UK’s net zero leadership is under threat

LESS than a year ago, the United Kingdom sought to lead the world on climate change at COP 26 in Glasgow. However, there is now a significant right-wing backlash against this agenda which threatens to undermine over a decade of UK bipartisan policy consensus.

That period of bipartisanship can be dated back to at least 2007 when there was cross-party support for the United Kingdom becoming the first country in the world to introduce legally binding targets to reduce carbon emissions. That measure, introduced by Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government, was followed up with successive measures by Conservative administrations culminating last year in London setting the world’s most ambitious climate change target, cutting emissions by 78 per cent by 2035 compared to 1990 levels.

Although the UK’s two most recent premiers Theresa May and Boris Johnson signed up to a 2050 UK net zero target too, the political ground in their Conservative Party may now be crumbling under this. From the right wing, there is a significant campaign underway to undermine these commitments in a manner that some suggest is not dissimilar to the weakening of UK support for the EU.

The timing of this potential volte face in London is especially strange given dynamics in Washington DC where US President Joe Biden recently welcomed passage of his new climate spending package which invests US$375 billion to fight climate change. This is the most significant federal investment in history on the issue, and is projected to lower US emissions by up to 42 per cent by 2030, compared with the current US trajectory, which would lower emissions by up to 35 per cent.

The UK right-wing attacks on net zero began in the intellectual community with some conservative thinkers asserting that the 2050 targets amount to UK unilateral eco-disarmament. And this language was more or less exactly parroted by former leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch MP, a former minister, last month when she branded UK climate policy as “unilateral economic disarmament”.

It is also reported that Attorney General Suella Braverman MP, who also fell out of the leadership race at a relatively early stage, received a donation of £10,000 from a consultancy which is owned by the chair of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) between 2019 and 2021. The GWPF, opposed to net zero, was sanctioned by the UK Charity Commission for failing to follow rules on “balance and neutrality”.

Both Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and ex-Finance Minister Rishi Sunak know net zero is not a super priority for a significant chunk of the approximately 160,000 Conservative members, and that they will therefore win comparatively few votes by championing this agenda in the current leadership race to replace Johnson. This even though some polls show that the wider national electorate ranks it as a top issue.

A recent poll by YouGov found 59 per cent of Conservative voters want net zero commitments suspended during the cost-of- living crisis engulfing the United Kingdom. In contrast, only 30 per cent of Labour and Liberal Democrat backers would like to see the climate target frozen.

Net zero is not the only worrying undercurrent within the Conservative leadership contest on energy and climate issues. For there has also been relatively little discussion about energy security in the PM race debate, especially from Truss who is the strong favourite to win.

It is not just politicians, but also business which has noticed. Take the example of Rolls Royce CEO Warren East who has commented on this in the context of his firm’s goal of securing government approval for new nuclear small modular reactors. 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 spoken much about nuclear power. However, both of them in government, as foreign secretary and finance minister, were publicly supportive of PM Johnson’s goal for nuclear to deliver a quarter of UK electricity by 2050.

Truss, who has been rhetorically more sceptical than Sunak about the UK’s net zero commitments, claims she backs the mid-century target set by May and Johnson, overall. However, she has 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 sceptical of the net zero agenda. Moreover, she has committed to restoring gas fracking and other measures that 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 criticised for not being more enthusiastic about developing a greater number of UK solar energy farms. Both have said that they want to see more agricultural crops, not solar farms, around the UK countryside.

In the immediate term, Truss has proposed that the solution to the UK’s soaring energy costs is suspending green levies that add about 10 per cent to bills. This despite the role these play in reducing fossil fuel dependence.

Sunak not only seems stronger than Truss in his commitment to UK carbon neutrality, he also wants to make the nation energy self-sufficient too by 2045. He proposes a massive expansion in offshore wind farms to help deliver on these goals.

Previously, he had vowed to keep a ban on new onshore wind farms, even though these can generate relatively cheap electricity. However, he has u-turned on this issue, saying he would now scrap the ban on such new turbines.

Taken together, it is possible that the Conservatives will potentially tack back and embrace net zero more enthusiastically again. However, this is by no means clear in the context of changing party dynamics on climate change, and the historic cost-of-living crisis, which could bring these issues into the crucible of the UK’s next general election before end-2024.

This leaves a clear and present danger that the next prime minister will undermine the UK’s at least 15-year bipartisan consensus on climate policy, especially Truss. This would be a retrograde step, and alarmingly would come less than 12 months since Johnson urged the rest of the world to adopt this green agenda as he hosted COP 26.

Andrew Hammond is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics