Net zero aspirations remain valid but the priorities have changed - David Behrens

These “experts”, who seem to far outnumber actual medical staff in today’s health service, would also like us to re-adopt face marks as we scuttle between our homes and the centre aisle at Aldi to stock up on electric throws and all the other newly-devised gadgets designed to heat corners of our homes without running up the gas bill.

Wearing a mask is not necessarily bad advice but few will do it. The fact is that despite the restrictions of three years ago – or perhaps because of them – we’ve stopped taking our health seriously, until it’s too late. Getting a doctor’s appointment has become more trouble than it’s worth for all but the most desperate cases; flu vaccines are going spare because not enough parents want their children to have them; even toothbrushes, we were told this week, are now luxury items in many households.

We’re becoming a nocturnal nation that shivers at home by day and then goes out to spread our germs and bad breath around town. It’s surprising so many newly liberated Chinese tourists apparently want to come here.

This new lifestyle of ours – it’s too ingrained to be dismissed as a passing trend – presents a wider challenge for public health policymakers. Across Yorkshire, councils are poised to spend billions of pounds in pursuit of “net zero” targets conceived in an era that no longer reflects life as we live it.

In York alone, nearly £4bn has been earmarked by the end of the decade for infrastructure projects designed to ensure that people can go about their business without generating more greenhouse gases than they remove. The city needed to “go big or go home”, boasted one council executive, having apparently not noticed that everyone was at home already.

And in West Yorkshire this week, the mayor declared a “climate emergency”, warning that one in every nine jobs would have to change substantially if targets were to be met.

The targets in question are being promoted by the Local Government Association and other bodies for whom the phrase net zero has become both a mantra and an excuse for pursuing or abandoning policies that are deemed to fit the narrative, or not.

In York this manifests itself as 73,000 heat pumps, 91,000 electric vehicles and around one home in four generating its own solar electricity. That’s according to the firm of consultants hired by the council, which then passed the buck and said it would be up to the city’s political leaders to deliver it all.

The council’s policy department admitted it would depend on getting “megabucks” from unnamed sources, which doesn’t sound like a thought-through business strategy.

But in a perverse way, it’s helpful that the plans are not more advanced – because given the changes of the last three years, they should really be torn up and started over. The aspirations remain valid but the priorities have changed.

And anyway, can any council justify expense on that scale when so many people are reliant on food banks to feed their families and brush their teeth? In that context, heat pumps and electric cars suddenly don’t seem so urgent.

The next few weeks will see the publication of a report by the soon-to-retire Tory MP Chris Skidmore on the provenance of the government’s ambition to become net zero by 2050. It’s being seen as a test of the Prime Minister’s green credentials but it will also serve as a reality check on which policies today’s Britain needs, and which it can afford.

Already there have been hints from Whitehall of a shift in emphasis brought on by Russia’s weaponisation of energy across Europe. But the clearest indication of a change in the way the wind is blowing has been the greenlightning of the UK’s first coal mine in three decades.

It will belch 400,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year, not counting those from the coal it produces – which makes the proposed savings in York seem like whistling in the wind. But never mind – it’s in the North and so counts towards the delusory levelling-up agenda.

With so many of the basics of life in short supply right now, the hypocrisy of encouraging carbon neutrality and fossil fuel extraction at the same time makes no sense at all. Is it any wonder we’d rather shut out reality at home under an electric throw?