Climate Resistance
The houses that Net Zero will destroy
Making your home compliant with Net Zero is going to be easy, right? Only if you have deep pockets and don't mind wasting the money.
Ben Pile
Oct 29
One of my main observations of climate policy (but which is not unique) is that emissions reduction targets were created ‘legally-binding’ before any idea existed about how they could be achieved. According to the UK government’s analysis [PDF], 16 per cent of the UK’s emissions come from the residential sector. And this sixth of Britain’s emissions poses the most vexing challenge to the green agenda. To modernise a tenet of the unwritten constitution, if an English[person]’s home is [their] castle, how are you going to tell them what to do in it? How are you going to make them pay for the decision to put statute before the laws of physics?
The laws of thermodynamics ought to take precedence over laws that govern our central heating. And economics ought to have been the government’s (and so-called ‘opposition’ parties’) first considerations. And so, we might assume, a democratic mandate ought to have preceded the intrusion into our once-warm homes. But they were not.
The green agenda is the political establishment’s reality-defying stunt, but with us taking the risks for their scepticism of physics, economics and democracy. It’s a triplet that sounds like it ought to be an Oxbridge undergraduate degree, in which tomorrow’s statespersons learn that the assertion of material reality is colonialism, misogyny, homophobia and trans-hatred; that endless public and private borrowing is a good thing; that democracy means telling people what to do and anyone who disagrees is probably a Russian-funded fascist. None of which will explain how people do and will heat and power their homes, pay for it, and whether people will willingly participate in this self-destruction without onerous laws and draconian enforcement. The British public has an appointment with cold, hard, unforgiving reality, scheduled for it by its degenerate political classes.
I am somewhat in the market for a house. I say ‘somewhat’, because my options are limited by the fact of 25 years of the Westminster parties’ management of the economy means that a house built a century ago for factory workers in the city I grew up in would now require a literal lottery win to buy outright. Though I quite like the idea of moving to the remote regions of the country where house prices are not so insane, I need to be near-ish family and near work, and I would prefer, in not too dire a place. This is a modest expectation, it might seem. A 2-up-2-down within 2 hours drive of where I’d like to be will cost a lot of money, however, and the last year’s 10%+ increase in house prices — because house prices were the only thing to be protected by lockdowns — has pushed my options further away.
Anyway, the point of this personal whinge is that, despite looking at houses for a year on the popular property websites, I had somehow overlooked the Energy Performance Certificates (EPC) that estate agents are obliged to include in their marketing. Until now. And wow! Do they make a statement about Net Zero, or what?
Here’s an example from a said 2-up-2-down in the West Midlands…
https://benpile.substack.com/p/the-houses-that-net-zero-will-destroy
