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 debates that followed it, seem trivial.
As a Treasury minister at the time it was clear the costs were likely to be astronomical. To his credit, Philip Hammond, the chancellor at the time, bristled at the vaguery of this announcement and pushed back. Banning plastic straws had been subjected to more detailed analysis, 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.
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 political and economic trade-offs that accompany it. The result is a dangerous 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, when it contacts reality this approach unravels. Labour’s finger-in-the-air £28billion pound spending pledge is the latest casualty. But behind it lies bigger skeletons. For instance, Labour 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 and the scale of their deceit becomes clear. They are promising a million new green jobs over the next 10 years, playing to a narrative that reaching net zero can regenerate areas left behind by deindustrialisation. It is true that some well-paying green jobs will be created. But the boom is unlikely to materialise. America may be able to reshore green manufacturing jobs but only through enormous subsidies and tariffs.
Rishi Sunak is the first prime minister to have begun to confront the trade-offs of net zero. He has made steps to curb the excesses of the green movement, recalibrating targets to sit behind credible plans and reducing the burden on working families. He has focused on pro-business solutions like improving our grid infrastructure.
But more honesty in the debate and realism in policymaking is needed. The energy secretary Clare 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 aren’t mainstream yet.
Elsewhere the Government needs to make tough choices. It is right to expand our nuclear power baseload. But at present we have what the Commons science committee called a nuclear “wish list”. We won’t deliver on this if we keep our kafkaesque planning system. Sizewell C nuclear plant’s development, for example, runs to 14 years and 44,000 pages.
As we have seen across Europe the public are sick of dishonesty by the political class about what net zero entails. To reckon with the public will force policymakers to balance net zero against our security and economy in a more responsible way.
‘Banning plastic straws had been subjected to more detailed analysis’ ‘The result is dangerous green politics unmoored from reality that lacks the buy-in of the public’