Andrew Montford: Cleverly’s climate assessment is symptomatic of our sloganeering

In a speech last week, Sir James Cleverly apparently declared that the party leadership should ignore climate change ‘luddites’. Although he has since said that he didn’t mention Net Zero, the fact he was critical of those who think ‘concerns about emissions…are scaremongering’ and went to on extol the (alleged) virtues of renewables and carbon capture suggests that he is protesting a little too much.

While the text of the speech has yet to be published in full, the excerpts that appeared in the Mail and the Spectator suggest it is symptomatic of the kind of shallow thinking that has got us into our current energy predicament, with prices rising inexorably, deindustrialisation well underway, and wholesale economic collapse looming.

So when Sir James tells us we need to ‘push further, faster and smarter’ and ‘set the pace’, I hear only the same kind of somewhat vacuous sloganeering we have had from every government, both Labour and Conservative, for the last twenty years.

This is rather extraordinary, when you think about it. Our fertiliser factories are gone, aluminium and steel are all but done for, the Grangemouth oil refinery is closing, the North Sea oil and gas industry is almost on its knees. Set against that background, wheeling out the same tired lines calling for more and better technology looks very strange.

We have heard them a thousand times before, and for 20 years they have delivered nothing other than an upward spiral in electricity prices and a downward spiral in the economy. Can Sir James really not see that the direction of travel is wrong?

Slogans might work in the good times, when the public can afford to ignore the antics of politicians, but those days are long gone and the future looks very bleak indeed. It’s a new era, for which we need a new kind of politician, willing to get to grips with the detail, to move beyond slogans and to formulate policy around real-world technology, after a careful consideration of known costs, rather than – as is the norm in Whitehall and Westminster – on speculation about what they might be in three decades’ time. We need serious people, for serious times, in other words.

There is no sign that Sir James is a politician in this mould. “The UK is advancing rapidly in renewable energy generation, clean transport, and carbon capture,” he says.

We are certainly getting more renewables, but the price of electricity has been going up inexorably for decades; bills are now £282 higher in real terms than they were ten years ago. Moreover, now that the gas prices have fallen, almost all of the increase can be ascribed to Net Zero policies. Is this what Sir James means by “advancing”?

We’re getting more clean transport too. I took an electric bus into town the other day. It is a cheap but excellent service, and is expanding rapidly. And so it should be when the operator is receiving a capital subsidy of a quarter of a million pounds per bus. I suppose we could say that the subsidies are “advancing rapidly”, alongside the passenger numbers.

As for carbon capture, it’s only the subsidies that are advancing. The technology has never been made to work on a gas-fired power station, which is just about all we have left nowadays. Ed Miliband’s pledge of £22 billion is therefore more about subsidy than delivery, and Sir James’ citing of the technology as a key part of the future looks like dangerously wishful thinking. It certainly suggests that neither of them have bothered looking at the details.

‘Unicorn’ technologies, such as carbon capture, are the bane of the energy field. We hear constantly about ‘gridscale energy storage’ and how it will solve the problem of windfarm intermittency, but rarely are we told which technology will do this for us, and almost never at what cost. Across Westminster, politicians, media and wonks believe, without any evidence, that the answer will revolve around batteries or hydrogen; suggestions that are laughable to anyone who has taken a moment to look at the costs. They also think that Rolls Royce is about to build a small modular nuclear reactor (they don’t have a design yet), that the cost of wind and solar farms has fallen through the floor, and that the rollout of carbon capture is just over the horizon. These people are the problem, not the solution.

For decades, energy policy has been dominated by sloganeering and a belief in technological unicorns, and we have been brought to the brink of disaster. For our children’s sake, we need serious people to take the reins, and quickly.