A war on Middle England won’t solve climate change

Her comments, as part of an evidence session to the House of Lords environment and climate change committee, conjure up images of mean rick folk sneaking out of their Stucco-fronted Belgravia mansions in the dead of night and stealing the boarding passes of the less fortunate while they slept.

Except, of course, lots of people on lower incomes won’t go abroad some years – if at all.

So is she urging them to jump on the next Ryanair flight to Torremolinos? Anything to escape this claptrap perhaps. Or is she suggesting that if a rich person ditches yet another weekend in Saint Tropez, someone on a council estate will magically be able to jet off to Faliraki for a fortnight?

Perhaps it’s worth debating whether you’re truly poor at all if you’re able to go to Spain every year.

By the same token, there are many families who would probably consider themselves to be relatively well-off – yet only take one foreign holiday a year. The thinking behind this is so flawed as to be rendered utterly stupid.

What Pinchbeck – like so many net zero evangelists – is essentially saying is that millions of perfectly hard-working and marginally wealthier people, who pay more than their fair share of taxes, should make the greatest sacrifices in the form of what is essentially yet another tax.

Meanwhile, those below a certain income bracket, and presumably also those on benefits, should make fewer sacrifices or none at all.

There is certainly a debate to be had about why so many green initiatives such as solar panels, heat pumps and electric cars are wildly unaffordable but that’s the case for the vast majority of people surely, such are the staggering figures involved.

Yet, it is precisely the sort of divisiveness that Pinchbeck advocates that is one of the many giant flaws at the heart of net zero.

At first, we were told the costs of going green would be negligible. Then it was that the costs would be counteracted by the benefits in the form of job creation, lower household bills (eventually), and improvements in living standards.

With the upside proving alarmingly elusive, and millions of people resisting being nudged, or indeed guilt-tripped into impoverishing themselves in the name of a planet, the climate lobby is stepping up its attempts to drive a wedge between people.

This is a mistake.

These hairshirt tactics, in which people are expected to make ever greater sacrifices, don’t work, nor does shaming.

One suspects it’s among the reasons the Just Stop Oil eco-loons have decided to stop glueing themselves to petrol forecourts – such tactics are counter-productive because it alienates the very people you need to get behind your cause.

People of all backgrounds and income brackets work hard in their own way and they deserve to enjoy their lives. It’s not that the vast majority of us aren’t prepared to make sacrifices either.

But there’s rightly a limit to what most are willing to endure.