Blair backs Badenoch on Net Zero – and then gives a perfect case study in why policy doesn’t change

Here’s an interesting statement from The Climate Paradox: Why We Need to Reset Action on Climate Change, the Tony Blair Institute’s interesting new report on Net Zero:

“[B]ecause of the levels of growth and development, present policy solutions are inadequate and, worse, are distorting the debate into a quest for a climate platform that is unrealistic and therefore unworkable.

“So, the movement now needs a public mandate, attainable only through a shift from protest to pragmatic policy. Too often, political leaders fear saying what many know to be true: the current approach isn’t working. But they mustn’t be silent – there’s a new coalition to build; one that unites disillusioned activists with technologists and policymakers ready to act.”

And here’s a statement issued by the TBI minutes ahead of PMQs when someone realised that this might – might – be unhelpful to the Prime Minister:

“The TBI report is clear: we must prioritise technologies which capture carbon, place a bigger emphasis on protecting and enhancing nature, and develop new nuclear power, smart grids, and a new system of financing existing renewable solutions in developing economies. The UK government is already pursuing these, and their approach is the right one.”

Thank goodness they clarified; nobody reading the actual report would get the impression that there was one single government which had abandoned the idea of “any strategy based on either “phasing out” fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption”, which is after all “a strategy doomed to fail” – let alone that it happens to be the one led by the party formerly led by one Mr T. Blair.

It’s an amusing encapsulation of so much of what’s wrong with British politics, in a laugh-to-keep-from-weeping sort of way. Publish a report calling for a bold and imaginative break with a failing policy consensus, and then immediately disown it to make life a little easier for the Prime Minister at a here-today, gone-tomorrow public event – where Kemi Badenoch chose not to mention it anyway.

So it goes.

For nobody could really pretend that this government is wholeheartedly pursuing the programme advocated by the TBI. Yes, it is investing in carbon capture and storage (CCS) – a rare bit of capital spending which seems to have been protected from the Chancellor – and it is making promising noises on nuclear. The recent proposals to vastly streamline the planning process for major infrastructure are genuinely excellent, for all they will doubtless have Local Champions howling in fury from the backbenches.

But the overall pattern is still the one set by Theresa May’s discretable effort to secure what I called a legacy-via-deadline, or “the grandiose, lazy, blame-shifting, lunge-for-a-legacy policy. The hallmark of these is that a politician tries to get the credit for a nice idea whilst leaving all the hard work to others.”

In this case, setting a deadline for comfortably beyond the end of your own political career. The result? Politicians don’t have the necessary incentives to drive through expensive and politically sensitive infrastructure at the point they need to do it (near the start), ruling out the abundance approach and leaving as the only options either pushing back the deadlines or bearing down on living standards.

This doesn’t even need to be actively driven from the centre. The whole point of setting a target in law is the way it brute-forces change on a wide range of private actors, none of whom really have the capacity to build their way past the problem even if they wanted to.

Regulators can also sense which way the wind is blowing (no pun intended): Ofgem wouldn’t be proposing nonsense like turning energy bills into a progressive tax (rather than being based on, you know, demand) if it thought we’d left behind our Stupid Policies Era.

But they not exactly ignoring the Government’s signals, either. Given that the TBI depracates “any strategy based on either “phasing out” fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption”, it’d would be interesting to get a clarificatory note on how the Government’s decisions to end North Sea exploration licences, kneecap the Cumbrian coal mine, and bury our national stock of civil plutonium, rather than convert it into fuel for all the nuclear reactors we’re supposedly planning to build.

Regardless, the facts in the TBI report are essentially correct. The public was never going to stomach a sustained fall in its own living standards, especially in pursuit of policies which will make a near-zero difference to global emissions but exist mainly to satisfy the sort of green activist who think climate change is Gaia’s judgement on us for having nice things.

Meanwhile developing countries were always, rightly, going to scorn lectures from the developed world about generating the energy they need to modernise their own economies.

(If this sounds a lot like Badenoch’s criticism of Net Zero, it is. She might perhaps make more of it, if only to see everyone involved squirm.)

The solution was always, and remains, developing reliable clean energy (that means nuclear) to the point where we can both remove carbon from our own energy mix and export the technology to countries which might otherwise build coal plants.

Being a bit more imaginative, that could also entail things like nuclear cargo shipping, a policy which has the potential to slash CO2 emissions in an industry responsible for three times as much as the entire UK on an annual basis – and would seem to gel with our combination of nuclear maritime expertise (we always have a submarine under construction at Barrow) and politically-sensitive, economically-precarious shipyards in places like Belfast and the Clyde.

Or we could continue strangling our domestic energy industry and importing our fossils fuels to “send a signal to the world”. The TBI says that’s the right approach too.