David Willetts is President of the Resolution Foundation and is a member of the House of Lords.
The recent heatwaves have brought home the reality of climate change. Wildfires, failing infrastructure and the yellowing of our green and pleasant land mean there is little room for denying that the world is getting warmer and it is happening fast.
The scorching summer has led to an interesting flurry of articles in the Daily Telegraph about what the Conservative position should be. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard argued for “Green Conservatism”. Kemi Badenoch replied that she was not a climate change denier and accepted that action was needed: the issue is what that action that might be. She said it should be based on “markets, innovation and competition”.
She is right. But any change of course needs details: what changes to emissions targets, when, and at what cost via more adaptation later.
The end of the consultation period for the Rosebank oil field yesterday brings this issue out. There are sound arguments for going ahead with both Rosebank and Jackdaw. They can help meet domestic demand, especially for gas, with greater efficiency than any alternatives. Moreover they are another example of judicial over-reach. Rishi Sunak’s Government took the decision to go ahead with them but it was struck down by judges reinterpreting the law on environmental impact assessments, saying they needed to include the downstream impact of using the oil and gas. This was not explicit in the original requirements for such assessments. The courts rejected a Governmental decision by setting a new more ambitious interpretation of how the decision should be taken. Such judicial activism is what makes it so much harder for elected governments to get things done.
Kemi Badenock rightly argues that electricity prices are too high. Bringing them down is the most effective immediate means of promoting growth, accelerating the net zero transition, and helping families deal with energy bills that have outpaced inflation since Russia invaded Ukraine.
One reason electricity prices are high is that successive Governments – including Conservative ones – have put extra costs onto them. They’ve been used to hide spending that would otherwise having to be announced at Budgets, with taxes or borrowing rising to pay for them. It is also wrong to impose such high costs on the cleanest fuel when we do not apply the same treatment for gas.
Net zero is not a political slogan or a Brussels import. It is a means to help stabilise global warming. It was largely devised here in Britain, before being signed into law by a Conservative government. This is our research and our law, not imposed on us by someone else. However there is an argument against full blown net zero. Often public policy targets for 0 or 100 per cent of anything would be better if they were 10 per cent or 90 per cent targets.
The highest costs usually come from the last part of the journey to the target. This may be the Tory argument but without identifying what a new target would be the argument is unfinished. Moreover, in this case ninety per cent of the way to net zero is not ninety per cent of the benefit, it is a slower rate of continued warming. Plus some flexibility is already built in, since the “net” means residual emissions offset by removals.
Climate change is real and we still have the capacity, indeed the responsibility, to act to reduce it and the damage it does. Recognising this should be one of the big differences between Conservatives and Reform. They still seem ambivalent about it, claiming we can simply ‘adapt’. Richard Tice yesterday toyed with Trumpian dismissal of it altogether.
Tackling climate change is where the voters are. Almost nine in ten Britons (86 per cent) now see climate change as at least partially responsible for the heatwave, and even a majority of Net Zero opponents (63 per cent) make that connection
One survey shows 48 per cent of Conservative voters and 33 per cent of Reform voters said the heatwaves made them more anxious about climate change. Indeed 35 per cent of Reform voters said tackling it should be more of a priority.
Conservatives worry that somehow tackling climate change is socialism. It need not be. The problem starts with a classic proposition of market economics that the price of energy from fossil fuels does not properly reflect its costs in the long-term damage to the environment and the planet. If those costs are properly priced in cutting back carbon emissions makes overall economic sense.
Rigorous analysis by the Climate Change Committee shows there are indeed costs to decarbonising but there are also significant gains too – electric engines have lower operating costs than many based on fossil fuel. They estimate a typical UK household will see lower and less volatile bills overall if they have an EV and a heat pump, rather than a petrol car and a gas boiler. This could add up to savings of £1,200 a year.
Mrs Thatcher’s powerful speech to UN Assembly of November in 1989 put climate change on the agenda and called for multilateral action.
She warned of “the prospect of irretrievable damage to the atmosphere, to the oceans, to earth itself….. we shall only succeed in dealing with the problems through a vast international, co-operative effort….The United Kingdom therefore proposes that we prolong the role of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change after it submits its report next year, so that it can provide an authoritative scientific base for the negotiation of this and other protocols….We can then agree to targets to reduce the greenhouse gases, and how much individual countries should contribute to their achievement. We think it important that this should be done in a way which enables all our economies to continue to grow and develop.”
That is still a coherent and persuasive account of the Conservative approach.