Andrew Gilligan is a writer and former No10 adviser.
It’s so hard to keep up these days, isn’t it? One of the fascinating things about politics is how a policy which was conventional wisdom in the Tory Party until about five minutes ago – and was put into law, almost unopposed, by a Tory government only seven years ago – is now total anathema, an absolute bar to even being selected as a Tory candidate.
I’m talking about net zero, of course. And that’s not because I object to Kemi Badenoch’s position, or I’m in any way a supporter of net zero. As I’ve written in this space before, I do believe that man-made climate change is real, and harmful. But net zero has absolutely, well, zero chance of stopping it.
The lightbulb moment for me was when the then co-leader of the Green Party, Adrian Ramsay MP, came out against a proposed electricity pylon line through his Suffolk constituency to carry power from North Sea windfarms to London. If even the leader of the Greens isn’t willing to support even one of the politically easier, and economically least damaging, aspects of net zero policy, net zero is surely politically impossible.
And that is in one of the world’s more politically willing countries. Others, with far more C02 emissions than Britain, never paid even lip service. The international order that underpinned the UN climate change conferences is weakening. So we are dismantling parts of our economy, such as North Sea oil and gas, for nothing. Pursuing net zero as our main policy against harmful climate change is certain to fail. It means that harmful climate change is certain to happen.
Perhaps the more interesting question is what it all shows about the quality of Britain’s policymaking process. Having gone all in on a bad policy without any real debate or deep public consent, what are we doing to avoid making the same mistake again?
Simply pretending that climate change is not real or can be ignored, as some on the right do, is also a bad policy – not only inconsistent with most of the science, but inconsistent with the politics. Voters can see that the climate is changing. The first part of a better policy should be putting the threat in the right place on the priority list.
Economic and military warfare by our enemies; a new, more lethal pandemic; tech power – all these are greater external threats to Britain over the next 10-20 years than climate change, yet have often attracted less government attention and money. That is the case for moving climate change funding in the short and medium term to tackle some of those threats.
Even in the longer term, on the current evidence, climate change is not the most serious external threat to this country, though it is to other countries. For Britain its direct effect is significant, but not existential. Its indirect effect will be significant, too, in things like food supply, again not existential.
But the threat is real.
What the country needs is a proper attempt to sit down and work out what the hierarchy of threats is, what the timescale is, and what we can do about them. If there is, for instance, a high-order threat that a British government cannot do much to protect people from, and a lower-order threat that we can do a great deal to protect people from, it is still worth spending money on the lower-order threat.
And if a policy approach to a global problem like climate change can (unlike net zero) gain real global support for real global action, it’s still worth Britain contributing.
Domestically, what that means is paying far more attention to adapting to climate change, preparing for a country where there will be more heat, more flooding, and less of some kinds of food. This effort (though also mandated by the Climate Change Act) is described as inadequate, piecemeal and disjointed by official monitors. It also means continuing with as much of the carbon-reduction agenda as is politically possible and economically beneficial, including nuclear power. Internationally, what it means is exploring climate engineering, the benefits and risks of approaches such as cloud brightening.
But as far as I can tell, the Conservative Party hasn’t said much about any of this. Maybe, like other parts of our policy platform, it’s coming later. If ours is a serious governing project, rather than an Andy Burnhamesque vibes project, it needs to.