A Net Zero ‘nudge unit’ that used scare tactics during the Covid pandemic has received a £100,000 contract from the Government to encourage the public to take up heat pumps. The Telegraph has the story.
The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) has received a £100,000 contract from the Government as Ministers aim to deliver an extra 300,000 home upgrades this year.
Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, plans to scrap noise restrictions on heat pumps and lift the limit on their size in a push to expand their use.
The team was launched in 2010 under Lord Cameron’s administration in an effort to design policy interventions informed by human behaviour and has widely been viewed as a success in Whitehall.
However, Simon Ruda, a behavioural scientist who co-founded the unit, suggested in 2022 that scare tactics had been misused during Covid lockdowns to ensure the public complied with the rules.
While he defended behavioural science for driving improvements in policy, Mr. Ruda said he was concerned the “level of fear willingly conveyed on the public” was the “most egregious and far-reaching mistake” of the coronavirus response.
The BIT’s work during the pandemic included an online experiment conducted in March 2020, the month of the first lockdown, to test which public health messages the public would remember.
Now the unit is expected to conduct similar research on heat pumps after being tasked with combatting what the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) calls “misinformation”.
Toby Park, the Head of Climate, Energy and Sustainability at BIT, claimed too many “myths” exist around the technology and that negative perceptions were a “barrier” to expanding their use.
Worth reading in full.
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“Toby Park, the Head of Climate, Energy and Sustainability at BIT, claimed too many “myths” exist around the technology and that negative perceptions were a “barrier” to expanding their use.”
Please Mr Park, list all of these terrible myths so we can all analyse them through the lens of truth,fact and science
On behalf of Mr Park let me explain it to you: shut up.
Market forces says that nobody wants them.
Of course, market forces are the enemy of communism.
Market forces never wanted HS2
They are also the enemy of Stakeholder Capitalism The Great Reset
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CAiTHWBM18&t=2692s
Excellent.
Forewarned is forearmed. Not that I needed any warning. My default position on anything from officiadom is that they are lying and that remains the case until I have completed my research to confirm that they are indeed lying.
Are you saying you don’t trust the nations ‘ministry of truth’? ..shame on you
I’m sure Mr Toby Park will be sharing details of his dwelling and heating arrangements, with how many units he consumes and how much his energy costs now that he has a heat pump (LOL) compared to before, and including total cost of ownership calculated over a suitable period, always bearing in mind that the comparison before and after must be using the same target temperature.
Cost before and after, look no further than Swansea Tidal Lagoon.
I’d not heard of that
The Blue Eden project seems like pie in the sky
Or when they officially deny something.
The nudge unit (aka tax payer funded propaganda for use by elites) was not designed to “design policy interventions informed by human behaviour”. The unit was specifically designed to cajole people into doing what the elites wanted.
Covid was a good example. The policies adopted did not reflect public attitudes (nor, we know now and suspected then), scientific or statistical evidence. The public were propagandised, insulted and made fearful to achieve the novel and disastrous policies the elites wanted to try.
Similarly with Net Zero.
I hope Reform UK not only reject the policy and practice of propaganda with green energy, but also put practitioners on notice that it is party political campaigning for which there will be a price to pay when Reform get office.
While the Electoral Commission suggests changes to the law to damage Reform (even though ithe EC is meant to be only a bureaucracy), and the MSM pile in to help their preferred parties, it seems that none of those defenders of freedom have any problem with mass propaganda.
The free view channel U&Yesterday are playing a WWII programme in which they wonder how the German people could have been persuaded to do what they did. The term “leadership” was used by an academic psychologist.
I wonder if she had ever heard of German propaganda. Maybe today’s psychologists don’t use that word anymore. Perhaps she works for the government propaganda unit.
Propaganda these days is wrapped up in warm and fluffy words that more generally agree with. But people should look at what Government does, not what they say. I’m sure the farmers would agree.
I can’t believe there are many left that still believe anything the Student Union says given how many lies they told up pre-election.
Warning: be prepared to be disappointed.
I see that the UK ‘Health Security Agency’ tells us not to go out in the morning or evening when the weather is bad! No …. Sherlock. What happens if they find out I’ve walked the dog at 7 am???
I would hope that we are growing the same distrust in the legacy media that they have in the US after 4 years of leftie anti-Trump lies.
Treat any announcement, from anyone or any thing, as though it was generated by Artificial Intelligence.
Even ‘Trust and Verify’ is going further than I would like with many sources.
Sadly with Covid though, a lot has remained. I had a conversation the other day where someone was amazed at the numbers of people coughing on a bus, so he put his mask on – “even if I’m not infected, at least they’ll be protected from me” was his phrase.
The behavioural insight that this unit needs is that we’re onto their lies and distortions and won’t be fooled by their unscientific drivel.
Revealing that you are going to lie to everyone, is not really the smartest plan, is it.? Still the more they do it, the easier it is to spot, and the fewer people get taken in by it.
They can nudge all they want, but if you don’t have a spare £ 200, 000 lying around, then you cannot make an old house ready for Nut Zero.
So all those people who bought their dream homes in the Cotswolds, should have bought a boat.
With all the people currently living in houses incapable of reaching the required insulation standards for fitting a heat pump…”their goner need a bigger boat!”
