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Dieter Helm

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2024-04-14
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2024-04-14
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  1. “Build a grid and a modern electricity system which is going to carry an enormously larger amount of electricity in it because of all these new demands and do it in a sensible, pragmatic way towards 250. Now you're the politicians. Getting politicians to depoliticize stuff is very important for the expectations and the costs. I'd love to do it for the health service, for social care and a number of other things too. But in this territory, let's be grown up, realistic, tell the customers the truth, do not expect things to be delivered in no time at all. Do it measured, do it efficiently because if there's a limited amount of money to spend, then people need to know that money is best spent to the objectives that we have in mind.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So, in the UK, promising to achieve ludicrous targets in an incredibly short period of time, which cannot be met and would involve really quite large costs to try and rush them through, that would be a mistake. People going around saying they're going to do net zero electricity by 230. I don't owe anybody quite privately who actually thinks that's going to happen. And I can tell you all sorts of reasons why it isn't. But if you put all the feet on the accelerator and you rush it all through quickly, it's going to be very costly. And if you tell people at the same time their bills are going to go down and then they might not, that's a mistake. So let's have a serious building on what is actually a cross-party consensus on what we're doing. That's a great achievement in Britain. We've got rid of the coal industry. That's a great achievement. Let's sit down and work out how to build.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Just do it, right? But don't think it'll solve climate change. It will make you feel better about it. It will make some very trivial marginal difference. But the big stuff, the big stuff, is about thinking about what big contributions we can make to addressing those global problems. Get on with CCS, get on with RD, get on with an offshore wind. These things and transfer them to the world and help them take stuff forward rather than spread jam on every single policy and every single lobbyist you can give and each bit of jam is too thin to make a difference.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “But what are you doing daytime travel? Are you using public transport? Are you using private transport? Are you walking? Are you cycling? All this stuff, which is good for you. And loads of environmentalists, not just activists, you know, spell this out on a daily basis. And what's more, you know, for all the sackcloths and ashes and the cost that people like me as economists, life will be a lot better for you too, right? You'll be healthier, you'll have a more enjoyable life.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “So we know that if you, for example, are an intensive meat eater and you reduce that meat consumption a bit, you will make quite a large difference compared with you reduce other things. If you buy stuff which is ultra processed, involves products from all over the world, palm oil in particular, you will be having a bigger carbon footprint than otherwise. Next up is what you're wearing. How many times do you do fast fashion? If you look at some of the numbers on fast fashion, it's just truly extraordinary. Then it's about traveling. It's not just about flying. And I'm not perfect in flying. I mean, there are occasional very short flights, one or two a year that I might take, but basically long all that stuff's gone. This technology that you and I are talking about revolutionized that possibly. It makes it much cheaper for me to give that up than it would be five, ten years ago when I needed to fly everywhere.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And so he comes back to have a look at your carbon diary. Find out what you're actually doing and then work out what are the easy things to do which would improve the position because we all individually have a responsibility in this frame too. It's no good telling the world to do something different and then not be prepared to make some steps oneself. So that's first thing. So in that carbon diary food is really important. What are you eating? What's the packaging in it? How much of it's coming from depleted rainforests which are no longer sequestrating carbon, etc. And you'll rapidly discover that you can live a more healthy life and a better life and reduce your carbon footprint.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well, look, every single prediction that any sensible person makes in this territory is a prediction. And I am almost certainly going to be wrong about almost everything that I project for, but so is everybody else. And I am utterly delighted. The cost of North Sea wind came down more than I expected. But it has now just doubled. And so I think people on the other side should also say, I'm sorry I got it wrong, it's actually much more expensive than I thought it was going to be. So you're trying to push me in a corner. Which I don't accept.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “The ity of arking exactly what this carbon border adjustment will be rather than pretending that we could just ignore imports, close port Torbut, close Grangemouth, close the fertilizer, close the aluminium industry, pretend our emissions have fallen and we're the poster child of the world as the minister puts it and just happily let us absorb and benefit from pollution in China and elsewhere and pretend it's not our responsibility. That doesn't work. That's why we haven't achieved very much.