One of Britain's leading climate 'experts', Professor Kevin Anderson, has provided a valuable insight into the
increasingly bizarre demands that surround the promotion of the collectivist Net Zero political project. Writing in the
Conversation, he argues for Net Zero within 12 years, complete with a refit of U.K. housing stock, a withdrawal of all combustion engine cars in favour of expanded public transport, electrification of industry, the roll out of 'zero-carbon' energy, and the banning of all fossil fuel production. To achieve his aims, Anderson suggests mobilisation on the scale of the post-war European reconstruction Marshall Plan. Others might suggest
his crackpot schemes will leave the country facing a similar scale of destruction, ruin and poverty to that caused by the Luftwaffe.
Anderson is currently a Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester and he has
plenty of form when it comes to extremist claims and calls for widespread rationing. As early as 2010, he was calling on politicians to consider a rationing system "similar to the one introduced during the last time of crisis in the 1930s and 40s". He also suggested a limit on electricity "so people are forced to turn the heating down", and a limit on goods that require a lot of energy to manufacture.
On a practical level, Anderson's latest calls for radical societal restructuring under the guise of a 'climate emergency' are plainly ridiculous. Retrofitting Britain's well-ventilated housing and industrial stock along with installing heat pumps would cost around £3 trillion, according to a
paper published last year by the technology professor Michael Kelly - equivalent, it should be noted, to Britain's annual GDP. That, of course, is before we've factored in the cost of Anderson's other plans such as retrofitting the entire industrial and transport infrastructure, all within the next 12 years. In its more sane moments, even Extinction Rebellion might be proud of such an ambitious plan.
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