Modern politics seldom has room for an issue to have more than two sides. You’re either for something, or against it – or at least, the otherside is for something so you’d better be against it, or vice versa.
Partly this is because we’re still by instinct fairly binary creatures, and partly its because such a simplistic frame suits the media. A TV producer organising a segment on a topic will know what angles they’re looking for before they book their guests; explaining that actually you take a third position will mostly just ensure you don’t get booked.
Net Zero is a subject that feels especially prone to this dynamic, because whether or not one is pro- or anti-Net Zero serves (or is widely perceived to serve) as a shorthand for one’s broader political position. Which is unfortunate, because whilst cleaning up our environmental footprint would be a very good thing, Theresa May’s Net Zero target was a very bad way of going about it.
I have written previously about the problem of “legacy by deadline”, of which the target is a pre-eminent example:
“But once again, MPs opted for the sugar rush of voting for the nice thing whilst setting a hard deadline for comfortably after they will have left office – kicked into the long run. And once again, that has spared them the need to confront the ugly political choices getting there will involve.”
The basic idea is pretty simple: if subsequent generations of politicians hit the target, you get the credit for being the visionary who set it; if they fail, you still get the credit and they get blamed for letting you down.
But it leads to very bad policymaking. Consider Net Zero: the good way to deliver it (in my view) is one oriented around the fact that clean energy is guilt-free energy, and we could therefore suddenly generate vast amounts of it without harming the planet. A major investment programme in nuclear (and attendant infrastructure) could reverse the UK’s current energy sickness, bringing down bills, reviving manufacturing and R&D in energy-intensive technologies, and more.
The problem is that such an approach requires taking action now, because big infrastructure investments take a relatively long time to deliver and start paying off. But the Net Zero deadline operates in entirely the opposite way: the politicians with the most time to act have the least incentive to do so, because the legal deadline is yet far away (and if they were minded to make a productive contribution, they could have done so rather than setting a target).
Suddenly, that legal deadline starts becoming a barrier to positive action, because there is no longer time to undertake big, time-consuming capital projects to hit it (and the demography-driven fiscal pressures which made those original politicians not want to make that capital commitment have only got worse, too).
As a result, the default setting becomes what we might call ‘Net Zero Negative’: crushing demand through sky-high bills, forced upwards by various levies and the mounting costs of bad policies, such as this year’s £1 billion bill for switching off redundant wind farms. It has also led to vacuous and expensive gesture politics, such as cancelling a new coking coal mine in Cumbria or refusing new licences for North Sea oil and gas exploration (in both cases, we’ll just be importing the resources from overseas).
The question is whether Kemi Badenoch can avoid falling into the same binary trap. Her decision to commit to scrapping the Climate Change Act’s legal Net Zero target is not, in itself, a bad thing; but a wholesale pivot away from clean energy, specifically nuclear, would be.
A sensible nuclear programme need not conflict with, for example, heavy exploitation of the North Sea – not only are we going to need oil and gas for decades to come, but oil will remain absolutely essential to the petrochemial industry (which is forecast to balloon in size over the coming decades) even once we stop burning it. Nor does it preclude exploiting shale gas as a bridging energy resource and export commodity.
But Britain’s long-term prosperity and energy security rest also on getting a head start on tomorrow’s power sources. Nuclear could herald not only the long-delayed era of electricity that’s too cheap to meter, but a well-incubated domestic sector could become a powerful vector both for exports and soft power as other countries confront the steep technological hurdles of starting a nuclear programme from scratch. That the planet benefits too is a delightful bonus.