Climate Scaremongers: Public Wants Action On Climate, Don’t Want To Pay For It
“Even environmental believers are reluctant to embrace expensive climate interventions: It is called the ‘Iron Law of Climate Policy .” Roger Pielke, Jr.
WRITTEN BY PAUL HOMEWOOD ON NOV 18, 2022. POSTED IN LATEST NEWS
PSOS has just released the results of a poll timed to coincide with COP27.
They state: ‘As part of a global study covering 34 markets looking at citizen support for policies to help tackle climate change, British citizens are most likely to say they would support policies that apply incentivization, discounting and other inducements rather than those which use taxation or reduced choice.
‘The relative order of support for the various policies in Great Britain broadly reflects that of the global picture.
‘The most popular policy of the nine tested was for government spending on subsidies to make environmentally friendly technologies cheaper (eg solar panels, electric vehicles), with almost two-thirds (65 percent) saying they would support this in Britain.
‘Least popular policies were higher taxes on non-renewable energy sources such as gas and oil for heating and cooking to make them more expensive, supported by only 1 in 3 British citizens (29 percent), and higher taxes on red meat and dairy products that have a bigger carbon footprint (30 percent).’
Polls such as these are totally meaningless. Most people always say they want things like Net Zero, more nurses, more police, etc etc. However, when push comes to shove, nobody wants to pay the bill. [emphasis, links added]
Other polls in recent years have come to similar results. One in April claimed that the Conservatives would lose 1.3million votes if they ditched the Net Zero commitment.
To a large extent, these polls reflect how badly the public has been misled by the media on the topic of climate change.
They have been consistently lied to about extreme weather and had patently absurd claims of a climate crisis thrown at them.
There appear to be millions who don’t even appreciate how tiny UK emissions are, and who apparently believe UK policies will affect the weather!
What opinion polls do constantly show is that very few people are prepared to pay the cost of decarbonization.
For instance, just days after that April poll, an Express poll found that 67 percent were opposed to paying any extra for heat pumps to replace gas boilers.
A poll for Net Zero Watch a year ago reported that three in five would not be willing to pay higher taxes on their energy bills to help reach Net Zero targets, including 49 percent of Labour and Green Party voters.
Why this apparent contradiction? At its heart, of course, is the simple fact that people want all sorts of goodies but are not prepared to pay for them.
Either they believe that money grows on trees or they think that ‘somebody else’ should pay. We saw the same phenomenon this year.
Most people say they want more money spent on the NHS, nurses’ wages, and old age care. But what happened when the government increased the National Insurance tax to fund it?
There is, however, another factor at play with the climate agenda. Without putting too fine a point on it, the public has not been told the truth about the real cost.
To date, most of the cost of decarbonization has been loaded onto electricity bills, via renewable subsidies.
Even now very few people are now aware of just how much this has already cost them, a total of £78 billion in the last ten years alone.
Indeed many prefer to blame ‘greedy energy companies’ for their rising bills. Other costs have simply been absorbed into public spending without anybody noticing.
Much of the blame for this coverup lies with the media, who, with a few notable exceptions, are loathe to mention it.
And, of course, most of our political establishment is complicit in stopping voters from finding out the truth about the enormous costs coming their way.
But increasingly it is becoming impossible to hide these costs. Homeowners, if they don’t know already, will soon find out just how horrifically expensive heat pumps are, and the extra £10K or so that electric cars will cost cannot be hidden from buyers.
And with the public finances in a mess, it will become increasingly difficult for the government to add the costs of Net Zero to public spending.
Sooner or later Net Zero will be much less popular than the pollsters think.
Read the full post at Conservative Woman