All you will want for Christmas is a gas central heating boiler
It is perhaps the best gift to ourselves that we in the UK have ever had. But we take it for granted and it is the government's priority to take it away from us. Why?
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Unless the Net Zero zombies get their way, I am, I hope, going to be one of the last generation to remember life before central heating. I was about eight when it was installed in our home in the 1980s. Before that, there would be ice on the inside of my bedroom windows in the winter. I don’t recall it as a great hardship, like out of some Dickens novel, because though we may not have been wealthy, we did not live in poverty. But I do remember running from the bath to the living room to avoid instant hypothermia. Our living room had a gas fire, and our bedrooms would be heated by fan heater before we went to bed. As well as being uncomfortable, it must have been inconvenient and expensive for my parents. Since then, I don’t think the same house has ever been less than 20°C. All of my memories are of the warmth that followed. I used to sit on a beanbag, reading a book, with my back against the radiator in my room.
In a sense, I believe that we should take central heating for granted. I believe it should be so taken for granted that to propose a home without central heating should be as absurd as proposing a home without running water or electricity. But there is a danger in complacency, which is that there is no aspect of life which environmentalists will not problematise, to a terminal degree. When I, despite being a climate policy sceptic, first heard of green schemes proposing to dismantle Britain’s natural gas infrastructure and ban the humble gas boiler, I did not believe that their plans would last the month. But they are relentless, and have endless supplies of money.
Since then, of course, the government, will pretty much the support of all MPs, and all the legacy Westminster parties has proposed ‘phasing out’ the domestic gas boiler, which provides the hot water and warmth to the majority of homes in the UK. According to House of Commons research, the 2021 Census found that,
73.8% of households in England and Wales used mains gas, 9.1% used two or more types of central heating, 8.5% used electric heating, 3.5% used oil, 2.5% used other central heating (including renewable, solid fuel, wood and district or communal heat networks), 1.5% had no central heating and 1.0% used tank or bottled gas.
British homes began their conversion to central heating in the 1960s. According to Statistica, in 1970 just 30% of UK homes were heated centrally. Rapid development in the 1980s and into the 1990s, driven by the ‘dash for gas’ gave 95% of homes the heating systems they needed — those being gas or oil-fired.
Switching the 91.5% of homes in England and Wales that currently use other sources of energy, to electric heating of one form or another — likely heat pumps, as shall be discussed below — is an extraordinary policy intervention.
Barely more than one generation into the era of ubiquitous central heating, the government, the opposition parties, an army of fake academics and think tank wonks and ideological activists at ersatz ‘civil society’ organisations, and fake news merchants have all decided that ripping out the systems that have made near-instant warmth a possibility is an urgent political priority.
Comparisons are everything in politics. And so this policy agenda needs comparisons if we are to understand what is going on.
It was easier for MPs (and the rest) to create a consensus between themselves, without any consideration of what the public wants, to abolish the gas and oil central heating boiler than it is for them to decide on a way to tackle the immigration crisis.
I don’t say it as someone who has had, hitherto, strong views on immigration. And neither do I say it as someone who thinks that polling is as instructive as pollsters claim it is. However, it is polls that typically drive Westminster narratives. And Yougov finds as follows:
Vastly more people believe that the economy, immigration and health ought to be the priorities of politics, with ‘the environment’ in distant fourth. Yet it is the environment that enjoy privileged position over those issues in policymaking circles.
Climate is similarly put far before any consideration of the economy, often armed by false claims of ‘green growth’ and ‘green jobs’ and even a ‘green industrial revolution’, despite decades of policy failures showing these dreams to be false (as forthcoming articles shall demonstrate). Yet nobody can explain how banning the boiler, causing huge expense to people, creates growth or jobs.
And even health! It is easier for politicians to admit more patients to the country, to add to waiting lists, and to ban petrol and diesel cars (and the boiler) than it is for them to put our priorities before the preferences of Greta Thunberg and XR.
No. The most important order of the day is abolish what is perhaps the most significant addition to our homes in centuries: the humble central heating boiler.
It is a miracle. It is a device the size of a small cupboard, which can heat a three bedroom home, and provide it with endless hot water. At entry level, it costs barely three quarters of a weekly average household income (see the screenshot from a page of boilers at Screwfix below). And it is fuelled by a substance that exists in vast quantities under the land and sea of the British Isles. It provides a level of comfort and convenience that no earlier generation could even conceive of, much less expect. And its ubiquity speaks to the best of what this country is capable of: heat and hot water, for the masses… In every home. And at affordable prices.
And yet our political class act as though it — and its fuel — is our mortal enemy.
Some say that the cost of gas has risen, reducing the apparent virtue of our humble combi. But that too is a mirage, born of politics. It is the historic price of gas which is instructive as to the technological feasibility of low energy prices…
Two decades ago, we heated our homes for just a few £hundred a year. Now, people struggle to pay the bills, as the cost of food, housing, transport and other goods and services have also risen. And this price rise — of gas and everything more broadly — was not the consequence of natural scarcity. The price of gas rose because of policies and politics — green ideology manifest. EU diktats closed down coal-fired power stations, increasing generator’s dependency on gas. And then policymakers turned against gas itself.
Despite the experience of the shale gas boom in the US showing that low and stable prices were a possibility, against the volatility and expense of gas on European markets, politicians such as the daft Andrea Leadsom (above) sought to protect consumers from affordable, abundant, and reliable energy.
