Until today’s decision by Kemi Badenoch to scrap or reform the Climate Change Act, Ed Miliband was arguably the most successful figure in British politics. Net Zero, rooted in the 2008 Act, sits like Brexit across all of political life. And unlike the Brexiteers, he got his opponents to buy into his cause, changing the character and direction of 14 years of Conservative government.
The parties disagreed at the margins, briefly on North Sea oil taxes, for example, or which renewable incentive scheme to use. Yet both agreed on the direction, Net Zero by 2050, and delivery through top-down state control. Some two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the party of Margaret Thatcher decided it was content to support a regime of economy wide central planning and five-year carbon budgets. Backed up by the threat of legal action and overseen by a control committee (or Gosplan) in the form of the Climate Change Committee, a regulator and ideological lobby group.
Their safeguard against the obvious risks to growth, democratic accountability and of state corporatism was to put a Tory in charge. Perhaps the most glittering example of witless managerialism in the Cameron-era before Johnson mastered the art by letting Ministers do deals in pubs with their mates to tackle the overstated threat to the NHS from Covid.
Dwight Eisenhower warned 1960s America about the threat of vested interests and state-corporate collusion in his ‘military-industrial complex’ farewell address. He described a force that was pushing up defence spending regardless of the public interest. I doubt he could have imagined the green-industrial complex of the 21st century, putting the public on the hook for replacing a reliable energy system with one that isn’t, in order to make an undetectable difference to the global thermostat.
The green-industrial complex spawned by the CCA is there by design. It’s supposed to be the engine of ‘green growth’, creating jobs and global industries in cleantech. 17 years later, and after an even longer period of ‘temporary’ subsidies, it has delivered nothing of substance. The UK is a marketplace for, as Cameron more wisely said, ‘green crap’, not a growth engine. It leads the world in industrial energy bills, not energy industry exports.
I am being a little unfair, two groups have benefitted: the City and lawyers. If you put all your commercial risks on the tax or billpayer, you can make good returns from green finance. If you can sue all human activity that might increase greenhouse gas emissions, you can make a killing in court.
The sheer scale of parliamentary collusion with this farce without serious debate or accountability has been breathtaking.
Some of it is understandable: the CCA has been a convenient lever for community activism against local developments, but not the cause of it. In fact, ideological supporters have to their horror discovered that a small minority of people will oppose everything, including solar farms and pylons, not just fracking.
And it’s a good thing when politicians celebrate genuine innovation from real businesses, utilising their own capital. It’s aspirational to want the world of tomorrow today, and for that world to be cleaner and greener.
But the regulatory burden of climate absolutism has been clear from the start and has added costly uncertainty to Britain’s already failing planning and permitting regimes.
We were the first country in the world to operationalise nuclear power. Today we take 2-3 times longer than anyone else to fail to build a plant. We are sitting on potentially enough oil and gas to service the economy for 50-100 years, but no one will invest due to ‘windfall’ taxes, risk-averse regulations and bans. It’s economic suicide.”So the Opposition has much to do to ensure that this reopening of the debate restores some sanity.
The CCA is the nexus of the problem, but it has spawned rules, missions and institutions across the economy that will need attention. For example, mandates for zero-emission vehicles and heat pump targets. The last government made it more difficult to build wind farms but didn’t make it easier to build better alternatives like small modular reactors. There is no conservative solution to affordable abundance without hard choices on planning and safetyism.
There are also traps. The CCA provides the architecture for delivery on the UK’s commitment to the 2015 Paris Agreement. Replacing it raises the serious question as to whether the UK must also withdraw from that treaty, alongside many others. This will be fought tooth and nail in the Lords.
The support scheme contracts are legally binding and heavily loaded with compensation clauses for policy change. These liabilities will substantially increase before the next election given the direction of the current Government. Many otherwise unemployed climate lawyers will be relishing that fight.
The proposed refocus on conservationism is not cost free. Infrastructure projects that fail because we venerate rare bats above getting to work, and potential spider habitats above homes for young people, are not the result of the CCA. Rewilding, the green belt and other ill-judged absolute restrictions on land use can be just as damaging as auditing carbon atoms.
It’s an enormous challenge, but it is also enormously welcome that it can now be seriously discussed. Hopefully, real options will eventually become available for the public to choose between at the next election.
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