Kemi Badenoch's net-zero denial is a dangerous gamble
It seems the existence and quality of the government’s net zero plans are dependent on whether Badenoch is Tory leader, writes DeSmog's Adam Barnett
Kemi Badenoch likes to style herself as a leader who is not afraid to tell hard truths to the Conservative Party, and to signal a breach with its past mistakes. But rather than come clean about austerity, say, or Brexit – to name two salient examples – Badenoch has decided to attack the Tories for trying to slow climate change.
Earlier this month (18th March), in the first of a threatened series of “Policy Renewal Programme Speeches”, the Tory leader declared that the UK’s target of cutting emissions to net zero by 2050 is “impossible”.
“We have to get real”, she said. “Anyone who has done any serious analysis knows it cannot be achieved without a significant drop in our living standards or worse, by bankrupting us.” Badenoch added that “there’s never, ever been a detailed plan” for net zero, while attacking what plans there are as “muddled”.
This is an odd claim for Badenoch to make, given she repeatedly praised the government’s net zero plans when she was a minister. Badenoch even wrote a blurb for the Tories’ Net Zero Review in December 2020, saying: “We are determined to achieve a cleaner, green future, and cutting our emissions to net zero by 2050 is crucial to this.”
In September 2021, while a Treasury minister, Badenoch told parliament, “We have set out ambitious plans about the net zero target”, adding in typical Kemi fashion: “We would appreciate it if opposition parties took some time to read them.” It seems the existence and quality of the government’s net zero plans are dependent on whether Badenoch is Tory leader.
Her timing is notable in other ways. Two weeks before Badenoch’s speech, the Climate Change Committee, which advises the government on net zero, published its latest carbon budget, a detailed “pathway” for exactly how to hit net zero on time.
Far from “bankrupting” the country, the carbon budget has revised its estimated total cost for net zero (including savings) down 73 percent compared to its 2020 estimate, to £4 billion a year until 2050, or 0.2 percent of GDP. The CCC reckons 60 to 90 percent of the investment would come from the private sector.
Against this, Badenoch has a bright idea: “The best way to deliver clean energy and a better environment is with the market, not state diktat.” Actually, we’ve seen what happens if you leave climate change to the market, and it’s fossil fuel corporations pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, knowing it would heat the planet.
Equally reassuring was the Tory leader’s claim that shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho is on the case, and “will be looking at all aspects of the UK’s future energy and net zero policies.” “Few have spent more time trying to unpack the muddled thinking at the heart of the net zero debate than Claire”, she said.
Coutinho was energy secretary when Rishi Sunak delayed several net zero deadlines in September 2023. She also recently suggested a gaggle of keyboard pundits on X.com be invited to scrutinise (“red team”) government energy policy – among them several well-known climate deniers.
It’s notable that Badenoch’s speech refers to protecting the “environment”. She mentions climate change by name only once, and as a throat-clearing before her attack on climate policies. (“I’m certainly not debating whether climate change exists. It does […] But it doesn’t look like we are going to get remotely close to net zero by 2050.”) This is significant. Why, after all, do we have an “energy transition” if not because our use of fossil fuels is causing dangerous global warming?
Net zero isn’t an optional policy but a scientific necessity. The world’s top climate scientists agree that cutting emissions to net zero by 2050 is our best chance of limiting global temperatures to 1.5C and avoiding the worst of climate change. This is not “eco-zealotry”, it’s the least we can do.
Badenoch’s attacks on net zero are nothing short of climate crisis denial. Not surprisingly, they’ve won her friends in low places. In February, Badenoch held a three-day policy retreat with her team and family at the Gloucestershire estate of Tory donor Neil Record, who provided £14,350 worth of hospitality, according to her register of interests.
(It was a strange venue for Badenoch the would-be populist. According to the Guardian, Record’s estate boasts “a swimming pool, donkeys and 180 acres of sheep-grazed grass”. )
Record – who donated £15,000 and office space to Badenoch’s leadership campaign – also happens to be chair of Net Zero Watch, the campaign arm of Nigel Lawson’s notorious climate denial outfit the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Incidentally, the GWPF welcomed Badenoch’s speech, saying the late Tory chancellor Lawson “would have been delighted with Kemi Badenoch’s excellent speech which could have been drafted by himself almost verbatim”. (Fun fact: One of Coutinho’s proposed “red team” experts was Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford.) Record is also the life vice president and former chair of the BP-funded Institute of Economic Affairs.
Badenoch’s new position on net zero, which blurs the difference between Tory and Reform UK, does create a stark contrast with Labour. Making the UK a “clean energy superpower” is one of the government’s five “missions”, and unlike many Starmer promises, it has so far been backed by policy, (though tarnished by Labour’s support for a new runway at Heathrow airport). Countiho’s successor Ed Miliband is apparently being left to get on with it – at least for now, and with less money than he’d like. The other week, Labour announced they were fitting 200 schools and hospitals with solar panels – the sort of thing that gets the Lawsonites down.
In a desperate bid to win back Tory voters from Reform UK, Badenoch has abandoned one of the Tories’ few decent policies – while wrapping her anti-climate electoral gamble in the language of honesty and responsible government. The real legacy she ought to repudiate is that of Tory leaders running scared of Nigel Farage.
About the author: Adam Barnett is UK News Reporter at DeSmog and a freelance journalist. He writes a politics column for the Big Issue and has reported for The Guardian and Private Eye
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