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “The ship turns up in Southampton docks. It's full of steel from China. The customs official goes down to the boat and says to the captain, can I see your payment of the carbon boarder tax? Let's say, can I get out of it? Yes, of course you can. Show us a certificate to show that you paid the carbon tax back in China. And the captain says, she says, you know, okay, I'll go back to China and make sure they levy it. It's a no-brainer. The Chinese in such a world would levy a carbon tax domestically in order to avoid that tax being paid to the British government rather than themselves and everybody else. This is an example of a practical bit of politics which is working with the grain and saying let's build a unilateral coalition of the willing and actually do something about climate change. That's what I want to do. And I think that's doable. And I'm delighted we're finally getting into the...”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And as I put it in my latest book, the legacy that we leave the next generation is that an unsustainable world will not be sustained. And that's what the two degrees or the three degrees is all about. Now, on the carbon adjustment at the border, I advocated this point with colleagues in 210, 211, 212. Okay, it's a decade later. The EU has imposed a carbon border adjustment. It started the recording year this year. We are now going to do the same. That is a coalition of about 2022-23% of the world economy. If the United States were to join, we would get there because everybody else would realize there's a hell of a lot better to pay a carbon tax to their own government than pay it to HM Treasury. Because think of the practicality.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, let's be careful whether it's a lot more, but basically, you can't get away from the fundamental fact that we are all living beyond our environmental means. That's why we have environmental crises, because we don't pay for the pollution we cause. We merrily go on doing it because we'd rather pollute and let the next generation clean up the mess. So you can't have it both ways. If you don't want to pay for the pollution you cause, you want to go on in an unsustainable way.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yes, for some things, yes. And for a country like Britain, where we're importing all this carbon, the reality will come home to roost.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Well, that's pretty context. So, what I'm interested in is I don't think the top-down COP type process, you know, 90,000 people trying to buy or wherever it is they fly to or Azerbaijan next is going to get there. I don't think in this 30 years the cops have made much difference. That makes me very distinct from what most other people think, which think this is the way we're going to get there. What I think we have to do is recognize that people are going to do this unilaterally and then to build a bottom up unilateral club of the willing. So when it comes to paying the same price for carbon embedded in imports as we would for the carbon embedded in say steel production in Torbut now or wherever, that's a kind of in my view no-brainer and we can impose a carbon border adjustment that basis. Now you might say well you know but the politics that's not going to work.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Anywhere in the world that next up is RD. We're really good at some aspects of research. We're not that good at turning them into production. But when it comes to things like fusion power, when it comes to developing new materials for solar panels, all these things we're going to need. We are a great place to do it. But what you can't do is take a pot of jam, which is what we do, and spread it over everything. Give everybody a bit of money, give everybody support. We're going to do absolutely everything. No, we've got a limited amount of resources. There's a limited amount the public are prepared to pay, are able to pay, can afford to pay. Let's spend that money in a way that has the maximum effect on global warming. And that's not what we're doing. And that's what I think is a big opportunity. And let's also face up to the carbon consumption that we're doing as opposed to simply pretending that...”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Seabed, etc., and good wind flows. So we should do offshore wind. And I'm very pleased we've done it and I'm very pleased the costs are lower than I thought they were going to be, but they're not as low as people think they are. But it's a great thing. And we should experiment more. So floating platforms, et cetera, so we can help other countries do this. The second thing is we are going to have to need some industrial sequestration and carbon capture and storage putting the gas back underground. We've got empty gas wells, empty oil wells. We've got pipelines in place. The North Sea is shallow, well understood, and we've got supplies of carbon nearby.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “First thing just did in a footnote is I think the destruction of biodiversity is at least as important a problem as climate change. We're in a really serious environmental mess in this century. So if it's on climate change, what I want to do is say that every penny that's spent ultimately by British consumers and British taxpayers in the UK is spent with the maximum return or benefit to addressing climate change. So my starting point is what can we do here, which is most going to tilt the balance on that two degrees or whatever? So I start with what is the unique contribution we can make and we have at least two things going for us which virtually no one else has. We have a great site for offshore wind. Shallow waters near the coast well understood”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “And people like Caroline are very good at raising these questions. But I think that they deserve robust answers. I gave them a robust answer. I'm completely happy with that. And it surprised anyone's interested in it. But good on them if they are.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And no, on the contrary, I think it's really important that someone who stands for political office And is elected to do so is open to all these challenges around them. And it's one of the reasons why in the UK, I think we have one of the least levels of corruption, genuine corruption amongst almost any democracy anywhere. It could be better, but both our civil service and our political class are actually pretty clean. And one of the reasons for it is exactly what you say.