In the UK, the opposition leader Kemi Badenoch’s decision to abandon cross-party consensus on climate change and the need to meet net zero targets may win her plaudits from some right-wing commentators, but places her in opposition to popular opinion and the scientific world. The debate taking place in Britain has significance far beyond the UK. Across Europe and elsewhere, long-standing climate commitments are increasingly being challenged through arguments about energy prices, competitiveness and living costs. In a column in the September issue of Energy in Buildings & Industry magazine, Andrew Warren, who chairs the British Energy Efficiency Federation, examines what happens when a target once supported across the political mainstream becomes a political dividing line.
On the Wrong Side of History
The hottest summers on record. Wildfires burning uncontrollably. Mudslides from glacier melts killing thousands. No wonder people are genuinely concerned about climate change affecting not just their grandchildren, but themselves right now.
So, there’s no dispute about the need to adapt both our buildings and our lifestyles to these major changes. But we also need to continue working together around the world to minimise the exponential way that the climate is now altering.
The Paris Climate Change Agreement was agreed 11 years ago, endorsed by practically every country in the world. Subsequently, 137 countries have signed up to setting, then achieving specific net zero targets. Most of these are statutorily binding. Since 2017, the UK has had 2050 as the agreed legal target date for net zero.
Up until the 2024 general election, all significant political parties had fully adopted this goal. Since then, the Reform Party initially, and now the Conservatives, have opted to attack the entire concept of seeking to achieve net zero. The seven Reform MPs have at least consistently concluded that climate change is of negligible, if any, concern.
But the Conservative party – whilst still purporting to accept there is a climate crisis – is now officially opposed to the entire concept of any need to reach net zero by 2050.
Its’ leader Kemi Badenoch maintains it is a ‘political fiction’ and is refusing to accept as a parliamentary candidate anybody who refuses to condemn the entire concept of net zero.
All change
This is a genuinely extraordinary reversal. After all, it was the Conservative government that originally introduced this ‘net zero by 2050’ policy. And it was Badenoch herself who, when a Treasury Minister, stated that: “We are determined to achieve a cleaner, greener future. And cutting our emissions to net zero by 2050 is crucial to this.”
Badenoch told Parliament in a debate dealing specifically with net zero: “We are already making good progress and have set out billions of pounds in green investment, including decarbonisation and greener homes, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, walking and cycling infrastructure, and flood defences.
“We have set out ambitious plans about the net zero target and published the energy White Paper, the industrial decarbonisation strategy, the transport decarbonisation plan, which has not happened anywhere else in the world – we are the first country to do a transport decarbonisation plan.”
In the same debate, she even chided a Labour MP who had queried all this, adding: “The government have been busy setting out plans on net zero. We would appreciate it if opposition parties took some time to read them.” She of all people should scarcely object to the present government taking her advice.
Instead, she now seems only to be listening to a few right-wing media commentators.
These scientifically illiterate blowhards have sought somehow to create a false distinction between the need to combat climate change and delivering net zero by 2050. Whilst all media outlets are giving prominence to the impacts of galloping climate change, only more liberal outlets have coupled this with recognition of the consequential need to implement net zero policies.
Badenoch is now applauding headlines like: “Net zero is a Trojan horse for the total destruction of Western society” or: “The lunacy of climate change fanatics is driving humanity to extinction”. Or more recently in the Telegraph: “We’ve lost the war against climate change. Time to scrap net zero.” And the classic from Daily Mail‘s Florida-based columnist Richard Littlejohn: “The climate emergency is over – here comes the rain.”
Laws of physics
Sadly, the present Conservative party leader must have missed Sir Brian Hoskins, writing in the Times in late June, reminding us what net zero actually is.
Sir Brian, a fellow of the Royal Society, and someone who has studied climate change for most of his professional life, knows what he is talking about when he writes: “Net zero is not an arbitrary slogan. Rather, it is dictated by the laws of physics. To halt warming, net greenhouse gas emissions must stop.
“Pretending we can safely slow the transition ignores the certainty of escalating climate costs, which will fall most heavily on vulnerable, lower-income households.”
Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, heating up twice as quickly as elsewhere. The consequences, as UN climate chief Simon Stiell puts it, are “reaching national emergency levels,”
Yet populist and far-right political parties are increasingly seeking to frame net zero initiatives as an ‘ideological mantra’ and the elite’s punishment for ‘ordinary working people’.
In the UK, too many Labour Party activists worry that, despite the ever more visible impacts of the climate crisis, there has been no major political push from the Burnham government on the issue, even as voters become increasingly convinced of the need for action. Pleading with Tesco to ban selling portable barbecue sets is scarcely sufficient.
But the real danger is not popular opinion turning against net zero. Because it isn’t. It is an entirely elite division. Right-wing media narratives seek to create a false sense of political risk in addressing net zero purposefully.
Failing to acknowledge, let alone support, all the policies necessary to deliver net zero by 2050 is placing Kemi Badenoch firmly on the wrong side. Not just of the popular will – but of history.
