A letter in the Sunday Times:

Your article on the battle over the technology used to remove carbon emissions from heating rightly mentions the heavy lobbying by the gas industry to promote hydrogen over heat pumps (News Review, last week). As my own research shows, lobbying power is stacked in favour of these companies because of their market dominance. In reality, heat pumps are the only deployable option in the short term; and studies have shown there are fundamental problems with hydrogen.

It is worth noting the connection to your separate articles on lobbying. Join the dots and you’ll find a number of energy lobby group chief executives with easy access to politicians. It’s no surprise hydrogen is high up the policy agenda.

Richard Lowes, Energy Policy Group, University of Exeter

People can only lobby government over a particular technology if it is government deciding which particular technology should be used.

This being exactly what the Stern Review told us should not be done. Instead, set up the system so that no specific path, plan, technology or solution be decided upon, just internalise those externalities and see what happens. The reason being that government picking losers is inefficient and if our reaction to climate change is to be inefficient then we’ll do less of it.

That people lobby for what Mr. Lowes insists is the wrong solution is all the argument required to insist that lobbying not be the basis of the decision. Set the goal, by all means - heating houses to the temperature desired by those who live in them at the lowest overall cost including that upon the climate. Then leave the market to work out what is that lowest cost technology.

After all, people only lobby government in order to gain privileges from government. If privileges won’t, cannot, be granted then the lobbying won’t happen.