As we point out over at Climate Debate UK, both conventional gas production and fracking were banned or severely limited by lawmakers in Spain, Germany, France, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and the UK. And, moreover, the green blob’s colonisation of financial institutions, such as through shareholder activism and ESG lobbying, forced them to withdraw financial services such as credit and insurance to hydrocarbon energy companies. As I explained in this film, this increased the cost of capital for gas and oil producers, thereby increasing the scarcity and cost of gas, with the full help and approval of the British state, using its instruments, such as the Bank of England, to drive this result further.
There was nothing ‘natural’ about the rising price of gas. It was the green dream, made flesh.
The solution, according to our green overlords, is a ‘heat pump’. My friend David, who is a builder of extremely fine houses, sends me the following photograph of the interior assembly of a heat pump system. He installed the apparatus in a house he developed in 2020, and points out that there was no gas connection to the (rural) property, and the requirements of the heat pump itself are such that the house had to be insulated to a much higher degree than normally, causing even more expense to the buyer. So my point here is not that heat pumps have no use case. My claim is that they represent terrible value for money for the majority of households, given the better option of gas or oil-fired central heating.
The appliance simply would not fit in most people’s houses. There is no room for it in my flat! And the external component would take up space and generate noise outside.
And, of course, neither I, nor likely most people, could afford it. The attempt to make gas more expensive, by creating scarcity, and through ESG and financial regulation has not made heat pumps less expensive; they have only made gas more expensive.
Now the government is set to impose a £120 charge on new boilers — a ‘boiler tax’ next year, in an attempt to further change the cost calculation. And homeowners are currently being offered a whopping £7,500 grant towards heat pumps, but this is unlikely to be of any benefit to anyone who does have cash to burn, because the difference is still vastly less than the cost of a conventional boiler, never mind the costs of upgrading the rest of a home to make the heat pump work property — such as extensive retrofitting of insulation and replacing the radiators. And all for an inferior system, which is slow to respond to need, does not perform as well as the systems that they apparently are the successor to.
The grant was announced in 2022 with a budget of £450 million. This was amped up by a further £1.5 billion last week. But even if the ‘£6 billion allocated for energy efficiency and clean heat over 2025 to 2028’ that the government has committed to is spent on heat pumps, only 80,000 homes, out of 28 million, would have them. We can’t all have £7,500 grants. If every home did, it would cost £210 billion. So what is the sense of making these £multi-billion grants — of our money — available to, probably only middle class people, who do not need them?
The only reason I can think may explain the absurdity of these grants is the peculiar way in which the government has decided to implement its ban on gas boilers. Starting next year, the Clean Heat Market Mechanism will require manufacturers to provide an increasing percentage of heat pumps vs boilers, no matter what consumers decide for themselves. Between April 2024 and the end of March 2025, 4% of sales must be heat pumps. And the following year, the target rises to 6%. Otherwise, a penalty of £3,000 will apply to each boiler sold. So, since practically nobody wants to spend £12,000 on replacing their superior system, plus the tens of £thousands required for retrofitting, the government’s policies are a self-licking ice cream.
It is a very odd fudge, to use another food metaphor, that characterises British climate policy — and British policy failures. The mandates of the green agenda require authoritarian policy interventions that would, in any other era, be jarring against the principles of either the mixed economy or the free market that broadly characterised the economic positions of UK political parties. They fool themselves into believing that setting sales targets for ‘the market’ they are not acting like some socialist tinpot dictator — or even Stalin himself, with his five year plans.
But it is people who are being left with no choice, and left to pay the cost. The ‘market’ mechanism is thus just an illusion at best, or perhaps just a con-job. It will cause a horrendous misallocations of private capital, public funds, and household budgets.
No net benefit will be achieved by gas boilers being replaced by heat pumps. The heat pump will cost vastly more for less functionality. This is the precise opposite of what occurs in economic growth and industrial revolution. Less is being done by more money. It is deeply regressive. Those household budgets would be better spent on whatever the occupants of those houses want and need than on what climate laws require. That private capital would be better spent on producing more and better for less, not on the rent-seeking opportunities created for idiot investors. And that public money could be doing better by either doing nothing at all — saving us the expense of more borrowing — or put to actually good things, like addressing the public’s clearly stated policy preferences. But Greta rules.
Even on the continent, the political liability has been understood. In The Times, Bruno Waterfield reports that,
The European Union has delayed an “action plan” to accelerate the use of climate-friendly heat pumps to avoid a popular backlash against the cost of the new green technology in European elections next year.
We are going to miss our boilers, unless we act to save them. We will miss the instant heat, the baths and the showers on demand, when we need and want them — not when the weather and the government and bank say that we may have them. But worse than this, we will miss the warm homes that protected our children and older people from the cold. You may think that sounds dramatic, but no part of the green agenda, of which now is only the first of it, has succeeded. No green promise of jobs, of growth, or of ‘industrial revolution’. Energy prices are skyrocketing because the government writes blank cheques to degenerators in our name. Gigafactories are going bankrupt before they are even built. And ‘surprise’ data out today shows that the UK is teetering on the edge of recession: ‘Instead of growing by 0.2pc in the second quarter, as the ONS had previously estimated, the economy flatlined’, reports The Telegraph.
Well, maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe it’s time to ditch Net Zero. The following articles on this Substack will make the case.
Happy — and warm — Christmas to you!