The Tories can restore some climate sanity

Job-killing policies won’t wash with the party’s new voters but there is room for a green compromise

As an MP in a former coal mining constituency until 2017, I never saw climate change raised on the doorsteps. Now, it’s placed about fifth by voters of all demographics when they’re asked to rank issues in order of importance. And in the focus groups I ran throughout the election campaign among lower-middle and workingclass voters – the very people who have just given Boris Johnson a majority – it was brought up all the time.

But Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens, who put climate change front and centre of their election campaigns, spectacularly misunderstood what these voters mean when they say they care about the environment. Such voters make no link between climate change and energy. They feel really strongly about plastics in the oceans and the loss of wildlife habitats. But blank faces meet questions about carbon emissions or “net zero” (the fashionable slogan of climate campaigners today).

Eventually you might get, “Oh! Cars idling outside schools!” Air pollution – they really hate that. And when people have net-zero explained to them, they think it’s a great idea. It’s the next question that is more problematic: “Who should pay?” “It’s one thing wanting to and another thing being able to,” they say.

These are people who know within 50p what’s in the kitty. They say they can’t pay any more for energy or fuel and certainly can’t afford to have their taxes raised. “If it’s between global warming and putting food on the kids’ table, you’d put food on the table.”

This is the problem for the green movement. There is a huge perception gap between ordinary voters and the delegates to climate conferences like COP25 in Madrid, where, once again, global agreement on tackling climate change has been kicked into the next meeting (in Glasgow next year).

It is a great shame that the global climate change discourse has been captured by campaign groups making ever-more impossible demands of national governments, without including, or indeed taking with them, millions of ordinary voters. By doing so, they are failing to answer some fundamental questions.

Does net-zero mean 100 per cent renewables (the total and almost immediate curtailment of fossil fuels)? Or does it mean investing in technologies that remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it under the sea? Do we want to decarbonise or de-industrialise? In short, is net-zero an ideological pursuit, or a practical approach to tackling climate change?

Framed in these terms, it becomes immediately clear that the ideological approach being pushed by many campaigners is not sustainable. It would, for example, involve asking the Government to abandon its carbonheavy Northern infrastructure plans.

But the feasibility of a more practical approach also becomes clear. It could involve, for example, using carbon taxes. Not to penalise firms that use a lot of energy (ceramics, cement, steel, paper and pulp, chemicals and pharma) to the point where they pack up their factories and leave their workers behind. Instead they would be rewarded for investment in carbon capture to store what they produce. In other words, measures are needed that would help us reduce carbon in the atmosphere while creating jobs and prosperity in the North, not costing voters more money.

Australia’s elections in May showed how important it is to get this right. The Right-wing Liberal government had just repealed Labor’s carbon tax and given permission for the opening of a vast opencast coal mine in Queensland (home of the Great Barrier Reef). Climate change protesters weren’t the only ones who thought that the election was a slam-dunk for Labor. The electorate, though, had other ideas – specifically around the jobs that the coal mine brought – and voted the Liberals back in.

It’s an important lesson if the Tories want to keep hold of their new voters: they are talking about broader environmental issues when they say they care about climate change; they are deeply price-conscious; and above all, they will vote for jobs. Without taking those into account, there is no chance of meeting net-zero. But if they do, the Tories could finally help meet our climate change targets and win votes for doing so.