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I have no Qualm at all with Caroline and the position she takes on a lot of these things. I disagree on many things, but that's perfectly legitimate. And I have never represented the oil industry in any form whatsoever. And there's this attempt to try to find some sort of something under the stones, et cetera. And frankly, it's not there. It's not true. And it had no effect on the outcome or the report whatsoever.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And I think that if I didn't have a grasp of how the world works out there and what happens in boardrooms, et cetera, et cetera, then it would be a much poorer report as a result. But I think I was completely open. What really happened was that there were a number of politicians who were got at by the renewables industry who realized from some of the things I've written in the past that they might not like the conclusions that came out. And so kill the messenger before the messenger puts the message down on paper in order to discredit before you get the result. And I just walked through that.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Well, no, no, no is the answer to your question. It's very straightforward. And in fact, in discussions with the civil servants, I tried to go much further than most people do in these contexts. But in the end, there is a question. If you want people who've never had anything to do with companies to be involved with these reviews, you're going to find people who have very little understanding of what happens in boardrooms and very little understanding of how the world works. My world is the intersection between three different things. Academic research, government and policy, and industry.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Say so, and Alistair, you might not like this, but the Blair government's focus on delivery stripped out a lot of that core really competent tradition in the civil service of telling truth to ministers. And I think a lot of that's gone. And it's not just under Labour, it's happened under Conservatives too, and that makes it much harder to get through to good public policy in the public interest, which is what I'm interested in.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “That is included within the cost. So, of course, they opposed it, and they were really good at it. And I would say they were so good at it, and they probably still are, that they've captured a lot of the government department. And that's really important how it's not just how lobbying works vis- ⁇-vis ministers. It's how lobbying works in its interaction with the civil service. And I think that's incredibly important. I think there are all sorts of dimensions about revolving doors, about career paths, et cetera. And we've lost the ability for ministers to separate in their minds what is advice that's based on interest from what is actually genuine analysis because what we've lost, this is my experience in government, is that role for civil servants as giving impartial policy advice to ministers. And if I...”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “So, and no disrespect to them at all because if I was one of them, I would have done the same thing because we'd moved to a world in which the government is the client for energy generation, not the customer. That's this world in which we have the CFD subsidies, et cetera, the government's effectively the guarantor. They're your contractor, they're your client. And once you've done that, which is what happened at the end of the first decade and over 210 and just afterwards. Once you've done that world, you want to get the best terms of contract out of the government for your investors. So those who are having a free ride on the system costs of their intermittency obviously didn't want a world where those costs were recognized.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “And what you learn is that if you're a Democrat, and I'm half East German, I care a lot about democracy, it is if you care about public policy, almost your duty to provide independence advice if you're asked to do it by democratically elected people, whether you agree or not with many things they do. And the lesson I learned was you have to adapt the style by which you engage, but you must never compromise on the content because the moment you tell people what they want to hear, which I could have done in the cost of energy review, you lose the plot.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Boris Johnson's energy advisor, for I think two weeks, and I say I think because they never got it organised to make the announcement and they never quite ended it. But this was an experience of dealing with, in this case a Prime Minister, which was complete outside the cosmos that I dealt with before.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yes, and I teased him about that a great deal. I have to say, lots of things I don't agree with Gov about or conservatives about, Brexit being one of them. But I have to say, he was the most professional minister I ever dealt with. He listened, he read, he thought, and he was prepared to challenge vested interests. I had them all. That energy, it was a much more interesting experience in one sense because I had Greg Clark who was very supportive, but he disappeared. We then went through the whole shenanigans of all the Brexit deals and the focus was not on anything other than the Brexit deals. But I then had the very surreal experience of being”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “And then I had Michael Goff, who was, I'm not political about this, but he was an absolute star, totally ministerial support, secretary of state support for what we were trying to do.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “In energy, I had this in DEFRA and natural capital committee, and Time, you were there, Rory. I mean, I had, I don't know how many Secretary of State. You know, I had Caroline Spellman, then I had Owen Patterson who was very focused on being in a different position. Yeah, like net zero and he's a publisher. Then I had, I think, Liz Truss twice.