UK and European temperature records tumbled in June, but when the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) met in London, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright served as cheerleader for climate change denialism. ‘“Most of the major European countries are well aware of the energy mistake they have made and are trying to understand how they are going to pivot away from it,” said Wright, who joined the conference on one of the hottest days of the year in Britain as delegates inside sweltered,’ reported The Guardian. As we all felt the heat of climate change, and saw the parched land outside our windows, Wright wanted us to believe that there was a growing consensus that burning stuff made way more sense than going green. Burning stuff has become a bit of a theme in Europe in the last few weeks. Not the stuff that Wright was thinking of, but the stuff that will inevitably continue to burn if we follow his prescription and turn increasingly to fossil fuels to produce energy.

One of the speakers at the ARC conference was the leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch. According to the Guardian she told attendees that there had been a “villain in Britain’s deindustrialisation…His name is Ed Miliband and he has made our country poorer.” However, in an opinion piece in the Daily Telegraph, a paper that has previously been a cheerleader for climate change denialIsm, Badenoch was accused on being a “climate nihilist”. Stung by this rebuke, Badenoch wrote a response, which she also posted in Facebook, in which she laid out her position on climate change and energy.

Badenoch’s approach is a good example of a modern kind of climate change denialism: of course I understand science, she says, before projecting emissions targets as a left-wing plot, shifting the focus from prevention of warming to mitigation of consequences, offering nuclear power as a solution, ranting about China for its coal power and cheap electric vehicles, and offering the mythical (and fast diminishing) pot of black gold under the North Sea as a panacea for the UK’s rising electricity costs.

As this is programme has been laid out by an aspiring prime minister, it deserves proper consideration, so I’ll consider her main points one-by-one.

The “political programme”

Badenoch begins as follows:

“Net-zero scepticism is too often confused with climate change scepticism. But they are not the same thing. It is an elementary distinction, but an important one. Climate change is a scientific phenomenon. Net zero by 2050 is a political programme. Climate change is real. We can see its effects all over the world, not least the current spate of heatwaves here in Britain.“

This is the modern face of climate change denialism: of course I don’t want to deny science, but responding to scientific evidence by changing the way we live would be politically extreme/too expensive/unbalanced/evidence of belonging to a weird cult.

While it is unquestionably the case that “Net Zero by 2050” is a widely used slogan, it has until very recently been one that has been supported by politicians across the political spectrum. Previous Conservative governments were committed to tackling climate change, and in 2019 Theresa May’s government amended the 2008 Climate Act to make net zero by 2050 a legally binding target for the nation.

But where did this slogan come from? In 2015, 195 nations signed the Paris Climate Agreement, committing to work towards restricting global temperature rise to 2^oC above the pre-industrial average by the end of the century, with the aspiration to limit this figure to 1.5^oC in order to avoid some of the worst consequences of climate change. To achieve this aim, it was determined that emissions needed to be reduced by 50% by 2030, and to be reduced to net zero by 2050. Thus the target is not a political slogan, but a plan based on evidence and on climate science, to avoid catastrophic consequences for humanity. It was embodied within the sixth IPCC assessment as SSP1-1.9 (see my previous post).

It is fashionable in some quarters to dismiss “Net Zero” as some sort of religious cult. However, far from being cultic or political, or the preserve of a London elite, it is a target that was agreed by 195 nations in an effort to prevent calamitous climate change, and which is legally binding and has been ratified by the United Nations. As it happens, emissions have continued to grow, and we have already very nearly reached warming of 1.5^oC. Global temperatures lag changes to the composition of the atmosphere by some decades, and increases in global temperatures at least another 1^oC are probably baked in now, even if we begin to reduce emissions immediately, because temperature rises lag behind changes in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations by several decades. It may well be that the Net Zero 2050 target is dead. But that should not be a prompt to give up, but rather, to strain every sinew to reduce emissions as fast as possible.

Mitigation rather than prevention

“Conservatives have always understood that we have a duty to protect our natural inheritance. We should preserve our countryside, encourage biodiversity, invest in flood defences and ensure that Britain is resilient in the face of a changing climate.”

Badenoch conjures up again the mythical England of John Major’s famous speech about warm beer and old ladies cycling to Holy Communion. But what she is really saying is profoundly sinister. “Let’s give up trying to fight climate change”, she says. “Let’s build up flood defences and make ourselves ready to weather the storm.” But the floods will wash away our crops, and when the summer sun burns the hayfields, our cattle will die of starvation in the winter. The UK has not been self-sufficient for food since before the Industrial Revolution, and in 2016 we isolated ourselves from the EU, from whence much of our food currently comes. As agricultural yields collapse across Europe (already down significantly in the UK for several consecutive years because of a string of record-breaking summers), how will our ability to feed ourselves be impacted? We need realism in the face of this threat, not warm words about preserving the countryside and investing in flood defences. In the future, we will need other nations to feed us; working in partnership with those nations to stave off the worst effects of climate change seems like a reasonable quid pro quo. Badenoch’s words give no evidence of any consideration of how we will feed the nation as the 21st century wears on.

“The best way to deliver cleaner energy and a better environment is not through state diktat, arbitrary deadlines and an ever-expanding bureaucracy paid to inspect the consequences of its own policies; it is through markets, innovation and competition.”

