If we do what the green BBC says, we’ll have a £625 billion bill

Back in 2006, Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s chief environment correspondent, was the organiser of that famous, no longer “secret” seminar when the BBC’s top executives, after a day-long love-in with a roomful of green activists, decided to ignore their statutory obligation to “impartiality” and to become an all-out propagandist for the global-warming industry.

Since then no one has done more than Harrabin to push the party line, whether he is telling us about that “vanishing” Arctic ice, or echoing a press release on the latest crackpot green energy scheme. On last Tuesday’s programme, he was plugging yet another new scheme from a green lobby group, whereby every one of Britain’s “25 million homes” (actually it’s now 26 million) should be made “zero carbon”.

The last time anyone came up with this idea, as I reported back in 2011, it was the government, which wanted to make it compulsory under planning law that by 2016 every new home built in Britain must give off no CO2 emissions. In 2015 this makebelieve project was quietly dropped.

But now it has been brought back on to the agenda by the Green Buildings Council, for the members of which, of course, it could be a rather lucrative business opportunity. Harrabin wheeled on a lady from south London to tell us how pleased she was to have invested £25,000 in getting her home totally insulated, because this would help the fight against “climate change”.

A lobby group spokesman said that if everyone followed her example, we might all live “longer, healthier, happier lives”: even if, to meet the target, this would need one more home to go “zero carbon” every minute between now and 2050.

All Mr Harrabin didn’t tell us was that, at £25,000 a time, the total bill could amount to £625 billion.

The BBC may want us to fall for this, but somehow I don’t think it is going to happen.