Keir Starmer parrots a rightwing narrative against cutting emissions on a household level, writes Charlie Chamberlain. And Alastair Nisbet wants to bring back the feed-in tariff

I wanted to believe Keir Starmer would make Cop29 the moment he made good on his earlier green promises (Editorial, 12 November). In one sense, he didn’t disappoint, stating that he would oversee a cut in emissions of 81% by 2035 on 1990 levels. Great. But how? Essentially decarbonising the grid but “not telling people how to live their lives”.

As a retrofit project coordinator working in social housing, I fear this means Starmer is following his predecessor Rishi Sunak down the route of “we still care about net zero, we just don’t want it to cost votes from landlords or make people think they will have their gas boilers forcibly ripped out” (the latter was never on the cards, new boilers just wouldn’t have been installed). This matters because 20% of UK carbon emissions come from domestic properties. If we don’t tackle our draughty and leaky housing stock – the worst in western Europe – we will never reach net zero by 2050. We need to be retrofitting 1.5 homes a minute.