The future of the UK’s climate leadership is under serious threat
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Less than a year ago, the UK sought to lead the world on climate change when it hosted COP 26, the UN Climate Change Conference, in Glasgow. However, there is now a significant right-wing backlash against this agenda, which threatens to undermine more than a decade of bipartisan policy consensus.
Although the UK’s two most recent prime ministers, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, signed up to a 2050 target date for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, the political ground in the Conservative Party might be crumbling under this. There is a significant campaign underway on the right wing of the party to undermine the commitments.
These attacks began in the intellectual community, with some conservative thinkers asserting that net-zero amounts to unilateral UK eco-disarmament. This language, more or less, was parroted last month by Tory leadership candidate and former minister Kemi Badenoch, when she described UK climate policy as “unilateral economic disarmament.”
It has also been reported that Attorney General Suella Braverman, who fell out of the Conservative leadership contest at a relatively early stage, received a donation of £10,000 from a consultancy owned by the chairperson of the Global Warming Policy Foundation between 2019 and 2021. The GWPF is opposed to net-zero and has been sanctioned by the UK’s Charity Commission for failing to follow rules on “balance and neutrality.”
Both of the remaining Tory leadership contenders, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, know that net-zero is not a super priority for a significant chunk of the approximately 160,000 members of the Conservative Party who will choose the new leader, and that they will therefore win comparatively few votes by championing this agenda — even though some polls suggest that the wider national electorate ranks it as one of the top issues.
Indeed, a recent poll by YouGov found 59 percent of Tory voters want net-zero commitments suspended during the cost-of-living crisis that is currently engulfing the UK. In contrast, only 30 percent of Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters would like to see the climate target frozen by the next prime minister.
This is not the only worrying undercurrent within the Conservative leadership contest relating to energy and climate issues. There has also been relatively little discussion about energy security during the debates, especially from Truss who is the strong favorite to win.
It is not only politicians who have noticed this, but also business leaders. Take, for example, Rolls Royce CEO Warren East, who commented on the issue in the context of his company’s desire to secure government approval for the new small, modular nuclear reactors it is involved in developing.
A recent poll by YouGov found 59 percent of Tory voters want net-zero commitments suspended during the cost-of-living crisis that is currently engulfing the UK.
Andrew Hammond
He said: “You can invest a lot in wind and you can invest a lot in solar but at a latitude such as where we are at in the United Kingdom, then unfortunately neither wind nor solar gives you sufficient continuous power unless you have a huge amount of storage, which makes the economics of this very different.”
Truss and Sunak have not said much about nuclear power. While in government however, as foreign secretary and finance minister respectively, both of them were publicly supportive of Johnson’s goal for nuclear facilities to deliver a quarter of the UK’s electricity by 2050.
Truss, who appears more skeptical than Sunak about UK net-zero commitments, claims that overall she backs the mid-century target set by May and Johnson. However, she stressed that “we need to reach net-zero in a way that doesn’t harm businesses or consumers.”
During the leadership contest, she has won the support of a wide range of Conservative MPs who are skeptical of the net-zero agenda. Moreover, she has committed to the restoration of gas fracking and other measures that will make it harder for the UK to meet its net-zero commitments. She is also “very supportive” of using gas as a transition fuel.
Both she and Sunak have also been criticized for not being more supportive of the development of a greater number of UK solar-energy farms. Both have said that they want more agricultural crops, not solar farms, in the UK countryside.
In the immediate term, Truss has proposed that a solution to the UK’s soaring energy costs is a suspension of the green levies that add about 10 percent to bills. This is despite the role these play in reducing the dependence on fossil fuels.
Sunak seems stronger than Truss in his commitment to carbon neutrality and wants to ensure the nation is energy self-sufficient by 2045 to boot. He proposes a massive expansion in offshore wind farms to help deliver on these goals.
Previously, he had vowed to maintain a ban on new onshore wind farms, even though these can generate electricity relatively cheaply. On Aug. 3, however, he performed a U-turn on this issue and said he would scrap the ban on new turbines.
Taking all this together, it is possible that whether Truss or Sunak becomes prime minister he or she might potentially revert to the electoral center ground and once again embrace net-zero more enthusiastically.
This is by no means certain, however, against the backdrop of shifting Conservative Party dynamics on climate change, and the historic cost-of-living crisis in the UK — which could bring these issues into the crucible of the UK’s next general election, due before the end of 2024.
• Andrew Hammond is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.
