Sarah Ingham is author of The Military Covenant: its impact on civil-military relations in Britain.
Our brave new green world is filled with utopian visions. The wind, waves and sun will power our Net Zero future. Carbon will be captured, our homes will be cosy-toasty thanks to heat pumps or hydrogen or fusion, planes will waft skywards fuelled by chip fat.
And then: “I will not gamble with our energy security.” Rishi Sunak’s reassuring commitment to keeping the UK’s lights on was a welcome corrective to all the flights of carbon-free fantasy in recent years. These surely include global Jet Zero thanks to Sustainable Aviation Fuel – which demands far larger aircraft fuel tanks.
The creation of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero showed an early political deftness by the government. Linking the two issues underscores that trade-offs must be made, a point stressed by the Energy Secretary in a speech on Tuesday.
New gas power stations will be built said Claire Coutinho, because “a renewable-based energy system needs backing up with power plants which we can ramp up and ramp down when it isn’t windy or sunny enough.” This almost unique outbreak of medium-term thinking in connection with energy policy has stunned us into silence.
The weaponization of energy supplies? Who’d have thought it? Not Western European governments, for the last two years in painful recovery from an addiction to Russian oil, gas, and coal. Instead, we are all now happily in energy hock to other unpalatable regimes or taking advantage of the US shale revolution, one source of the abundant cheap power available to American consumers. (But no fracking here, after ministers caved to pious Prius drivers and Extinction Rebellion trustafarians.)
This week’s commitment to energy security was put in the context of the leap Britain has made towards cutting carbon dioxide emissions, halving them since 1990. Meanwhile, China’s have increased by 300 per cent. Carbon Brief reports that the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions had fallen to their lowest level since 1879 – the year, coincidentally, that Thomas Edison made his first electric lightbulb. In 2022, half of Britain’s electricity came from zero-carbon sources.
None of this progress is good enough for Britain’s climate campaigners. These green grifters, often eager to take taxpayer hand-outs in an eco-friendly, bourgeois version of Benefits Street, do little but gripe and grumble about government back-sliding on Net Zero.
Greenpeace UK moaned the gas power station proposal will make Britain “more dependent on the very Fossil Fuels (Renewable Energy) that sent our bills rocketing and the planet’s temperature soaring.” E3G condemned “policy failures” and “missed opportunities”, while the Green Alliance warned of “increasing the risks of runaway climate change”.
Joining the chorus of castigation was Ed Miliband, the Shadow Energy Minister, perhaps hoping to walk the green walk by recycling the job he was first given back in 2008. Gordon Brown government’s diesel debacle – giving tax incentives for diesel-fuelled cars – tells us all we need to know about Labour’s record on environmental science.
Miliband was an early adopter of the “do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do” hypocrisy that ever since has been the hallmark of many eco-campaigners. In December 2008, he led a delegation of 47 flying to a UN climate conference in Poznan, generating 13.55 tonnes of carbon, as the media gleefully reported.
The inconvenient truth for their many critics is that the Conservatives have long led the way on greenery. This Common Inheritance produced by the Thatcher government in 1990 was the first White Paper on the Environment. A cross-departmental environmental strategy set out 350 commitments, among them the inclusion of air quality information in weather reports.
This Common Inheritance: The First Year Report (1991) details the progress made. It includes a chapter on a concept that was new to many – “climate change”. One of the goals was to ensure that in 2005, global CO2 levels would be the same as in 1990. John Major’s administration was realistic enough to acknowledge that this would only be achievable “if others play their part”.
More than 30 years on, Britain’s parochial green lobby is seemingly oblivious that global problems demand that others, particularly Beijing and New Delhi, indeed play their part.
Why are MPs indulging these grumblers, who refuse to accept that Britain is at the forefront of decarbonising a leading economy? Perhaps their view is skewed because the Green Alliance is the secretariat to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Environment. Providing this service might account for the APPG giving the campaigners £50,000-£75,000 in 2022-23.
On Wednesday, the Climate Change Committee groused that the Government’s response to worsening climate impacts was “inadequate”.
All this carping coincides with the release of the latest documentary by director Martin Durkin. Dropping online on 21st March, Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) questions the current lucrative, career-making consensus on climate change. It is surely inevitable that griping greenies will try to close down any debate.
Voters in the recent Rochdale by-election had the chance to support a candidate backed by Just Stop Oil, whose co-founder made a hysterical call to arms in The Guardian. Former vicar Mark Coleman gained 455 votes, representing 1 per cent of the vote. He still beat the Green Party.
In the real world, not some future Utopia, Conservatives should heed the continuous rejection of greenery at the polls. Ofgem the energy regulator has warned the costs of attaining Net Zero could hit the poorest hardest. Not that this will worry the hectoring eco-lobby, which seems to expect the rest of us to live almost off-grid as they swan about at COPs.
The Government’s realism on energy policy is putting some clear green water between the Conservatives and their political opponents. It’s welcome. Being in tune with voters’ concerns could mean saving some seats as well as saving the planet.
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Author: Dr Sarah Ingham
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