Matt Hancock's covid hypocrisy is nothing compared to the elite's Net Zero mockery

Matt Hancock wasn't just breaking his own hard-line ban on hugging when snogging his aide in London, he also whisked her to Oxford for a meeting of G7 health ministers.

The G7 conference, featuring parties on the sand, hugs and squeezes, and fresh seafood for all—is now thought to have caused a surge of the virus down in Cornwall and no one has been able to explain to me why it could not have taken place on Zoom like almost all other events for the past 18 months.

According to The Sunday Times, Hancock and Colangelo enjoyed their getaway when the rest of us were banned from most holidays, meeting more than six mates in our homes, or visiting dying loved ones. Top of the agenda at G7 was "saving the planet", of course, and the so-called Net Zero agenda.

President Biden brought his 12,000kg helicopter inside a humongous military transport plane and our Prime Minister flew down in a 200-seat private jet from London, despite even the Queen managing to take the train, generating a fifth of the emissions.

Amid the scandal last week, the government's official parliamentary climate change advisors recommended the end of business flights, just as the international Green elite prepares to jet in for all corners of the globe for the COP26 holiday camp in Glasgow this November. Will the champions of the Net Zero ideology listen or will they continue to order us to do one thing to "save the plant" whilst continuing to do the precise opposite?

In the lead up to conference, and amid the pandemic, Alok Sharma, president of COP26, has bragged about jetting off to Costa Rica for COP26-related matters whilst Wendy Morton MP has met week representatives of Azerbaijan and Slovenia and even toured the ancient ruins of Agora in Athens, somewhat bizarrely, all in the name of COP26.

The West Midlands Local Authority, for one,wantsnormal people to work from home more, go to physical shops less, and spend less time in the pub to help them meet their local Net Zero targets. Are the world leaders who partied on the beach in the middle of a pandemic likely to follow a form of lockdown-light forever for Net Zero? I doubt it.

The Committee On Climate Change, who made the recommendation to outlaw business flights, themselves spent £9,531 on nine return flights abroad between June 2016 and July 2019. Are these people any better placed to tell us we must stop taking business fights than Matt Hancock would have been to tell us to abide by the almost inevitable (in my view) next set of social distancing guidelines?

The CCC report also demands 900,000 heat pumps a year be installed in British houses by 2028, and 1.1 million a year by 2030. The existing government plan is for 600,000 a year by 2028 and the current rate, in 2020 at least, was just 36,000 a year. The problem is that very little is said about who is to pay £10,000 per house this will cost, and the government scrapped a scheme to help the poorest households pay the cost, just three months ago.

Remember, these policies, under the wider Net Zero agenda, were written into nation and international law long ago. Elites effectively removed them from the pool of policies the electorate of the day may select or reject but we must find a way to fund them, even as the cost spirals. And who will pay when these rushed initiatives go wrong?

When, inevitably, some of the rapidly developed and deployed technologies fail, who will be the ones, literally, left out in the cold? It certainly won't be Alok Sharma or Matt Hancock, who live in houses far larger and more energy-dependent than your average Brit. Like with so much green policy, it is those with the fewest resources and the least energy efficient lives who must pay the highest proportion of their income towards it. And it is some of the most precarious and vulnerable in society who face the highest risks from cold winters and isolation without cheap cars.

The CCC admits in their report that the UK is facing power cuts because the National Grid needs updating as we increasingly rely on electricity to run everything from cars to home boilers. And heat pumps, the government says, will only heat our radiators to 10 degrees cooler than boilers can, and some could take hours to get them to that temperature.

One of the largest questions of all, is why HM Treasury fought a two-year freedom of information battle just to hide one of their own, older, estimates for the total cost for the Net Zero? And when they were finally forced to reveal the £1.275 trillion figure this March, many campaigners said the real cost, in reality, could be orders of magnitude higher because they often relied on hopeful hypotheticals like the cost of much-needed technology falling in price.

But we cannot know, as the Treasury has again delayed publishing their cost estimates on this critical policy area, which were supposed to be out this spring.

When GB News's Andrew Neil questioned the current Chancellor on the cost of Net Zero on June 16th, he was completely unable to answer, calling it "hard to put a specific figure on". Rishi Sunak also called it an '"a multi-generational project", which is complete rubbish, as the government has committed to getting three-quarters of the way to Net Zero by 2035.

And when Mr Neil asked the founder of Extinction Rebellion last Thursday why the UK should be trashing its heavy industries despite emitting less that 1% or global Carbon emission, whilst China builds dozens of new coal power stations every few month, Roger Hallam also had no answers.

No reasonable person is disputing the fact carbon levels are rising, because of the burning of fossil fuels, and global temperatures are rising. But we can adapt. And offshoring polluting industries to China and Russia only make elites feel good and working people in the UK poorer, whilst no difference is made to net carbon levels.

Net Zero is one of the most expensive, risky, and important policies in history and it astonishes me how infrequently other journalists ask the Chancellor these questions. There has been almost no scrutiny of the spiralling costs because journalists don't want to be seen as so-called "climate deniers". The ends blindly justify the means, they assume. Similarly, there has been very little scrutiny of the cost-benefit analysis (of lack of) of lockdown for fear of being labelled a "covid denier".

To push back was to be called a killer. Fortunately, since Mr Neil's interviews, there has been a rash renewed interest in the cost of Net Zero. The dial has turned. I just hope we also start to call out the hypocrisy of those imposing these policies. COP26 should happen thanks to Zoom, not private jet, otherwise its participants will be as shameless as an adulterous Health Secretary.