer had zero rights over that land. Ultimately the reason he was kicked of wasn't because of a cable, it's because the land was owned by someone else who thought they could make more profit doing something else. If.thats a problem, it's not a problem with renewables

What this country needs urgently is

Education systems that are fit for purpose
Social housing
New housing to ALL have solar panels on the roof as standard
New hospitals, more GPs, more dentists
Public transport that gets people to work and is affordable
Utilities that are affordable
New reservoirs urgently

some of that has an impact on our carbon footprint but that should be the focus, not fannying around with cardboard and yoghurt pot recycling

Re electric cars- I always have a used lease car, currently a petrol Hyundai Tucson (mid size suv, economical, v good) I pay £185 a month.
im due to renew in October- a Kia nero ev, very similar size to my current car is £180 am month, (3 months down payment, no balloon payment )
ev’s are definitely getting more affordable as they come onto the used market, in a few years the argument that they’re not affordable will be redundant.

This is the sort of account which confirms my suspicion that many net zero advocates don't give a shiny shit about long-term sustainability. Why are they using prime farmland for solar panels? How about covering some carparks? The likes of Dale Vince would rather collect lots of dividents than pay more initial costs on a carpark scheme.

"Rob Sturdy signed a three-generation tenancy at Eden Farm, so that one of his children could take it on after him. Then the estate that owns the land agreed a deal to cover forty-two per cent of it in solar panels.

His grandfather Guy came to Eden Farm in 1954. His father John took over in 1971. Three generations at Old Malton, North Yorkshire, growing cereals and rearing dairy calves across 280 acres. A hundred and thirty of those acres are going under 90,000 panels and a battery storage system.

The Sturdys do not own an acre of it. They rent. The landlord signs the deal and collects the money. The tenant loses half the farm and gets nothing.

And it is worse than half. Take those fields away and what is left barely grows enough straw to bed and feed the cattle. You do not lose 42 per cent of a farm. You lose the farm, slowly, while it still looks like a farm from the road.

North Yorkshire Council refused the plan in October 2023. Five hundred people objected. It was the biggest fight over a planning application the area had ever seen. Then, just before the public inquiry opened, the government stepped in and took the final decision away from the inspector and handed it to a minister.

At that inquiry, the developer's barrister told the room the scheme would take just 0.16 hectares of the very best farmland.

Nought point one six. That is what a grading map can be made to say about a farm that feeds people.

The minister approved it in February 2025. His decision notice gave significant weight to the fact that the site sat next to a substation.

The family is finished because the cable was close.

They went to the High Court and spent heavily doing it. In September the judge found no arguable case. There is no compensation. Emma Sturdy has said they are not sure they can even stay in the house.

Rob Sturdy said one thing at the start that has stayed with me. He said he did not want this to become the last harvest.

He signed a contract for his children. A minister read a map."

We need to do grid expansion. It doesn't matter if you care about the environment or not, the UK electricity grid has been underfunded for almost 2 decades. It needs updating or there will be blackouts, the same way there are blackouts in South Africa. Because eventually decades of neglect catches up. Switching to renewables makes this more urgent because of the way renewable electricity is generated. But it's money that needs to be spent anyway. And yes, it is expensive.

The reason we don't produce as much steel in the UK as we could is a mixture of deliberate deindustrialization from the 80s onwards, plus the issues associated with high industrial energy prices, plus also TBH the effects of Brexit didn't help. China chooses to massively subsidise it's industry and it's energy, this means it's easier for them to produce steel cheaply. The UK has lost blast furnaces steadily but that's nothing to do with net zero. The issues with expensive energy also predate net zero. Countries with cheap energy/cheap fuel either massively subsidise that fuel or they are major oil states and fuel is nationalised. This makes them more competitive

The UK government has pumped a lot of money into subsidising electric arc furnaces in Port Talbot Wales and more recently into keeping the last remaining blast furnace open. This is complicated by the fact the (small Chinese company) that owned it seemed to want to starve it deliberately. So now it's likely going to be nationalised which will upset the right but ultimately we either have a steel industry or we don't. And making virgin steel isn't at all Carbon Neutral. But the government still supports it as a domestic industry because we need steel and it's better we can make it ourselves.

And that's what is so frustrating. There is an ideological belief in wanting everything to be free market, left to the invisible hand, no subsidies, no nationalisation. When that results in closing industry you want to turn round and blame net zero but it's not because of Net Zero. There is no plan in net zero to stop making steel and buy it from China.

The UK currently subsidises oil and gas extraction and refinement by about 17 billion a year. The easiest way to cut carbon would be to end those subsidies immediately and let it all crash down. But that would result in even more expensive energy, and really hurt the economy. Or we could do what some countries do and subsidise energy/fuel much more than we do now. That would help industry and consumers short term but isn't sustainable for the economy long term. So instead the UK is subsidising local renewables to a far smaller extent than they subsidise oil and gas and the plan is in time those renewables will usurp oil and gas as the main source of energy. In the long run this will save money as we won't be paying for everything increasing oil prices and we won't be subsidising those hugely profitable companies.

China, the country making all that steel, is steaming ahead with renewables. Because they are doing what is best for China.

Actually that's not the worst bit.

Because of the taxes on electricity bills and additional costs for grid expansion caused by the growth of renewables, UK electricity bills are amongst the highest in the world.

This then causes demand to drop (it's been decreasing since 2010 despite the growth in EV, heat pumps, aircon etc.

