The public are sick of politicians’ dishonesty about what net zero entails
It’s a depressing paradox of government that while the smallest policy changes can be debated ad nauseam, the most profound are often decided without a proper debate at all.
Net zero sits in the latter camp. It was decided upon after Theresa May had agreed to stand down, while the country was occupied by Brexit debates, and nodded through the Commons with fewer than 90 minutes of debate. The consequences of this statutory instrument will make the decision to leave the EU, and the incessant debates that followed it, seem trivial.
As a Treasury minister at the time it was clear the costs associated with this intervention were likely to be astronomical. The plan to achieve this goal had not been given anywhere near the level of scrutiny it warranted. To his credit, the then Chancellor Philip Hammond bristled at the vaguery of this announcement and firmly pushed back. Banning plastic straws had been subjected to more detailed analysis for goodness sake, we protested. He was overruled.
Five years of debate later and few in Westminster grasp the enormity of the undertaking. Reaching net zero by 2050 requires us to overhaul the material foundations of our economy in just three decades. There is no historical precedent for such a change. It constitutes an eye-wateringly radical revolution; a bet on scientific progress in technology that doesn’t yet exist.
The net zero commitment set out the end but not the means to get there. The competing questions of cost, energy security and practicality were all left unaddressed. Unsurprisingly, what has followed is a collection of decisions that have lacked a detailed plan or joined-up thinking.
Ever-more ambitious targets are not the long-term strategic plan we need. But they have proliferated across Western polities in an attempt to be seen making progress on decarbonisation while dodging the intensely difficult political and economic trade offs that accompany it. The result is a dangerous fantasy green politics unmoored from reality and that lacks the buy-in of the public. As we see in Europe, with yet more protests on the streets this week, when it contacts reality this approach quickly unravels.
Labour’s finger-in-the-air £28 billion pound spending pledge is the latest casualty , ditched after a long stint on political death row. But behind it lies bigger skeletons. For instance, Labour have promised to decarbonise the grid by 2030. Nobody credible in the energy industry thinks it is achievable. If they were reckless enough us to deliver this it would lead to power blackouts.
Dig deeper into Labour’s plans and the scale of their deceit become clear. They are promising a million new green jobs over the next 10 years, playing to a broader narrative that the reaching net zero can regenerate areas left behind by deindustrialisation. And it is undoubtedly true that some well-paying green jobs will be generated.
But the boom promised is unlikely to materialise. America may be able to re-shore (now) green manufacturing jobs but only through enormous subsidies and tariffs in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that we can’t and wouldn’t wish to compete with. Pretending otherwise is offensive to the electorate and sets up political reckonings of the sort we are already seeing across the European continent.
Rishi Sunak is the first Prime Minister to have begun to confront the trade offs of net zero that he also saw from his time in the Treasury. He has made sensible first steps to curb the excesses of the green movement, recalibrating targets to sit behind credible plans and reducing the burden on working families. And he has focussed on practical pro-business solutions like improving our desperately limited grid infrastructure.
But more honesty in the public debate and realism in policymaking is urgently needed. The energy secretary Claire Coutinho would be right to relax the “boiler tax” on companies that don’t meet heat pump targets which is being passed onto consumers. Much like EVs, heat pumps are a technology that despite the nudges and huge subsidies simply aren’t mainstream yet. Hard-pressed families shouldn’t be punished for that.
Elsewhere the Government needs to make tough choices. The government is right to massively expand our nuclear power baseload. There is no future in which this won’t be beneficial. But at present we have what the Commons science committee described as a nuclear “wish list’. We won’t deliver on this if we keep our Kafkaesque planning system that, to take Sizewell C nuclear plant’s development as an example, runs to 14 years and 44,000 pages.
As we have seen across Europe the public are sick of systematic dishonesty by the political class about what net zero entails. To reckon with the public will not only bring more people onside-it will force policymakers to balance net zero against our security and economy in a more responsible and pragmatic way. Until then politicians will keep driving political instability that blows back painfully in their faces.