Boris Johnson: a green revolutionary?
“Our fearless leader has descended from the mountain with a ten-commandment plan for a Green Industrial Revolution,” said Matt Ridley in The Sunday Telegraph. Published last week, Boris Johnson’s road map has been designed to set Britain on the path to reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050. By 2030, the Prime Minister promises, offshore wind power will be quadrupled, providing enough clean energy to power every home in Britain. Gas boilers will be replaced by heat pumps. Zero-emissions planes and ships will be developed. The nation will become a world leader in hydrogen power, carbon capture and the next generation of nuclear reactors. And by 2030, ten years earlier than planned, the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans will be banned. This vast enterprise will cost £12bn, and it will create 250,000 “high-skilled green jobs”.
“I am glad that Johnson takes green politics seriously enough to commit the Government to such ambitious targets,” said John Rentoul in The Independent. But his plan doesn’t add much to the “glorious froth” of his Tory Conference speech, which promised to “harvest the gusts” and make the UK “the Saudi Arabia of wind”. It is “alarming”, for instance, that three of his ten points rely on technology which has not yet been developed in an affordable form: from carbon-free aircraft to carbon capture and green hydrogen. Every leader today has to bow to the “green agenda”, said Allister Heath in The Daily Telegraph. What’s worrying is that Johnson seems to have caved in to the green “ultras”, with their “authoritarian hair-shirt, command and control, Stone Age” thinking. The plan to ban petrol and diesel cars by 2030 will impose great costs on UK consumers. It has the potential to unleash “myriad poll tax moments” and “gilets jaunes- style revolts”.
There are “many gaps” in Johnson’s ten-point plan, said the FT. For a start, setting Britain on the path to net zero will take a great deal more state investment. The £12bn in promised government funding includes just £3bn of new money; Germany, by contrast, is investing s40bn. Nevertheless, Johnson has “planted a political flag at a critical moment”. The pandemic represents an excellent opportunity to “build back better”. The PM is quite right to attempt this “historic shift” to a sustainable way of living, said The Times. He is also right “to seize greenery as a Conservative issue”, because it will both conserve the planet and foster new industries. His green agenda represents “a viable way forward for his troubled premiership”.