He's a CBS Eye of the World. I'm John Nacho with my colleague Joseph Sternberg. He's

in London. He writes politically economics. He's a member of the editorial board. He's

also someone who can explain to me some of the intricate details of the Sunack government,

also the British government banning new gas boilers. Here's the line. One of Britain's

biggest housebuilders is to install heat pumps in its new homes as standard. As the government

capital G prepares to ban new gas boilers. Now, Joe, the reason I make this careful

reading is because recently we had an excitement here that somebody was thinking about doing

away with natural gas stoves, with gas stoves, which upset everybody. Everybody who knows

how to cook said, what are you crazy? I'm going to be a rebel. What is a gas boiler to

be banned? The thing to understand about UK houses is that they tend not to have furnaces

in the way that a lot of American households do, and they also tend not to have hot water

tanks. So instead, you have a unit about the size of a cabinet in your kitchen, generally

fired by natural gas, sometimes by electricity, that provides both the hot water to your

taps, so like your kitchen sink and your shower, and also heats the water for the radiators

that you use for central heating. The vast majority of these in the UK are gas fired.

I think that the government estimates that somewhere around 85% of English households

are heated by natural gas fired, boilers providing the hot water and the central heating.

So of course, eliminating these boilers was a central clank of Boris Johnson's environmental

policy. Trying to replace them with heat pumps, this would be enormously disruptive, very

expensive for a lot of homeowners, landlords who would have to do it. The government would

have to be probably very involved in subsidizing it. So this was very controversial when it

came out. And in fact, there were a lot of signs that the politicians were kind of backing

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