Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.
When Reform UK announced its energy policy last week, I expected the chorus of boos from the Left. What did come as a surprise, however, was the massive thumbs down from the Right.
Naturally, green-minded Tories — as represented by the Conservative Environment Network (CEN) — were among the critics. But so were some more sceptical voices, like Dan Hannan and Julian Jessop. Even Harry Wilkinson, who’s head of policy at the Global Warming Policy Foundation — and therefore normally at odds with CEN — was unimpressed.
“Reform’s latest contribution to the Net Zero debate leaves a lot to be desired“, he said.
He’s not wrong there. No matter where you stand on energy and climate policy, Reform’s thinking — as articulated by Richard Tice — just doesn’t add up.
It begins with a promise to “lower energy bills for working people“. But what follows is a programme of additional taxation and onerous regulation — two approaches not famously associated with cost reduction.
In addition to slapping new taxes on the renewables industry, Reform say they’ll “force National Grid to put cables underground“. One teensy little problem with that though — burying power lines is much more expensive than using pylons. According to National Grid, “undergrounding” (or using undersea cables) would raise the cost of the new Norwich to Tilbury grid link from £793 million to between £2 and 4 billion. That extra cost would be added to our bills.
At some point in the future, it’s possible that innovative methods — like the use of tunnelling robots — will transform the economics. But why would companies invest in new tech, when it could be subject to punitive regulations by capricious politicians? And there’s no better example of that right now than what Mr Tice wants to do to battery energy storage systems (BESS).
This tech does what it says on the tin, i.e. use batteries (big ones) to store power. Such reserves help to balance fluctuating levels of supply and demand across the grid. It’s not the complete solution to challenges of managing a low carbon and fully electrified economy, but it is a vital part of the toolkit — which is why other countries, including China, are investing billions into the technology. And no wonder: batteries, along with solar cells and microchips, are an innovation hot spot — with a proven track record of rapid advances in performance and productivity.
If you want to know which technologies will most shape the future look at their cost curves.
And yet Reform’s policy is to ban BESS. Unbelievably, they’re justifying this on health-and-safety grounds. Yes, batteries do sometimes catch fire — but it’s also true that gas leaks cause explosions, oil depots go up in flames and nuclear reactors malfunction. Does Richard Tice propose a ban on those technologies too? And will he also prohibit the use of batteries in cars, computers and household appliances. Or has he just singled out one particular application of one particular technology because for some reason he’s taken against it?
This isn’t even close to serious policy making — and Nigel Farage ought to know it. Reform does, of course, need to provide a clear alternative to the establishment view, but the closer the party gets to power the more credible that alternative needs to be. So how did they end up with such a ridiculous energy policy?
Well, perhaps they should blame the Tories. Conservative policy on these issues has lurched so far to the Right lately that, in an attempt to outflank us, Reform may have gone overboard.
Under Boris Johnson, we were still proudly leading the western world on climate action. Even Liz Truss, during the 2022 leadership contest, was committed to achieving the UK’s Net Zero goals. The anti-green turn started under Rishi Sunak after the false dawn of the Uxbridge by-election. He was followed by Kemi Badenoch who said that though she isn’t a climate sceptic, she is a Net Zero sceptic. Meanwhile, her rival for the leadership, Robert Jenrick, has gone even further by calling for the scrapping of the Climate Change Act.
Why did the party that put Net Zero into law, turn against its own policy? Indeed, how did Net Zero end up on the definitive list of Left-wing impositions that Right-wingers long to be free of?
Of course, there’s always been a tendency for anti-greenery to find a home on the Right, just the extremes of environmentalism usually emanate from the Left. But what I want to focus on is much more specific than that: the change in the political weather over the last five years.
This can be put down to an unfortunate series of events.
Firstly, the Left decided to turn the fight against climate change into a culture war. Under the influence of Greta Thunberg and friends, a unifying issue became a divisive one. The activists insisted that we achieve Net Zero not on a reasonable timeframe, but by 2030 or even earlier. To the extent that this is remotely feasible, it would require a centralised command economy and a draconian system of rationing (which, for some on the Left, is surely the main attraction).
It isn’t just what climate campaigners want but how they’ve gone about demanding it.
Groups likes Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil have pursued a campaign of civil disobedience that has alienated public opinion. Even Stonehenge was sprayed with orange paint. Rather than slapping down the radicals, mainstream green groups have tried to clamber aboard the bandwagon. A low point was when Greenpeace staged a protest at Rishi Sunak’s family home in Yorkshire. Fortunately, the Sunaks weren’t there at the time, but the violation helped drive a wedge between the Conservative government and the environmental movement.
A bad situation was made much worse by the great disruptions of early 2020s i.e. the Covid pandemic, followed by chronic supply chain problems and the cost of living crisis. With truly horrible timing, the Climate Change Committee sent a letter to the government objecting to new oil and gas production in the North Sea just as Russia invaded Ukraine — a conflict that severed energy supplies to the West.
It should be said the energy crisis was a crisis of fossil fuels, not of Net Zero — and that we’d have faced even higher bills without the progress we’ve made on renewables and energy efficiency. As for domestic oil and gas, new fields will barely dent the ongoing and inevitable decline in North Sea production. The same probably also goes for shale gas production in the UK (or just about everywhere outside North America).
But the likelihood that there’s not much more British oil and gas to be had is precisely why it was so stupid of the green Left to make such a big issue of it. Just like the German Green Party, which insisted on prematurely shutting down Germany’s nuclear power stations, our climate activists have made a virtue out of pointless self-denial.
The unintended consequence is that they’ve made Net Zero a dirty word. It always was a gimmicky term, but now it’s become the go-to reference for everything that gets up people’s noses about environmentalism.
For instance, people think that Net Zero means we can’t extract our own oil — but that’s not true: the target limits our consumption of fossil fuels, not what we can produce. Furthermore the target is for 2050 — giving us a generation to adapt, not the absurd deadlines demanded by the activists (which would only guarantee a three-figure majority for Reform at the next election).
It’s also a net target — and so with carbon capture and offsets, it would allow for some fossil fuel use to persist beyond 2050. Needless to say, it doesn’t limit the use of nuclear power at all. Most importantly, the great majority of major economies also have Net Zero targets — this is not something that Britain is doing alone or on which we are obliged to make unilateral sacrifices.
It should come as no surprise that anti-green lobbyists have done everything they can to exploit the confusion surrounding the term. To a large extent they’ve succeeded: “Net Zero” has become to the populist Right what “Brexit” is to the Remoaner Left — a universal explanation for anything and everything that goes wrong in this country.
But anyone who decries this development should ask themselves how this confusion arose in the first place. It was created by activists who thought they could use Net Zero as a hook on which to hang their own opportunistic agendas. We can only hope that despite the broken politics, clean tech advances to the point at which it becomes too cheap not to use.
If and when it does, I doubt there’ll anyone more disappointed than the Left.