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‘Net zero’ groupthink got us into this mess | Comment | The Times
In the race to make Britain a ‘climate leader’ parties failed to plan for bumps in the road and now we’re paying the price
Get ready to be bribed with your own money. The political parties are competing to show who can offer the biggest bailout to get through this winter’s energy shock. But do not be deceived about who really pays for the failure of Britain’s energy policy. We all do.
The old observation by Margaret Thatcher that the government does not have any money of its own to dispense is as true now as it was then. It only has what it collects from us in taxes and borrows on our behalf. Higher borrowing generally means higher taxes later.
I make this point not to suggest energy bailouts shouldn’t happen. They must. Without tens of billions in immediate assistance, many citizens will face distress and penury this winter. The winner of the Tory leadership race has no option other than to spend more on this to avoid social unrest.
But amid the clamour there is a game of distraction and blame-dodging going on. The main parties, all of them, and every arm of the state have a shared interest in avoiding a proper accounting for what went wrong. They all designed and cheered on Britain’s too aggressive race to net zero. With voters angry as the bills land, no one wants to admit their culpability.
Since the 2008 Climate Change Act, successive governments, urged on by the opposition — and the SNP and the Lib Dems — bet the house on getting to net zero quicker than anyone else. They gambled on Britain becoming a global leader in killing off carbon use and howled down anyone expressing concerns. And look where it has landed us.
This is not an argument about whether or not climate change is happening. Even if you think, as I do, the emphasis should be on reducing pollution while adapting calmly, the climate is changing. There is a huge shift to renewable energy under way.
As Professor Helen Thompson makes clear in her latest book Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century, if the 1800s were the century of coal, and the 1900s the century of oil and gas, the rest of this century will be defined by the push for clean energy.
But as Thompson says, we need to be realistic and not believe the trade-offs are easy. This is going to be an extremely difficult transition lasting decades. There are the seeds of potential future wars in the battle for copper and hard-to-extract rare earths and minerals that are needed for wind farms, solar, batteries and new technology.
In the interim, we are going to need gas, and a lot of it, for many years. Last year it contributed 39.8 per cent of the electricity generated in Britain, according to the government’s report on energy use published last month. Oil and other fuels contributed 3.5 per cent. For gas, that’s a rise year on year. Total renewables were down a little, at 39.6 per cent.
This was not the impression given during Cop26 in Glasgow last November where the evangelism was childlike, as though wind power is endless and solar is free because it comes from the sun. Nicola Sturgeon grinned for selfies. Boris Johnson whirred away generating hot air.
Celebrating the launch of the government’s net-zero strategy last October, Johnson said Britain was leading the charge: “The UK’s path to ending our contribution to climate change will be paved with well-paid jobs, billions in investment and thriving green industries.” Well, up to a point. In time, perhaps it will be. First, there is a war on and not enough energy to go round.
What should always have been kept in mind by politicians and their climate tsars is that economies and energy production are highly complex systems, vulnerable to global disruptions, pandemics and war.
Instead, there was simplistic green groupthink. Labour complains now, but it can’t do so credibly when it is the co-architect of the nation’s policy. Ed Miliband, the former Labour leader, was highly influential. His price cap idea, adopted by the Conservatives under Theresa May, has proved to be worse than useless, providing consumers with false reassurance. Now, some in Labour call for nationalisation, although no one can say of what or at what price.
Miliband, like many climate activists, complains the government didn’t do net zero properly and spent too little on insulation. In the context of this emergency, the scale of dependence on gas and the difficulty of making quicker progress on renewables, that is trifling. What was needed was an urgent national effort to build more gas storage, to source more of every scrap of energy, and to tell us, the public, all year to get used to conserving energy to keep bills, and the expensive bailout, down. That would have involved levelling with people and admitting the too-fast race to net zero was a mistake. Neither the government nor the opposition were prepared to do so.
They were warned. Last October American and British intelligence said a Russian invasion of Ukraine was coming. The prime minister failed to make the connection clearly enough between war and energy.
More than six months after the invasion, only very recently has the regulator authorised more gas storage. The zombie government is in talks with Centrica about who might bear the risks and rewards.
Liz Truss sat in cabinet throughout this saga. Even so, her skill as a shapeshifter may help her now if she opts for honesty. Moving to clean energy is going to take a long time and right now we’re in a national emergency that may last years. Britain will have to secure and store more energy, and use less.
With everything else having been tried by Britain’s political parties, Truss might as well try the truth.