Maurice Cousins: The environmental ‘bait and switch’ Conservatives must resist

Maurice Cousins is Campaign Director at Net Zero Watch, which campaigns for affordable energy, protecting jobs, and policies that end the UK’s cost of living crisis.

The Conservative Environment Network (CEN) has done a public service by publishing Returning to Our Roots: How Conservative Environmentalism Can Win Hearts and Minds. It is a thoughtful, substantial collection of essays, and it arrives at exactly the right time.

The left has for too long claimed a monopoly over environmental politics. CEN’s project is to show that this is false. Conservatism, with its philosophy of inheritance, prudence, and restraint, is naturally environmentalist. On this, I could not agree more.

Several essays, which include a Foreword by Lord Gove, speak eloquently about the beauty of nature, the joy of the countryside, the importance of restoring habitats, and the duty to pass on a flourishing inheritance. There is a strong defence of farmers and landowners as custodians of the landscape. There are calls for private stewardship, voluntary action, and local conservation – all deeply conservative themes. Anyone who cares about the traditions of Roger Scruton or Edmund Burke will find much to applaud.

But here is the point where I must part company. Too many of the authors elide environmentalism with climate activism, as if the two were one and the same. It is, I fear, a classic bait and switch.

Properly understood, environmentalism is about stewardship. It is about conserving landscapes, protecting wildlife, honouring inheritance, and maintaining the bonds between past, present, and future.

By contrast, climate activism is about turning emissions into a proxy for capitalism. As realists, conservatives must resist this conflation – or else we risk signing up to a very different project: one that hollows out our economy, undermines our democracy and liberties, and weakens us in a new era of great power competition.

Let me explain why.

First, as the Jobs Foundation has shown, Britain cannot run a modern industrial economy on weather-dependent energy. Wind and solar are intermittent, storage is costly and inadequate, and the subsidies designed to prop them up have helped make Britain’s industrial power prices among the highest in the developed world. Manufacturers here now pay more than double the costs faced by their European rivals and up to four times those in the US or China. Energy-intensive sectors such as steel, chemicals, aluminium and fertilisers are shrinking or closing as a result. A serious conservative energy policy must rely on a pragmatic mix – domestic hydrocarbons, nuclear, and market-driven innovation – not the illusion that prosperity can be built on the weather.

Second, climate policy should not be insulated from democratic scrutiny or market forces. One contributor argues that Parliament should do more to scrutinise delivery, but also that Ministers should be bound by the courts and the Climate Change Committee to “meet their own legislation or else overturn it.” That may sound like accountability, but in truth it is a constitutional sleight of hand. Statutory climate targets – the framework that makes judicial overreach possible – should be repealed for precisely this reason.

At the same time, the Contracts for Difference regime is held up as a policy success. In reality, it is a Liberal Democrat invention that fixes prices and locks in subsidies for renewable developers at the expense of consumers. This same CfD regime is being weaponised by Miliband today to push up energy bills.

None of this is conservatism. It is continuity Blairism. Conservatives must always insist that policy is accountable to Parliament, and that technologies prove themselves in the marketplace, not behind a wall of subsidies.

Third, conservatives must resist authoritarian creep, not rationalise it. One contributor seems to argue that climate change may require interventions akin to wartime mobilisation or pandemic-style lockdowns. This is profoundly misguided and it is based on alarmist interpretations of climate data – something the current head of the IPCC has warned against.

Instead, the conservative role must be to defend liberty, not to preside over its erosion. The lesson of the pandemic is not that restrictions were a useful precedent, but that freedoms, once surrendered, are slow to return. Any climate policy that depends on curtailing liberty is a betrayal of conservatism and, bluntly, must be rejected.

Fourth, Britain should not pretend to “lead” on climate action. Climate change is a global – not a national – challenge. Our emissions are less than one per cent of the global total. The future of climate change will be decided in China, India, and the United States, not in Britain. Meanwhile, we already endure the highest industrial energy prices in the developed world. James Cleverly seems to suggest we should go “further and faster” on climate policy. As George Osborne rightly argued in 2011, all this posturing does is to impose greater costs on households and drive industry offshore for no meaningful climate benefit.

Fifth, climate activism risks distracting us from more immediate geopolitical threats. Another of CEN’s contributors appears to argue that Russia and China’s strategic ambitions pale in comparison to the dangers of climate change. I cannot agree. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, China’s assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific, and their growing partnership represent clear and present dangers to Britain and the free world. To elevate climate change above these immediate security threats is to misread the world. Conservatives should not indulge in such wishful thinking. Our first duty is to protect the nation’s security against adversaries who are very much active today.

Taken together, these departures matter because they go to the heart of what conservatism should mean today. Yes, we should conserve nature. Yes, we should protect wildlife and restore beauty. But that is very different from signing up to the globalised climate agenda.

Many of the contributors to CEN’s volume rightly cite Margaret Thatcher’s early leadership on climate change. But they choose to ignore her later warnings in “Statecraft” (2002), her last book, when she cautioned that climate had become the “doomsters’ favourite subject” – a “marvellous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism.” Thatcher saw clearly that emissions were being used as a proxy for capitalism itself and risked undoing her legacy.

If Thatcher is to be invoked, her warning must also be remembered. Climate alarmism risks hollowing out both conservatism and environmentalism. True conservatives must not let that happen.