It must have come as another bitter blow to Downing Street. Net zero scepticism, it would seem, is not the cut-through, electorally galvanising political cause that some would like to believe.
When the London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, pushed ahead with plans to extend the capital’s ultra-low emissions zone to outer boroughs, many voters saw red, and it cost Labour the Uxbridge by-election.
By campaigning aggressively against the move, the Tories managed to hold onto a seat they were widely expected to lose.
This encouraged the Prime Minister to believe there might also be votes in the entire environmental agenda, where he had long harboured doubts, including some of the measures deemed necessary to meet the legally binding ambition of net zero by 2050.
Confronted by the costs, these seemed to be the subject of a growing public backlash, not just in Uxbridge, but around the world.
Sadly for Rishi Sunak, this has turned out not to be the case, thus far and in Britain at least.
Last week’s two devastating by-election defeats suggest strongly that push-back against climate change orthodoxy is falling flat among voters. Unless directly affected, people are simply not interested. Other cost of living issues, together with the post-pandemic breakdown in public services, are deemed far more important.
This makes Britain quite different from the US, where climate change scepticism, and even denial, are very much part of anti-woke culture wars.
It divides the nation and is fertile ground for some Republicans, including Donald Trump. Similarly, in parts of the Continent, where the issue is reshaping the political landscape. Not so in the UK, beyond very localised concerns.
This doesn’t mean that the Government has made a mistake in rowing back on some of the stricter intermediate targets, or erred by giving the go-ahead to another round of North Sea oil and gas licensing. Most people can see that these things make sense.
As Mr Justice Holgate intimated last week in dismissing a High Court challenge from Greenpeace, there are perfectly reasonable economic and energy security grounds that don’t necessarily conflict with climate change targets for further North Sea oil and gas development.
The same goes for pushing back the date for banning petrol and diesel-fuelled vehicle production, which in any case merely brings the UK into line with what the EU has already done.
Do we really want to give away our entire auto industry to the Chinese, which is essentially what would have happened if the earlier ban had been adhered to? Making us feel virtuous would be scant consolidation for the jobs and economic wellbeing thereby lost.
The UK is responsible for less than 1pc of global emissions. It matters not a jot what we do if others refuse to do the same. We merely shoot ourselves in the foot.
Even so, the sort of measured net zero scepticism that the Government now promotes is plainly not shifting the dial in terms of votes. As the by-election results showed, the costs of climate change mitigation are not a frontline political issue.
The Government’s messaging has taken net zero scepticism mainstream, yet the reality of what it has done so far makes little difference one way or the other; it merely tinkers at the edges of the climate change commitment.
All the same, we now have a clear dividing line between the two main parties on saving the planet. Gone is the notion, championed by Boris Johnson as prime minister, that the energy transition is a massive, cost-free economic opportunity in which Britain can lead the world.
Instead, we have the current compromised approach, which sees energy security as best served by having more oil and gas.
Labour, by contrast, believes that only by going hell for leather on renewables can we have both energy security and net zero.
On this issue at least, Labour is Continuity Johnson. On the evidence of last week’s by-elections, you’d conclude that Johnson’s net zero boosterism was rather more on the money in terms of its electoral appeal than Sunak’s net zero scepticism.
Britain has so far been way ahead of the game in meeting its carbon reduction budgets, yet it is now quite widely seen overseas as losing its nerve, and by seeming to go slower, setting a bad example to others.
This is particularly the case in the developing world, which understandably regards Western lecturing to the effect that it should skip the fossil fuel stage of development altogether and leapfrog straight to renewables as both hypocritical and unrealistic.
Should Argentina, for instance, be expected to leave its vast Neuquén Basin reserves of shale gas, thought to be the second largest deposits in the world after the US, unexploited? Even the otherwise holier than thou World Bank regards this as unreasonable for a country which is now ranked as lowly “middle income”.
Yet for the moment, there is no pathway to such development other than Chinese money. European banks are reluctant to invest in such projects for fear of being left with stranded assets, Ana Botin, chairman of Santander, recently told the Institute of International Finance annual meeting.
Aggressively applied environmental, social and governance (ESG) rules pile on the deterrents, making it ever more difficult for Western banks to finance fossil fuel development almost anywhere. Chinese banks suffer no such scruples, and are only too willing to step into the void left by the West as a way of extending the Middle Kingdom’s influence.
Botin suggests giving the World Bank, or some such other multilateral organisation, a role in determining which countries should be allowed fossil fuel development as a transitional energy source and which not.
Good luck with that. Up would go the cry of “why them and not us?”.
Here in the UK, oil and gas production has been in decline since the turn of the century, and is projected to continue falling by up to 8pc a year even taking account of the latest development licences.
The upshot is that domestic demand for oil and gas in the run up to 2050 is likely to be substantially higher than UK production, leaving the country ever more reliant on overseas sources of supply for its remaining hydrocarbon needs.
Importing the stuff is almost bound to have a higher carbon footprint than producing it ourselves.
The Oil and Gas Authority has moreover forecast that even with continued exploration and development, the future decline in UK North Sea production will be faster than the global average decline in oil and gas production required to keep global temperatures rising by 1.5 degrees.
So why deprive yourself? Why indeed. Not that it will make a difference. Regrettably for Sunak and his colleagues, they are way beyond the stage of getting electoral credit for doing marginally sensible things.
https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMibGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnRlbGVncmFwaC5jby51ay9idXNpbmVzcy8yMDIzLzEwLzIyL25ldC16ZXJvLXNjZXB0aWNpc20tdG9yaWVzLXN0cnVnZ2xlLWdhaW4tcG9saXRpY2FsLXRyYWN0aW9uL9IBAA?oc=5
2023-10-22 11:00:00Z
CBMibGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnRlbGVncmFwaC5jby51ay9idXNpbmVzcy8yMDIzLzEwLzIyL25ldC16ZXJvLXNjZXB0aWNpc20tdG9yaWVzLXN0cnVnZ2xlLWdhaW4tcG9saXRpY2FsLXRyYWN0aW9uL9IBAA
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