Jeremy Clarkson: Net zero is unhuman. Who wants to be sad?
There is, however, a big problem with net zero and it’s this: it flies in the face of all that we are. It’s unhuman.
There must have been a day, many millions of years ago, when someone grew weary of trying to sleep at night with their head resting on a rock, or a small mound of gravel. They decided therefore to pluck a nearby duck and use its feathers as a pillow instead. And instantly, their life was better.
Similarly, there must have been a moment when some chap thought “Ooh, I’m cold but if I bash that wolf over the head with this stick, and then peel it, I could use its fur to make some kind of rudimentary hat. And maybe a pair of mittens”. His life was immediately better as well.
This is what drives us as a species. To be more comfortable. Which is why, before the invention of the chest freezer, Victorians would spend a fortune and many weeks harvesting ice from frozen ponds in the winter and then storing it in complex straw-lined underground bunkers so that even in the summer, their gin and tonic could be pleasantly chilled.
And then there’s transport. There was a day, at some point in history when a man with sore feet thought, I can’t walk another step so let’s see if I can get that horse over there to let me sit on its back. And then later, we got the car which was faster and didn’t shit in the street. So we all started using that. Human beings are like rivers. We will always find a way to go downhill.
Internet shopping. The potato peeler. Curtains. Trousers. The escalator. Supermarkets. Ritalin. Sellotape. The Boeing Dreamliner. Chainsaws. They all do the same thing. Make our lives easier. It’s why you don’t use a fountain pen any more. Because in a world where you have a laptop that can write what you say, a device you have to fill with ink every day is a faff. Which means it’s unhuman too.
This is what Ed Sillyband doesn’t seem to understand. He fires up his adenoids every day and struts off to work, genuinely believing that we’ll all embrace his carbon-free initiatives. But we won’t because without exception, they all make our lives more difficult. And who wants that?
If I wanted to go to Scotland this afternoon, I’d get in my car and set off. Maybe I’d have to fill up with petrol but that would only take a couple of minutes and then, in the time it takes to play one Genesis track, I’d be McThere. In a Miliband eco-car, I’d have to charge it up all the time and the journey would take weeks. That’s worse.
And don’t get me started on heat pumps. I know people who are evangelical about these things, but invariably, their houses are so cold that when they get back from that day’s protest march, they can’t take off their Palestinian keffiyeh or they’d get frostbite. My house runs on gas and even though it’s currently about one degree outside, I’m sitting here in a T-shirt. And that’s better.
Can’t afford to run your central heating? If that’s the case, you certainly won’t be able to afford a heat pump, even if you factor in the government grants that Mr Stupidband has made available. When I looked into the idea of installing one at the house I was building five years ago, I quickly came to the conclusion that it would be cheaper to build Sizewell B in the garden.
So I plumped for gas knowing that we as a nation had a virtually limitless supply of the stuff under the North Sea. How was I to know that one day, we’d elect a government that refuses to extract it? God knows where the gas that I use now comes from. Mongolia probably. I don’t care.
Solar panels and wind turbines are interesting because of course, they don’t make your life worse. They actually make no material difference at all, because why should you care whether the electricity that powers your toaster comes from wind, sunshine, nuclear fusion or coal? All that matters is that it’s there.
That said, however, we do have to consider the aesthetics. I don’t mind wind turbines; they’re actually quite elegant, but whenever I see solar panelling on someone’s roof, I get so angry my hair starts to itch. Because God almighty, it’s ugly. And that’s unhuman as well.
Nobody wants an ugly wife or an ugly car and no one wants to take a holiday in an ugly resort. So why would you want to live in a house made ugly by solar panels? And why would you want to eat a sausage that has no pig meat in it?
One of the big things Mr Millipede wants to do to achieve net zero is convince us that meat causes global warming and that as a result, we should all eat nuts and pulses instead. Look, I don’t mind if someone wants to be a vegetablist because they love animals; that’s fine. They are making their lives happier by switching from beef to cauliflower. But for the rest of us? No. I cooked a rib of beef last weekend — in a Rational oven, which is easier to use than an Aga, and therefore better — and it was infinitely more enjoyable than a chickpea.
Chickpeas and solar panels and buses and cutlery made of bamboo are why Miliband’s ecological crusade will fail. Because it’s unhuman to go backwards. It’s unhuman to deliberately make your life worse. It’s unhuman to want to be cold and sad.