The Government reaction to complaints about high electricity costs is to expand the number of renewable generation plants. This in turn pushes up prices higher, reduces demand and so on.

It really is insane.

Thank you

When it works of course.

Which is where load factor comes in. If you had perfect levels of sunshine, no cloud and no night time for every hour of the year (24 x 365 =8,760 hours) then the load factor would be 100%.

However UK solar load factor is only 11%. By comparison Australian or Spanish solar is around 35%.

The reason it sounds like madness is because it is.

He's mixed up his ROC subsidies with CfDs leading to some double counting and his average costs of renewables are not weighted average which over inflates the cost.

But generally speaking he is correct. If anything he has under estimated the cost of renewables by not taking into account the significant cost to everyone's bills of the massive expansion of both the distribution and transmission needed to connect all
the new wind and solar farms, plus this new grid infrastructure is underutilised- for example a solar farm in the UK has a load factor of about 11% which means that the km and km of new cables connecting it to the grid are not used for 89% of the time but still need to be paid for.

He also misses out the Capacity Market subsidy which is paid to nuclear and gas fired plants for just being available to produce power in events of no wind or sun - even if most of the time they don't.

I know for example solar works and is amazing. Works well on homes and it's good for car parks as well. Absolutely great. It was subsidised as part of the RHI but this ended as the market matured

Almost as if we need fossil fuels and renewable energy in the mix..and if renewable energy is so cheap and effective it can compete on the free market right?

There are so many problems with ‘net zero’ it is hard to know where to start.

Anthropogenic climate change is real and it is accelerating, but not nearly enough people want to personally sacrifice anything to combat it,

The UK is a tiny fraction of the World’s carbon emissIons. If we are to ‘lead by example’ someone needs to explain precisely why. It strikes me as a colonial mindset. No one looks up to the UK any more and truss to copy us.

Secondly, we need to consider who is paying for it. It is an incredibly regressive tax on the poor, who have to shiver in winter and can no longer afford even basic holidays. Meanwhile the new champagne socialists embrace net zero, have their houses at a toasty 23 degrees (thanks to the £15k they have invested in a heat pump), still go on two foreign holidays a year, one probably long haul, and can afford whatever food they want.

We could of course expect people to share the cost equally, limit jet miles per person by law for leisure travel, and have an enforced 18 degrees maximum in winter (enforced by thermal cameras).

And, as others have pointed out, our grid can’t cope with renewables, especially direct current input (solar and batteries). We need our AC supply to be at (or very near) 50Hz. We failed recently due to a large solar input. And for renewables to be effective, we need to build them close to users (leafy Surrey comes to mind here).

Global warming is like a slow motion car crash. Most now believe it is a problem but want others to make the sacrifices to combat it. It is a games theory issue, with the probably outcome being continued warming until the local consequences become too dire to ignore

Don’t they do something similar with steel? Sell the minerals to China and buy back (often not great quality) steel made of those very same minerals, all shipped back and forth across the ocean?

Sounds like a nonsense

I would take that deal every day of the week.

What you are referring to is negative power prices where because solar and wind produce electricity when there is sufficient sun and wind rather than being driven by demand, you get a situation of supply being greater than demand leading to negative prices - ie paying people to use electricity.

The key point you have missed is that the Government gives the solar and wind generators a guaranteed price so that if the market price drops below this price (and in certain cases goes negative) then the Government tops up this price with a subsidy to the guaranteed price.

And where do think the Government gets the money to pay for this subsidy? From a charge / tax on everyone's electricity bills.

So yes if you are happy to go completely renewable, pay for this entire tax and accept no power when it's not windy or sunny then great. Meanwhile I will happily go with gas fired power especially if it's fuelled using N Sea or UK fracked gas.

Electric cars are expensive but improving public transport takes the pressure of those who are genuinely struggling, especially if (for example) you also cap bus prices. Reliable bus routes are particularly helpful for young people, especially those living in the forgotten towns or rurally. Not needing to buy a car or borrow to buy a car when also looking for jobs is massive for the group that's struggling the most right now. And buses/trams etc can be made to run on green energy but even if they aren't they use far less CO2 than everyone on it driving instead. Electric cars are fine as well for people that want to buy cars and can afford to buy new cars. But new car buyers aren't usually the strugglers.

We will always be reliant on other countries to set fuel prices because the amount of exploitable oil we have is a drop in the ocean. And even if all of it was drilled out in the next few weeks it would be sold on the open market, at market prices not handed out for cheap to UK buyers. Major oil companies aren't that altruistic. Until we find a way to break the hold oil prices have on the UK economy we will be trapped. Moving away from fossil fuels as much as possible helps to break that hold. It should be a priority for economic reasons as well as environmental ones.

https://x.com/LoftusSteve/status/1935230694956941444

Look at the thread here and explain why he's wrong

LCOE ain't everything.

If the UK achieves net zero. There's no impact on the climate at all. 1% of emissions ain't going to do jack shit at all. No need for economic suicide.

The problem is it costs money for people who are already struggling. Electric cars, for example, expensive to buy and expensive to put in chargers etc.

The plastic bags started at 5p but then companies started profiteering and charging much more.

Being reliant on other countries on fuel cost us more in domestic heating oil.

All around us land is being built on, old hedgerows and trees being destroyed at a time when we need more plant life to take in carbon from the atmosphere.

Even bring self sufficient is difficult in a world everyone has to work and can’t maintain their own veg and animals due to time.