Net Zero should be inevitable, not impossible

The saying, attributed to journalist Upton Sinclair, goes “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”.

Tony Blair, former British PM who led the UK into illegal wars that killed millions and who afterwards became a PR spokesperson for hire for dictatorial oil barons has declared that attempts to limit oil production are “doomed to fail”.

He joins a growing list of oil industry figures, politicians and politicians lobbied by oil industry figures who are trying to get efforts to decarbonise our economy and halt the climate emergency slowed down or reversed - safe in the knowledge that they won’t pay the price of the world’s failure to meet its climate obligations.

The problem, they say, is that we are moving too quickly when the opposite is true. The tensions appearing in Net Zero policies are because governments are not moving quickly enough to limit the damage (which is becoming worse and more apparent by the year) and are not moving strongly enough to help people make the changes that need to be made.

Householders being told that they need to not just pay the price of retrofitting their own homes and replacing their cars but that they need to do it when they don’t have the money to do it and that they need to pay an additional five figure premium on top of the cost to account for the inefficiencies of being left alone to do it themselves was never going to work.

In our Common Home Plan, the world’s first fully-costed, national-scale Green New Deal, we said that the policies we’re seeing now were never going to work and would be vulnerable to the kind of backlash that the oil sector is now paying to promote.

Instead of telling people that they must change but then not giving them the means to make that change, we argued that the bulk of the transformation should come from a system of national public works investments. Instead of telling people to buy an expensive electric heat pump and insulation upgrades, there should be a team of public-funded workers upgrading entire streets at a time with retrofitting packages and district heating networks.

Instead of telling people to buy an expensive electric car or face being banned from driving, there should be a network of free public transport and community-owned rental vehicles on hand to make it possible to not need to own a car.

Instead of telling people that the recession is their fault when they can’t buy disposable consumer goods because all of their insufficient wages have been spent on soaring rent and energy bills, we should have networks of sharing and resource libraries that allow us to use the tools and goods that make our lives better without having to buy the cheapest possible version of it.

Tony Blair has only a slightly higher chance of facing the consequences for his campaigns of mass civilian death than he does of facing the consequences of failing to meet climate obligations that he knew were coming when he was in office and did far too little to address. His comments that we should give up and just keep obliging his paymasters now are, frankly, an insult.