Heat pump humiliation and wood burner back-pedalling - the SNP’s Net Zero mission has turned into a farce

I've always had a soft spot for the SNP , despite agreeing with them on almost nothing. There's something about basing your politics almost entirely on the notion of national sovereignty that sounds noble to me, even when the foundations are built on sand.

But I couldn't help giggling at the SNP's latest net-zero climbdown – a "humiliating U-turn" the Scottish Daily Express calls it – this time on its proposed ban on wood burners in new homes. You guessed it, the ban has been axed, at least for the moment, much to the chagrin of the SNP's former partners in government, the Greens.

The trouble with these net-zero initiatives is always the same: they come to a crashing halt once they hit the realities of economics and human behaviour. Banning wood burners might sound great in Edinburgh's shiny corridors of power, but darn awful to those living in rural areas who rely on them to stave off the biting winter cold. They can literally be life savers.

But now these burners have a new lease of life, which is a huge relief to those who feared the ban was the thin edge of a green wedge, with more stringent measures to follow. And it comes hot on the heels of the Scottish government's failure to foist heat pumps on people. Despite much incentivising, the Home Energy Scotland Scheme achieved just 2,000 installations during the whole of 2023. Hardly a roaring success.

Meanwhile, in the wider UK, Labour's decision to abandon its £28 billion Green Investment pledge was the biggest flipflop of the year, out of a strong list of contenders. Now Labour has rowed back further, deciding not to ban the sale of new gas boilers by 2035, and backtracking on plans to stop diesel cars being sold in 2030.

We're left with Great British Energy, which hardly anyone understands, a seemingly unrealistic target of a decarbonised grid by 2030, and some sort of Global Clean Power Alliance, which as yet has no other members. Admittedly, Labour lifted the de facto ban on wind farms, and stopped new licenses for North Sea Oil, but the party's union backers claim a significant downside with the latter: the potential loss of 200,000 jobs .

With the sale of electric vehicles stalling, and their running costs, in any case, reported to be twice that of petrol ones, we can see which way the net-zero wind is blowing. None of this means that climate change isn't an issue. David Lammy reckons it's a bigger threat than the potential for a third world war, though that was going a tad far, I thought.

But net-zero ambitions need to work with the grain of human nature. The voters simply won't accept those in power swanking around in hospitality at Arsenal and Taylor Swift concerts before jetting off to Davos in gifted designer clothing, while telling the rest of us to install heat pumps we fear won't work properly and cost the earth, and to buy electric vehicles that burn holes in pockets and for which the infrastructure just isn't there.

So, the SNP in Scotland and Labour in England can talk the green talk and set impressive-sounding targets. All fine and dandy. But they're merely setting themselves up for yet more humiliating U-turns. And they appear to be the only ones who can't see them coming.