New Conservative Climate Policy. 

By Paul Atkin

In her speech abandoning the Net Zero 2050 carbon target, Kemi Badenoch said one sensible thing, which could stand as an epitaph for her speech, her policy and her Party.

“We’re mortgaging our children’s future by not recognising the world has changed, we’re making things harder and harder for them across the board.”

We’re not. But she is.

With 70% of the UK electorate wanting action on climate, Lib Dem MPs in the former Blue Wall – in which you can now travel from Weston Super Mare to Eastbourne without setting foot in a single Conservative held constituency – will be sleeping soundly in their seats as the Tories turn their backs on any kind of viable future.

Her claim that she is telling “the truth on energy and net zero” has been comprehensively fact checked and debunked by Carbon Brief (Fact check – why Kemi Badenoch is wrong about UK’s Net Zero goal) and Zero Hour (Net Zero saves us money – and fast) noting primarily that the “cheap, abundant energy” Badenoch cites as essential for a good standard of living is, and increasingly will be, provided by renewables not fossils; and this will precisely “keep energy costs down, whilst reducing our impact on the environment” in the way that she says is “impossible”.

This is just one baseless assertion from which she moves swiftly on without supporting evidence because, when you get your policies off the peg from the other side of the Atlantic, why trouble yourself with troublesome facts? Turning the level of patronage up to 11 instead doesn’t really hack it for anyone not actually eager to be gaslighted.

Not even everyone on the Right is prepared to be. A trenchant demolition of the Badenoch/Trump attempt to dig in on outmoded fuel supplies from a Conservative viewpoint, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s Trump’s oil Triumphalism will end in American tears in the Daily Telegraph, of all places, is devastating and everyone should read it.

Badenoch’s claim that “Conservatives …have always been custodians of our natural environment” characterised by “cherishing the forests that breathe life into our world, protecting the rivers that nourish our lands, and preserving the landscapes that inspire our souls” would carry more weight if they hadn’t set up and presided over filling our rivers with sewage and the most ecologically impoverished country in Europe. Tall claims. Short record.

To claim, as she does, that there has been “no plan” since the Climate Change Act” is either a conscious lie or shows that she hasn’t done her homework. All she had to do was read the Climate Change Committee Reports. The planning is there. In detail.

It’s true that government policies since then have not risen sufficiently to the challenge, which is why “environmental bodies are taking the government to court – and winning – because there isn’t enough detail.” Badenoch’s genius solution to this problem? Because all that complexity is a bit of a faff, abandon the legal imperative to have a plan and just hope for the best. Simples.

She says “ we’re already one-sixth of the way through Net Zero 2050 …and we are still arguing about whether we have the plan to get there”. Of course we are. This is a colossal challenge that we have never had to face before and we will have to be arguing about it and adjusting it all the way to the end, and then some probably; like in all worthwhile human activities.

Shutting our eyes to it and pressing on regardless with existing unsustainable practices, as Badenoch would evidently prefer, will ensure that “these targets are missed in the future and our children suffer”.

Her proposal to go big for nuclear, as Reform also wants, is much more expensive than developing renewable capacity with the same level of investment and will keep electricity costs far higher than they need to be.

In a false and fading echo of Johnsonian braggadocio, it is simply not true “that the UK has made the greatest progress on carbon emissions in the developed world”. The UK actually comes in seventh, after Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria and Finland.

And if the UK is “only responsible for 1% of global emissions” we should note that

• this is above the UK’s share of global population, which is 0.84%,
• historic emissions, from having got rich by burning mountains of coal is 3% of the global total,
• and emissions from consumption (from the carbon embodied in imported goods, the UK having offshored much of its manufacturing) more than doubles the territorial figure, as can be seen from the DEFRA graph below.

So there are no laurels to rest on.

We should also note that a third of global greenhouse emissions are produced by countries with a contribution of 1% or less. If all of them were to claim special privileges because they are so small and cute, we’d be well cooked.

