Some days ago, around the end of March 2022, the former England international footballer and current sports presenter Gary Lineker tweeted something in support of achieving Net Zero carbon emissions. There was an immediate pile-on, which split into two groups. One group said, more or less, ‘Well said, Gary’. The other said, ‘You’re a rich man who can afford all this net zero stuff like heat pumps. Most of us can’t.’
Sitting here in WREN, which for over ten years has made the case for home insulation and renewable energy, facilitated take up in the Wadebridge area and developed our own 100kW solar PV array, it would be easy to ‘Like’ Gary’s tweet and dismiss the nay-sayers.
But in fact, the discussion has to be more nuanced than that, which is why this is not a tweet.
And why I say: ‘You are both right.’ Net zero is necessary and lots of people can’t afford it.
The case for net zero is unarguable, agreed internationally at COP26 in Glasgow. So support for net zero has to be right. But those people saying that they cannot afford to pay for heat pumps, electric cars and other low carbon measures have an argument that cannot be ignored either. Not to mention those in rented accommodation reliant on landlords to take action.
There are four million people in fuel poverty in the UK. With the coming increases in electricity and gas prices, that number is expected to rise to over six million (ref https://www.nea.org.uk/energy-crisis/). Correspondingly more will move closer to the edge, where the higher costs are affordable – just – but there is no excess cash for a heat pump.
There are a couple of factors at play here. The first is that the narrative over the last few years has been largely about personal responsibility. Yes, the Government has introduced ‘green’ schemes (underfunded, over-bureaucratic and too short in timescale), but it has always been the individual’s responsibility to get something done within whichever scheme it happened to be.
The second is the time frame for reaching net zero. It will take time to get there; the target date is 2050. Not everyone has to buy a heat pump or an electric car right now. We just all need to have done it by 2050. The longer we do little or nothing, the more like falling off a cliff the transition will be.
So we need the Gary Linekers and those of us who can afford it to start making the transition now, catching up with our net zero heroes who have already moved quite some way along the path (see our March 2022 Newsletter).
Where does that leave those of us who cannot afford it now? Is there any reason to think that they will be able to afford it by 2050? Costs will likely come down. We saw it with solar PV panels and are now seeing it with electric cars. But that won’t necessarily, or even probably, make them easily affordable for everyone.
This is where we return to the first factor, the individual responsibility bias. There is no intrinsic reason why net zero has to be an individual responsibility; it is a political choice. Some things are structural and are best done at a national level. I think back to the 1960s and 70s, when town gas was replaced by natural gas. Gas appliances in homes had to be modified for the new gas and it was just done, over a period of ten years (1967-77) with no explicit charge to the household.
Since there seems to be no sign of this Government doing anything similar for net zero, what else can we do?
WREN’s Net Zero Community project (NZCom) is aimed at finding something else. The project’s subtitle is ‘Leaving no one behind’ because we recognise the need to bring those on or near the edge of fuel poverty along with us in the transition. If we do nothing, then everyone who hasn’t been able to install a heat pump will, eventually, find their gas heating stopping, and their only option will be cheap electric heaters. Cheap to buy, that is, not cheap to run. An electric fire could cost 4 – 6 times as much as a heat pump to run for the same heat output. As in many areas of life, the well-off can afford things that save them money in the long run; the poor cannot.
In NZCom, we are stressing the ‘community’ aspect. What can we as a community in the Wadebridge and Padstow area do to help everyone make the transition to net zero, over time.
We are looking at future scenarios for energy, how we can track and account for carbon dioxide emissions, what technical solutions there might be, and how we can make a viable business model for community energy that achieves net zero whilst leaving no one behind.
It won’t help people with the energy cost pain right now, but it will move us towards a future where we are not reliant on fossil fuels and their wildly fluctuating prices and their origins in unreliable countries.
It turns out that low cost energy, secure energy supply and reaching net zero emissions are all aspects of the same thing: renewable energy. Well actually, WREN and other renewable energy groups have been saying this for some time. It’s taken the tragic war in Ukraine to bring it to the surface of mainstream discourse.
Kevin Smith
5th April 2022