There’s one inconsistency in this article that really leaps out: it talks about “300,000 home upgrades”, but then mentions heat pumps. If you’re interested in being able to keep your house warm at a reasonable cost, then a heat pump is more likely to be a downgrade. Especially if you’re going to need an immersion heater to give you hot water that’s hot enough to kill legionella.
Interesting how Miliband wants to scrap noise restrictions, knowing that noise is going to be a real problem in densely populated areas. It smacks of desparation to me.
Many properties no longer have space provided or spare to accommodate a hot water tank. People used to hot water on demand won’t want to have to wait for the water to get hot again after other members of the household have had showers/baths and used it up.
ie my childhood
The scrapping of noise restrictions was the big issue that really worries me. I have contemplated dark revenge scenarios on my husband when he makes his cups of tea and keeps banging the spoon in the mug as he stirs it over and over and over……..AAGHH!
It’s sadly instructive to note that the existence of this team, while not exactly front and centre, is not a secret. Many probably have not really realised this is just a propaganda unit, many others are fine with the propaganda because it’s angled towards other people being badgered into doing what they think other people should be doing. Certainly among the middle class people I know, it’s pretty common to think it’s OK for laws to be passed or taxes or propaganda to be used to push people into behaving in certain ways that these middle class people approve of. These middle class people are the “educated employed” rather than the more entrepreneurial types who tend to have a saner view of the world.
And a lot of them are employed in jobs that produce no value so are parasites living off the wealth producers.
Probably. I guess it depends how you define value. In a perfect market, there should be no such jobs, but of course there are, even in the private sector. More in the public sector as the relationship between buyer and seller is further distorted by coercion (though in theory public sector jobs that produce nothing would not exist because the voters would vote against any politician that supported this, however this assumes perfect voters…).
They are entitled to their (largely stupid IMO) beliefs, but the fascist bastards want to impose them on me…
Negative “myths” – they mean truths.
If they are abolishing noise restrictions that means heat pumps being noisy isn’t a myth, it’s true!
Nudging will be no match for the free market process and consumer preferences. Irrespective of cash-bribes, people will still have to fork out large wads of cash, have their homes pulled about to get new radiators, pipework and insulation AND have to get a copper storage tank with immersion heater and find somewhere to put it, then have to plan showers and baths for the family around how long it takes to get a tank of hot water and use it sparingly.
It’s not going to be the same as scaring people to cover their faces with bits of paper or cloth.
Few these days buy the catastrophic climate change fraud anyway.
Nudge away. I won’t be buying one.
I thought that they were just BIT players
Next these zealots will be pushing Smart Meters on people before, like in many European countries, they become mandatory.
At least the meters are smarter than those having them installed.
They are aiming at 2030 but they haven’t got until 2030. It is simply impossible for that system to continue for that long. The Anglo-Americans aren’t going down lightly. There is only so much that you can do with managed decline. Major escalations with catastrophic results so I wouldn’t worry too much about heat pumps.
Propaganda pushing useless heat pumps
What sort of mentally deformed creep works in a nudge unit?
I reckon it’s those who can’t get a real job.
I chair the UK Noise Association. There remains real concerns around the noise impacts of heat pumps yet Ed Miliband is willing to brush those all aside in his evangelical zeal to reach net zero. Both the Institute of Acoustics and the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health Officers have said there are potential noise problems. This is paticularly the case for people living in flats, shared housing or in terraced homes. This ‘nudge’ unit apparently has no concerns about the ethics of persuading the poorest in our society to install heat pumps that could cause them noise problems for the rest of their lives in order to help the Government meet its wildly aspirational climate targets.
Not sure how “nudging” me to ignore the FACTS that heat pumps aren’t suitable for most British homes; cost a fortune to buy and install when compared with a gas boiler; cost a fortune to run since electricity is about 8 times the price of gas and come with anything up to a £30,000 price tag to insulate, upgrade and redecorate your house.
It’s going to be interesting …..
It should be law that anyone who ‘nudges’ someone else into using a product should have to exclusively use that product themselves and prove it daily. There’s no way on Earth these grifters are sat at home in 16C temperatures after having spent upwards of 20K on devices that heat your home to the outdoor temperature of Shetland in the summer.
Myths eh
https://www.geplus.co.uk/news/two-dead-after-explosion-in-bedford-following-heat-pump-drilling-04-11-2024/
Negative perception like bearings wearing out very quickly, they are unable to heat in the winter, they form a skating rink in their vicinity and kill garden plants with ice blast.
I would think the BIT nudge unit has rather screwed itself with its shenanigans during covid years. Although many succumbed to the covid nudges back then, including me, after all it was a first for all of us and covid was a new unknown. However, we are much wiser now and able to see more clearly through the scary alarmist bs. I expect to see the same level of resistance to heat pumps as we are currently seeing with EVs. Nudge away but expect to be hit back hard.
The fact that anything green needs to be subsidised, be it wind, solar, EVs, heat pumps and needs its opposition hobbled with green taxes indicates how useless it is.
More taxpayer money spent on more lying to the British public.
99% of the misinformation comes from MSM and the Government.
With a bit of luck we might get a nasty power cut this winter for a few days during a cold spell. People will wake up and realise that Heat pumps and EVs are a disaster if you can’t produce enough electricity.