Her argument is particularly dishonest because the countries whose practices she wants us to emulate, in an attempt to be temporarily wealthier, the USA, Australia and Canada, are all countries with per capita carbon footprints three times heavier than the global average. These are not sustainable role models.

Her race to the bottom argument “even if we hit absolute zero, we will not have net zero around the world, if other countries are not following us” becomes a self fulfilling prophecy if we don’t “follow” the countries that are ahead of us; and bankruptcy (and not just of the moral sort) is guaranteed by not reaching it. It’s as if she is wearing a virtual reality headset in which the climate change generated “natural disasters” that are making increasing parts of the world uninsurable are simply invisible to her.

Her last arguments give a lot of games away. Because we are dependent on China for “all the key components” of solar panels, EVs, and most wind turbine manufacture is now happening there, it doesn’t matter that “costs have dropped in the last decade”, because this is a country that doesn’t “share our values”.

Her argument that “the best way to deliver clean energy and a better environment is with the market” is belied not onlyby market failure to deliver the scale of investment needed in the most developed capitalist countries, and, indeed, the necessary transition from gas boilers to heat pumps which, under the systems set up by her Party in government, we are going at about a twentieth of the pace we need to be, but also because China’s massive investment in renewable energy, solar and EVs is a result of decisions taken, and investment made, by the state. Call it “diktat” if you like. But it’s worked, and we’d all be in even more serious trouble if it hadn’t.

More to the point, even with that investment now getting to a tipping point at which renewable energy and EVs are becoming cheaper than fossil legacy technology, “the market” is still investing in the latter, not because it’s cheaper, but because it’s more profitable. The only values Conservatives respect are “exchange values”; and this will kill us if we keep indulging them.

Deng Xiaoping once remarked “I don’t care if a  cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice”. For Badenoch, the point isn’t to catch the mice, it’s to give the privately owned cat the chance to make profits, especially if the state cat catches them better. In her topsy turvy world, profitability is the imperative, environmental sustainability is optional. It is more than symbolic that Badenoch made her speech at an ad agency that works for Shell.

Either way, whatever you think of China, it is obvious that global cooperation to solve global crises involves cooperation between countries that have different “values”. The crisis is too deep to duck having to do that and any notion that “the West” has any kind of moral high ground – with its hundreds of military bases around the world, its history and present of bullying and invading the Global South, exemplified by its current complicity in the genocidal attacks on Gaza – is absurd. Many countries around the world would have every right to feel a bit fastidious in having to deal with states like ours and the USA, but needs must.

Being prepared to risk not meeting targets that give us a 50% chance of averting the worst damage from climate change, is a light minded abdication of the first responsibility of a serious political party, to seek to keep people safe. Beefing up the potential for war – what Badenoch calls “the need to spend more on defence” is the opposite of that; because it makes war more possible, diverts spending from climate investment, and impoverishes everything else in pursuit of it.

“Telling the truth on net zero and energy” not Badenoch’s cynical lies “is just the start of actually ensuring we leave an inheritance for the next generation”.

It certainly is “time to stop pretending everything will be fine” because “climate change exists” , pretending that it doesn’t, or failure to tackle it doesn’t have serious and immediate consequences, is indeed “when politics turns into fantasy” .

If we do “want to leave a much better environmental inheritance for (our) children” we have to take it seriously enough to analyse, plan and mobilise the whole of society to make the changes we need to make, which will involve significantly more state investment  -at least on the scale of Labour’s cancelled £28 billion a year – not just hope that “maybe some of it” might turn out alright so long as we cross our fingers, close our eyes and whistle in the darkness believing Micawberishly that “something will turn up”.

Where Badenoch is bang on is in her recognition that in last year’s General Election “the public made it very clear that the Conservative Party needed some time away from government.”

 Quite so. And on the evidence of this speech, forever would be good.