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Influential journalists on the right of British politics are responsible for egregiously misleading reporting on climate policy and the green economy - could the climate movement do more to defend itself?
The Tony Blair Institute (TBI) yesterday published an interesting new report titled 'Making UK Industrial Strategy: A Hard-Headed Approach Guided by Green Industry'. Backed by the European Climate Foundation and featuring input from Oxford Economics, the report calculates the net zero transition can boost UK GDP by up to five per cent by 2050, supporting around 1.2 million jobs in the process. But it argues that to maximise these economic gains, the government needs a more proactive industrial strategy that ruthlessly focuses on those sectors where the UK is most likely to prove competitive.
It's a long report, but to summarise the TBI wants to see a bit less focus on green steel, where the UK will always struggle to compete with the powerhouses in the developing world, and more support for green services where the UK is already leader and an automotive sector where there is huge potential for rapid growth. To that end, it calls for improved relations with EU, better co-ordinated innovation funding, and improved governance across Whitehall to better manage escalating climate risks and the inevitable trade-offs that come with the net zero transition.
In fairness, the report isn't quite as bullish on the economic importance of the net zero transition as some other studies. For example, last year's analysis from the CBI put the share of GDP from industries that are key to the net zero transition at 3.8 per cent, while today's report puts the green economy's economic share at just 0.8 per cent. The TBI also argues the government's upcoming Industrial Strategy shouldn't fixate on green sectors and should also consider the importance of (wait for it…) AI. And it predicts the UK may struggle to engineer a green manufacturing employment boom, given the roll out of clean technologies will come alongside automation that is make manufacturing sectors less labour intensive.
But it is crystal clear the net zero transition is net positive for both the economy and employment, even before you get into the whole ‘sustaining the only habitable biosphere in the known universe' thing.
The first point in the report's executive summary states: "Fully capitalising on the net-zero transition could provide a major boost to UK growth. In a best-case scenario, the green economy could grow from 0.8 per cent of GDP today to nearly six per cent by 2050, employing 1.2 million people - up from 200,000. This could lift the UK's annual growth rate by 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points over the next 25 years, a vital boost at a time of sluggish growth. This upside potential is why green growth must be part of the government's economic strategy."
You'd think there was not much room for misunderstanding there, and yet you would be wrong.
Somehow this report has today generated headlines to the effect of 'Ed Miliband's net zero promises are false, Tony Blair's think tank warns' (The Telegraph), 'Tony Blair Institute Shreds Red Ed's Net Zero Growth Promises' (Guido Fawkes), and 'Ed Miliband warned against making huge net zero ‘mistake'' (Daily Express). Broadcaster Andrew Neil, who used to be a serious figure, took to social media platform X to declare that the report was "devastating… on Ed Miliband's net zero nonsense". At the time of writing that post has been seen over 190,000 times.
To call this reporting partial would be generous in the extreme. It is based on the most egregious selective quotations and provides readers with a deeply misleading of sense of what the report actually contains. It takes a handful of concerns the report expresses about the government's current industrial strategy and the prospects for the UK's manufacturing sector and presents them without any context or the wider analysis of how the net zero transition will boost economic growth. It can't be said often enough that right wing press holds many people in utter contempt, but right near the top of the list is its own readers.
However, there are lessons here for the TBI and the many organisations - and the large majority of the public - who support the net zero transition.
There are large parts of the press and the commentariat that cannot be relied on to report on anything to do with the net zero transition in good faith. To complain about the deep grained climate scepticism of much of the media in the anglosphere is as futile as complaining about the weather in February, but it is still worth acknowledging. The cynicism of parts of the British press is reaching thermonuclear levels when it comes to any and all climate-related issues. This feels like an important and under-discussed problem.
It is almost impossible to pre-empt such bad faith reporting and there are risks involved in trying to do so. Those analysing the net zero transition should not look to sanitise their reports or strip out anything that could be weaponised to attack climate policies. Climate action is filled with trade-offs, costs, and benefits. It is important these complexities are analysed and discussed. No one should self-sensor just because climate policy is being dragged into an increasingly ill-tempered culture war. The net zero transition should not be presented as a problem-free panacea to the UK's many woes.
But that said, when reports and arguments are shamelessly misrepresented and partially reported there has to be a response. There has to be a concerted effort at rebuttal and a serious attempt to ensure the original argument - with all its nuance - lands with the target audience.
That has not happened today. A report with the imprimatur of the most successful Labour Prime Minister of the modern age has been used to attack the very idea the UK should try and decarbonise, while one of the most influential journalists on the right of British politics has been able to hijack an analysis that calls for a more ambitious green industrial strategy to argue the net zero project should be ditched. Something has clearly gone very wrong here, and yet there has been next to no effort to challenge such shamefully partial reporting.
It will never happen, but imagine if Blair himself publicly challenged Neil and his allies to explain why they had failed to inform their readers of how the report also shows that net zero should boost GDP and concludes "green growth must be part of the government's economic strategy"? Imagine if he questioned why they had chosen to only present a small component of a report on the most important of topics and ignored everything that did not fit with their priors?
It wouldn't change Neil's mind, but it would make the deliberate machinations behind such reporting obvious to many more people and start a long overdue debate about how and why climate action is being attacked.
Both the left and the climate movement wonders why it keeps losing. Maybe it is because it is not willing to defend itself or its work.
A version of this article first appeared as part of BusinessGreen's Overnight Briefing email, which is available to all BusinessGreen Intelligence members.
