If even the hard-left Scottish National Party (SNP) can recognise the damage being done by the green agenda, surely other European governments should think twice about the most burdensome of their ‘environmentalist’ pronouncements.
SNP net zero secretary Gillian Martin last week announced that what had been described as “flagship plans” to make homeowners switch from gas boilers to ‘greener’ alternatives, such as electric heat pumps, after buying a new home were being ditched because—as she put it—they would “make people poorer.”
Legislation is being ditched temporarily, to be more precise, until current concerns are ‘resolved.’ So this is one to keep an eye on.
Net Zero Watch campaign group director Andrew Montford expressed his hope that while the SNP has been slow “to understand that the days of net zero are coming to an end,” the heat pump debacle may have “concentrated minds in Holyrood,” the home of the Scottish Parliament. He told europeanconservative.com:
With the Scottish economy shambles, with Grangemouth [Scotland’s only oil refinery] soon to close, and with much of the North Sea oil and gas industry under threat, they would be well advised to abandon decarbonisation completely.
The country can no longer afford to shun hundreds of millions of pounds of gas supplies just so ministers can flaunt their green credentials. The economy must take precedence.
Scottish Reform councillor Thomas Kerr also stressed that the country’s net-zero-by-2045 target should be scrapped altogether, so that it can “continue drilling and make Britain energy independent.” Voters would be wrong, however, to expect such a change of heart from the SNP.
The move has, of course, received criticism from the Scottish Greens, who lamented a “big step backwards.” Likewise in Germany, negotiations between the centre-right CDU and the Greens resulted in €100 billion being handed to the government’s climate and transformation fund. In Belgium, too, funding is again being given to the production of electricity via onshore wind farms, despite warnings that the taxpayer will lose out.