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “That's Greg Claw. And he was very keen that this was done, that he was very supportive of the process. And I was really clear at the beginning about the independence of what I did. You have to get the terms of reference right. I know it sounds techie in politics, but... Really matters, then afterwards, of course, politicians listen to the lobbyists. They all come out of the woodwork, and the more governments involved in these things, the more lobbying there is.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “So, what then happens is you have a process in which politics engages and the pushback's very hard. Subsequently, and this is what I expected, people would try to arrive at the right answer by every other possible way they could than the one I suggested. But in the end, you come back to baseline, which is what I proposed is the cheapest way of getting to the results you want to get to.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “And I propose this technical thing called equivalent fund power where people would have to bid. Rated by whatever that percentage was. And that meant that effectively those who caused intermittency would have to pay the cost. That's, by the way, why don't agree with you about the costs of the renewables? Once you add the intermittency in and the system costs associated, they are not cost competitive at the moment. It is not quite the rosy story that people sell. And that's why I'm very, very adamant they need subsidizing and supporting, right? If you don't believe me about this, then you can be very relaxed about the subsidies because you don't really need them. I think”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “And I didn't let any civil servant or anyone else write. So I was determined to say, here's a question. I will try to give what I think the right answer is to that question. And I will say what you need to do, what the recommendations are to achieve that outcome, knowing full well that the result would be that those who would be losers from the report would be vehemently hostile to the outcome and they would come in fiercely and try to knock the main conclusions out. And they were, I mean, it's very clear what happened. I said that intermittency is important. I said that, you know, if you want to have technologies which work for between 20 and 40% of the time, part of the costs of having those technologies is the backup that's required, as they say in the simplistic terms, when the wind doesn't blow, when the sun doesn't shine. And those costs are real. They exist. They don't go.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Okay, so I mean a lot, right? Is the answer to that question? And, you know, there was, first of all, the process of doing the report where you go through what's almost a political process in which various people try to capture the result before you get to writing it up. And I did everything I possibly could to make sure that didn't happen, including I wrote the report myself.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “You see, where I agree with Alistair on the following point it's not enough to point out that what people are being told may not be correct. It is beholden to do the other side of the equation too, which is okay, Emily, I'm surprised you didn't put this question to me, which is, so what would you do? And I have a very clear view about what we should be doing about climate change and how positively we could make a great deal more difference for what we're currently spending. And of course, I think we should spend more on it beyond that point.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “You know, the consequence of what I call, and forgive me for this, but the happy clappy approach to this is to say that when it turns out that people realize what the world is as opposed to what they've been told, they trust the politicians even less. And you get these kinds of backlashes at the moment, which I think are incredibly dangerous for our climate and incredibly dangerous for our natural environment. That's why I come back to being realistic.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “What happens is the reaction is exactly what's going on across Europe now. We have a nasty reaction which is anti-net zero policies, anti-green. We've got farmers on the streets supported by the public who are begging to keep cheap subsidized diesel and to maintain their pesticides and usage and have further subsidies. And they have large support. We have populists all over the place. The AFD made progress in Germany. Why? Because they were against heat pumps. Because the people found them expensive and didn't want to be told to do this.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “I know it's true that we haven't made much progress, and I've written about why we haven't made much progress, but I should shut up about that, not mention it, and pretend the progress has been excellent. I should go around telling people it's all going to be cheap. It's all much cheaper than fossil fuels, but prices are going to fall. You're going to run out and do this stuff. What happens when it turns out that it isn't, and people suddenly find that the story they've been told by politicians, by many, isn't actually true”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “No, no, no, no. Let's come back. So, what quite a lot of that 220 renewables target we're discussing here, biomass, things like drax, right? What's the carbon footprint of that? Have you really thought through what the components of that framework are? And that's what I'm saying. No, I didn't say that at all. So let me come to the second point. So, what would you have me do?”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Is lower in real terms than it was before the COVID event. It's incredibly cheap once you take the inflation effect into account and it's falling in price. And for most of the public, they don't have the luxury of sitting around thinking like I might that I'm not going to do this and I can afford to pay that, etc., etc. That's not their everyday experience. That's why what should be happening according to these quote optimists who tell you this story about is all going to be cheaper, bills are going to fall, etc. The reason bills are going to fall if they are, particularly for electricity, is because the gas price is going to fall. And gas is setting the prices in this frame. So it just isn't people's lift reality. And I would say, for good reason, because the story they've been told is not actually true.