Mythbusters #3 “It’s gonna cost you?”

Photo by Tanya Prodaan on Unsplash

In the PM election debate Rishi Sunak said, and I paraphrase, “I am not going to impose thousands of pounds of costs on you to rip out your boiler, change your car, convert your home”

But from next year, it should save you money. This graph from Bloomberg shows the cost of an average EV compared to an average Internal Combustion Engine car. This hits parity next year, and gets cheaper from then on.

The latest iteration of BYDs Seagull retails new at $9,700 (£7,600). That’s the writing on the wall for fossil fuel vehicles. How much will it cost you to hang on to one?

When it comes to heat pumps, Sunak seems to have forgotten his own government’s target of installing 600,000 a year by the end of the decade which will require more upfront government support to make it viable. But, once the system is in, current generation heat pumps can already save money for households that have one, as this graph from Octopus shows (see savings relative to a gas boiler in the final column).

Scaremongering is a standard Conservative campaigning technique. But scaremongering about necessary measures to combat the climate crisis shows how unserious and unfit they are to have any aspiration to remaining a governing party – and doing so in a way that misleads people helpfully sets them up to have their bubble burst.