On Tuesday, I attended a private lunch given by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the climate-sceptic think tank on whose board I sat until quite recently. Jacob Rees-Mogg was the main speaker. I am revealing no secrets by reporting more optimism in the room than I had ever previously seen in that company.

Since the Uxbridge by-election, which the Tories held by campaigning on popular resentment of Ulez, politics have changed. Ulez is, in fact, a pollution tax, not a climate-change measure, but the unexpected Tory victory in Boris Johnson’s old seat crystallised a feeling.

Plans to force the replacement of domestic oil boilers with heat pumps after 2026 and of petrol or diesel cars with electric vehicles (EVs) after 2030 annoyed millions. The gulf between airy, excited talk of saving the planet – which, to politicians, is free – and the hard here-and-now, day-to-day cost, particularly to poorer people, of the remedies allegedly needed, gaped wide. This public annoyance was predictable and – by most of us associated with the GWPF – had been long predicted. Now it had arrived, we rejoiced.

Several at the lunch rightly pointed out how appallingly cavalier successive Conservative prime ministers have been on this subject, but the prevailing mood was that Rishi Sunak had some understanding of the problem and was well placed to change direction in time for the election. Would he dare?

[Grifty grifty Green grifters. As the OP said where I found the article:

…Once cost is at issue, net zero is, barring a technological miracle, bound to lose. The “behaviour change” required by the Climate Change Committee to achieve emissions reduction is, in its prescription, a bigger element than is “green energy”. People must be charged more for living as they currently choose to do and/or be banned from doing so.

People, God willing, are less and less willing to lose more and more. ~ Beege]