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “If you want to go out and buy electric car unless you're a company director, it's fantastically expensive relative to a petrol car. We're talking about £10,000 plus difference. And that may not be much to people on higher incomes, but as sure as matters to people on average incomes. On solar panels. Well, yes, if you work out the costs of installing solar panels, and I have a lot of them installed, and you work out the payback period over that, and you've got a household budget where you've got no savings and you're trying to pay the mortgage, you don't have that capital to do that. And then you look at your electricity bill, and the truth is that a lot of your electricity bill, not all of it by any means, is made up of paying subsidies to these very technologies that are supposed to be so cheap. Now, it is true the gas price went up, but the gas price now”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “What's the experience of the, I don't know what you would call the average voter or the average household or whatever, confronted with these changes? Well, first of all, there's the cost. So part of the argument which reinforces the frame that Alice is putting on the problem is that, you know what? It's not only going to happen, but it's going to make our bills lower. It's all going to be cheaper. And of course, if that's true, it's like buying the next version of the iPhone. The market will do it. We'll all go out and switch. We'll say, get out there tomorrow morning. Let's get our solar panels in. Let's get our heat pumps in. Let's buy an electric car. But if you go and do that, if you sit down the pub and talk to people about their experiences of what actually happens, it's really expensive to fit a heat pump. It's very disruptive. And you have to have a certain kind of house to make this work.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Well, I'd start off by explaining the facts. So two facts that I put over to you in this discussion are A. We're not actually making progress on reducing the increase in carbon content concentration in the atmosphere. Secondly, we're 80% fossil fuel globally. And actually thirdly, the main future emissions are going to come from developing countries and not from the UK or elsewhere. Just tell people the facts because I don't think people see it that way. I think people think we're really doing well. We're nearly there. It's almost there. 2.30 net zero electricity. It's all going to be fine.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Haven't done the adjustment properly and you haven't taken account of the losers in your policy. And even you come down to the issue of gas and unabated gas, both major parties, energy policy in Britain is offshore wind, nuclear and gas. It's very interesting that Labour did not disagree with any of the substantive points that were in the Conservative Secretary of State speech. And it's not a bad thing, we agree. It's a really quite good thing that we have a stability of what we're trying to do. The rhetoric's completely different. And that and my personal view is unhelpful on both sides.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “So what conservatives have done, and I'm not an advocate of their position, is simply to recognize reality. And that's why the Labour Party didn't oppose that. Secondly, on the electric cars, everyone could see that problems all about the charging networks that aren't there and the range, anxiety, et cetera, et cetera. And so, is it really, realistic to go absolutely flat out to finish this job in five years? Is it going to happen? Probably not. It's a tweak on the line. When it comes to low emission zones, et cetera, traffic, et cetera. And the political parties are all over the place on this, depending on whether it's a rural constituency or an urban one, et cetera. The reality is, if you do not carry the local population with you to the extent that they're actually going to make it the main issue in a by-election, you have made a mistake somewhere along the line. You have not explained what you're doing properly.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “It's everything. It's the cost. I mean, you know, last year, over a million new gas boilers are fitted and a few tens of thousands, if that, of heat pumps done. It's very expensive, it's very difficult. The infrastructure isn't there.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “I mean, I'm not an apologist for what the government's doing or an advocate of what Labor's going. But let me look at the things that have happened, which are supposed to be this kind of turning away from net zero politics, etc. I mean, it's nonsense, right? So we're not going to hit the boiler target with regard to heat pumps and boilers.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Well, I'd be horrified if you could place me because the idea that these problems that I'm interested in are going to be better solved on the left or the right seems to me to abstract from the reality that we're all in this and we're all in it for the long run. But I would say as an aside, there's hardly any difference in this country between Labour and Conservative energy policy and there's hardly any difference in their position on borrowing GDP, growth ambitions etc. Actually, I think in my lifetime I've never seen two major parties actually agree on virtually all the component parts of this”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Don't know the number off the top of my head, but it should be enough to worry you quite a lot Rory, when you're off to Yale or wherever.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “I stopped Because we're all hypocritical, we're all engaged in all sorts of virtue signaling, et cetera. But, you know, I made that position.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source