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

[Echobelly]

Politicians like Kemi Badenoch and right wing newspaper front pages love to talk as though everyone hates Net Zero and sustainability as concepts and wants us to get on with burning coal and drilling for oil. They seem to stake an awful lot on people not like sustainability mostly because they see it as 'woke' as far as I can tell.

I think most people don't think about it enough to hate it really and most people broadly want the outcomes of improved sustainability but would like it to happen without it needing any investment. I reckon some people don't like feeling 'nagged' about saving the environment and in many ways I don't blame them as, while we should all do our bit, really it's up to governments and big businesses to actually do the damn work to truly make a difference.

Maybe Net Zero has a bit of a PR problem as it sounds unachievable, and also maybe it sounds like you get nothing, or something will be taken away from you/society. It might do better to have a name that sounds more 'positive'. But it's a shame because ultimately, even if for some reason you don't believe in climate change it seems to me that the benefits of renewable energy (such as ending energy dependence on some not always friendly countries and less pollution) are pretty clear and I'm not sure people realise it's not just powering a few kettles, it's often around 50% of UK energy production

We are indeed.
I just think spending a large amount of money to help another country improve it's renewable energy infrastructure via carbon credits may help with the environment. But will leave us still stuck with crumbling energy infrastructure that needs upgrading, expensive gas dependent energy, homes that are expensive to heat and cool and absolutely no energy security in a world that is rapidly becoming less certain.
India don't need to sell us carbon credits to be persuaded to invest in renewables. They are doing it anyway because it has a benefit to them.
If we are going to spend taxpayer money on this (we should) at least some of that money should benefit UK security, safety and the economy long term.

Let's skip the carbon credit bit as we've done that!

On what I'd spend on:
Upgrading our infrastructure, definitely. We need massive electrification. I'd built a lot more nuclear, expand renewables where economic to do so, and keep O&G for as long as we can, fully offsetting. Solar is getting cheaper and cheaper and is a very good option for powering, among other things, air conditioning demand (which we are going to need more and more of!)

Making buildings more energy efficient... middle path on this. Yes for all new builds, insulate and retrofit old building where economic to do so. No for things that have too great an impact on quality of life (i.e. there are many ways to make a building energy efficient that also make the building pleasanter. Some, like pushing towards very small windows, don't. The nice thing about a carbon budget is you can also spend it. Making new buildings nicer is one way to increase acceptance for them, which we desperately need).

Stuff like Heathrow expansion: same test. Very likely I'd come down on the side of expansion. Fully (or 'extra') offset the carbon cost. Recognise that a lot of what we are doing when we build a big hub is move international traffic from, say, Dubai, rather than create new traffic. But with the economic benefits of much more connectivity for the UK, aiding our prosperity.

It’s not funny though. You can quite easily use market manipulation to change that. Force rail fares to be per-km consistent. No yield pricing allowed. Predictable and affordable. Then begin raising prices on domestic flights prior to banning them, along with any UK flights to Paris, Brussels or Amsterdam at a bare minimum.

It’s such an easy win.

I'd rather we fixed trains and long distance train travel first and then started encouraging people of flights. In fact if train travel was good and affordable that would happen anyway.
As someone who lived in Europe and had to travel home with young children inter rail passes were amazing for that as I think kids under a certain age were free so it became way more affordable to Eurostar it to the UK and then flexibly travel around the UK by train. Worked out way cheaper than flights and then train tickets/a hire car etc.
But Europe has done a lot to make cross border train travel better. I think they could do more. So could the UK. I would rather that than taxing flights as that's only going to put people of bet zero anyway and it feels unnecessary

The stupidity is astounding.

A huge percentage of passengers flying from London to Amsterdam or Paris are not actually visiting those cities—they are just changing planes to fly to global destinations like Tokyo, New York, or Johannesburg.

If you ban those short flights, you completely sever the UK’s link to major global airline hubs.

Because Eurostar does not run directly to airport terminals (like Paris CDG or Amsterdam Schiphol), travellers would have to drag heavy luggage across foreign cities from the central train station to the airport.

Instead of switching to the train, millions of UK travellers would simply abandon Paris and Amsterdam altogether and fly through different hubs like Dubai or Doha instead. It would destroy UK economic connectivity while failing to reduce overall global flight emissions. And what do people living outside of London do? What if someone living in Edinburgh wants to holiday in Paris?

Forcing flat-rate pricing destroys cheap tickets for the poor, causes massive seat shortages for last-minute travellers, and banning flights hands a toxic monopoly to the train companies while driving global transit revenue completely out of the UK economy.

I said this to someone and got called right wing. People are literally losing their minds.

Most of people tend to be pro net zero but instead of rushing it, we need to plan and prepare, take our time to do it properly. As our contribution to pollution is so small, we can definitely allow for a smoother transition that isn't rushed. Instead, some politicians would prefer us to cut our nose to spite our face.

What impact would a net zero UK have on the global climate?

@Persephonia1966 ”I'd rather we fixed trains and long distance train travel first and then started encouraging people of flights. In fact if train travel was good and affordable that would happen anyway.”

Have you not seen the HS2 debacle?
We are not getting high speed rail. For whatever reason successive governments just won’t invest.