This extraordinary sentence makes a virtue of doing nothing to tackle the climate crisis. If ever there was evidence of a politician worshipping at the shrine of a crazy cult it is here in this statement: do nothing, make no attempt to change the way we behave, or the way we produce and consume energy, and trust that the the omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent Market will protect humanity. However, the market is not a sentient being, it has no values, and it is capable of being rigged. If anything, the market promotes the opposite of human well-being. As I walk to work and huge SUVs roar past me, I am conscious of how the Market is driving behaviour in the opposite direction to the one we need to follow to avoid civilisational collapse. And markets are not free; they can be rigged. Right now, the United States is straining every sinew to dissuade nations from investing in renewables, to protect the trillions of dollars its fossil fuel producers hope to make by selling liquified natural gas. Contrast Badenoch’s words with those of climate scientist Kevin Anderson from the University of Manchester in this video: every driver of climate change is becoming more intense, not less intense; markets are driving us relentlessly towards the collapse of modern civilisation.

The future of energy in the UK

“Britain now has the highest industrial electricity prices in the world. Four times higher than those in the United States and 50 per cent higher than in France and Germany. Britain’s domestic electricity prices are some of the highest in Europe.”

There is undoubtedly a problem with the UK’S electricity market. Markets are not free, and they are often constrained in very particular ways by governments. The UK has abundant renewable energy, and this is cheap to produce, but the cost of electricity has for many years been set by the wholesale price of gas. Given the UK’s high renewables capacity this seems like a nonsensical situation. It has arisen because of the way that the UK electricity market works (see here for a helpful explainer), and has nothing to do with Net Zero: if 100% of electricity was generated by gas then of course the price of electricity would also be set by the wholesale price of gas. The previous Conservative administration introduced “contracts for difference” (CFD) that rebalance the way that the costs of renewables are factored into the UK electricity market, and the present Labour government is now using CFD to break the hold of the gas price on electricity prices. The central point here is that UK electricity is not expensive because we have renewables but because we have a dysfunctional market.

“These are not minor inconveniences to be brushed aside before moving on to predictions about the unstoppable march of electrotech…Nor can Britain ignore where these technologies come from. China is building a new coal-fired power station roughly every other week while British workers are told that their own industries must close to save the planet.”

This inversion of the argument is a favourite tactic of climate deniers: “hey, green idiots, by buying electric cars and solar panels you’re just supporting Chinese coal power which we know is the dirtiest source of power on the planet”. But Badenoch is out of date. China’s use of coal has flatlined, and it now has more capacity for generating electricity from solar energy than from coal. China continues to outcompete the West in manufacturing while undergoing a green revolution. And the electrification revolution is what the world needs. Cheap solar panels manufactured in China are enabling the developing world to meet its growing energy needs without accelerating climate change, and they can help wealthy nations to reverse the slide to destruction too if only they have the will to avert disaster.

But why “electrotech”? There is no green way to run internal combustion engines and gas boilers: the only technologies that allow us to travel and heat or cool our homes without producing carbon dioxide are based on electrical power.

“We have to do things differently. The Conservative Party’s plan will repeal and replace the Climate Change Act, which causes many of these problems without actually tackling climate change. We will remove its rigid targets that put artificial deadlines ahead of prosperity and energy security.”

What use are prosperity and energy security if we are unable to feed ourselves? We have reached a critical point in our history as a species: either we tackle the existential threat that faces us, or we allow the majority of humanity to suffer the consequences of global heating and the collapse of agriculture while a tiny minority of super-rich survive. How important and valuable will AI data centres feel to people dying of starvation? The US technology giants are preparing to sacrifice billions of lives for the sake of the personal wealth of Zuckerberg, Altman and a few others. Is this the hill on which Badenoch wants to die?

“We will build nuclear power. We will back domestic North Sea oil and gas. We will invest in resilience, flood protection and our natural environment. We will put British energy first and pursue power that is clean, cheap, abundant and secure.”

The present government recently approved construction of the new Sizewell C reactor; Ed Miliband is known to be enthusiastic about nuclear energy. However, the levelled cost of electricity produced by nuclear energy is higher than for any other source. Moreover, the new Sizewell C reactor will not come online until 2035. That’s a long way off. Thus the government has also explored the possibility of investment in small modular nuclear reactors (SMR), with Rolls Royce recently winning a contract to build capacity to produce 1.4 GW at a site in North Wales. This is simpler technology than conventional nuclear power plant, requiring smaller up-front investment. Rolls says its aim is to develop a technology with a levelled cost of electricity generation that is competitive with offshore wind power – the most expensive renewable technology. However, SMRs are new technology, and it remains to be seen whether this aim will be delivered in practice. And then of course there is the cost of looking after spent fuel for thousands of years. In contrast, solar and wind power are cheap, can come on line fast, and can make an instant impact on our emissions. Grid-scale battery storage is the solution to intermittent supply, and currently allows California to use solar power 24 hours a day.

As for the North Sea, the gas and oil are running out, and 80% of the oil never makes it to the UK because Margaret Thatcher gave it to the Market to do with as it willed. There is no security for the nation in staking its future on a fast dwindling source of energy.

Badenoch’s vision is based on power that is polluting, expensive, scarce and diminishing. Some hope for the future.