HS2 could have been good. But we live in the UK and can't build anything

What makea you think we’re “rushing it” ? If anything we’re going far too slow.

It would mean we had delivered our obligation under the Paris agreement, which all other countries in the world are also obliged to deliver*

*except 4 utter idiot nations who don’t care if we all go extinct. Those being Libya, Yemen, Iran and the USA.

So nothing?

I know the value of good trains. I’m Swiss, I love them.

The key is not build the trains first.

Shut down the domestic and near-shore flights first and watch what happens when market demand takes the reins. Suddenly we’ll get good trains at conpetitive rates. We literally have to exert brute force on the market through policy. We live in a Keynsian economy, let’s use it as a lever.

If we do it the other way - build the infrastructure then hope demand arrives, we’ll have wasted years without real pressure or incentive, and all the while we’ll have spaffed ever more GHGs into the upper atmosphere.

If you and your friends book a holiday, and you all have to pay 10% of the cost, but you decide not to pay your share, what happens ?

Nothing ?

Nope.

International cooperation means every nation apart from those 4 idiot nations is doing their bit. If everyone else followed your lead and did nothing, our grandchildren would probably not inherit an inhabitable planet.

I’d like humans to still be around in 100 years. Not sure why you don’t.

We don't need high speed rail in the manner of Japanese style bullet trains. Out cities are too close together for that to be worthwhile, when you allow for acceleration time you would have to start slowing down as soon as you reached maximum speed. So the overall time saving would be minimal. What we needed/need is better rail capacity and that's actually easier and cheaper to build since the lines don't have to be as straight as for High speed rail (they still need to be straight). Building HS2 wasn't a bad idea in itself, it got needlessly sudestracked into being HS and by appeasing Tories voters in the Cotswolds. But building rail infrastructure is a good thing. There needs to be better rail infrastructure outside of the SouthWest as well. Fixing the issues with dodgy rail companies will also help and I wish Labour would

All of this costs money. It's hard to fix problems without building infrastructure. But building infrastructure is a good thing when done well, you have it for a long time afterwards.

It is partly about net zero. But improving rail infrastructure, fixing electric grid infrastructure, making houses better fills net zero targets AND is good for the UK and the UK economy. It's frustrating that the same people who are just flat out opposed to it will also mourn the days of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and ask why we don't make things anymore. Because the Telegraph constantly kicks up a fuss about building anything is why.

Yeah. It's like me just leaving my rubbish behind on the beach because just my rubbish only makes up a tiny fraction of sea pollution so there's no point me picking it up. That's the thinking of a twat and if someone saw me doing it they would have a go.

It's not building the trains. It's building the railways. That takes time, "market demand" won't make them magically appear when you take away planes and in the meantime the economy suffers. Since you are Swiss you will know they are building a massive very expensive underground faster train network into Italy. Neither Italy or Switzerland are waiting for "the market" to make it appear. Because the market doesn't make holes in mountains. They are doing this before cancelling flights into and ot of Switzerland.

@Persephonia1966 You were talking about getting rid of short haul.
To do that you do need HS from London to Manchester, Edinburgh etc. No one is flying London Birmingham anyway.

If the UK reaches net zero then what changes to the global climate? Absolutely nothing. The UK's impact on the global emissions is miniscule and cannot change global emissions at all. We've decarbonised a lot since 2010. But India's emissions are rapidly growing and so are China's..... So what impact have we had?

The basis tunnels don’t only help Switzerland, they provide much smoother north-south freight options in order to take cargo off the roads for all countries requiring alpine transit.

The point with emissions is that we need to cut them yesterday, with urgency. And it needs the same levels of effort and investment we humans are all too willing to invest in war and weaponry to kill each other.

Ending UK domestic aviation to favour rail will not harm the economy because the railways already exist. It would help if the trains which use them were more frequent, and higher capacity first, and faster second. Can we have double-deck trains ? Make it happen. Can we have longer trains ? Make it happen. Only then do we need faster trains.

So we can do it right now, ban the utter lunacy of domestic aviation and then watch the market make rail more efficient, more competitively priced, and more attractive than it is now.

We flew back from Switzerland recently. Ryanair as well. All those carbon emissions for a 1.5 hour flight. You must hate it.

Why do you seem to think the UK is doing this in isolation ?

I actually want the rail industry AND the aviation industry to thrive.

Right, but is Switzerland banning flights to make the tunnels be built faster? Is anyone? Or, as you mention freight, is Switzerland (or any of the countries affected) banning all road based freight in and out of the EU to incentivise the tunnels to be built? Or are they building the tunnels first?

Anyone who has seen a graph comparing our output with China knows Net Zero is just another shakedown operation on gullible western do-gooding populations. Taxes here, subsidies there, grifting politicians with board seats on "sustainable" energy companies everywhere.

Our country slides towards an abyss of debt, worklessness, low productivity and endless immigration, while politicians like Miliband burnish their halos with the Net Zero scam.

It's sickening and goes along with the bus fare bullshit as a sign of how fatuous our modern politics is.

So no OP right wing politicians aren't wrong when they say how hated it is.