Kemi Badenoch Credit: House of Commons/Flickr
The Tory leader has just torched the political consensus on ambitious climate action - the electoral calculus is likely to prove as deeply flawed as the economic analysis behind the move
"Everything is impossible to those who will not try," as Alexander the Great almost said.
Kemi Badenoch this morning once again attempted to position herself as a brave and principled teller of "unvarnished truths", as she confidently declared that "net zero by 2050 is impossible". It was a bold gambit, given this "truth-telling" is reliant on a litany of falsehoods and attempts to make an electoral virtue of that most neglected of leadership qualities: a can't do attitude.
The Conservative leader's central claim that reaching net zero emissions by 2050 is "impossible" is technically false, scientifically flawed, politically counter-productive, and economically damaging. It is entirely in keeping with a Party that has responded to its central role in a decade of economic failure and its worst electoral shellacking in a century by tirelessly exploring how to now fully destroy one of the world's most successful political machines.
Badenoch is often keen to stress how her background as an engineer gives her arguments a degree of rigour and accuracy her opponents lack, but her stance on net zero remains strangely imprecise and deeply irrational. This morning's assertion that "the truth is that net zero by 2050 is impossible" is simply incorrect. It is not impossible to get to net zero by mid-century. It is extremely difficult to reach the target and it could be argued it is improbable. But it is not subject to the immutable laws of physics - it is not "impossible" to decarbonise an economy.
There are multiple plausible scenarios whereby net zero could be reached within 25 years. Breakthroughs in nuclear, battery, or carbon removal technologies could all enable deep decarbonisation inside the required timeframe, or failing that the government could simply pursue the scenarios modelled by the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the International Energy Agency (IEA), and many others setting out in painstaking detail how reaching net zero is entirely technically feasible.
Badenoch's supporters - of which a handful still exist - would argue that when she said "the truth is that net zero by 2050 is impossible" she did not mean that "net zero is impossible", because she went on to explain that "anyone who has done any serious analysis knows it can't be achieved without a serious drop in our living standards or by bankrupting us".
But this is not true either. There are literally thousands of pages of hugely detailed analysis showing how net zero could be reached without undermining living standards or imposing excessive costs on the economy. The latest CCC report calculated the net cost of reaching the net zero target stands at around 0.2 per cent of UK GDP a year on average - a cost which has fallen significantly in recent years as clean tech costs have plummeted. Other analyses are more optimistic still, arguing that when co-benefits such improved health, enhanced energy security, and reduced climate impacts are taken into account net zero is likely to result in net gains for the economy.
There is also plenty of real-world evidence to date showing how industrialised economies have managed to slash emissions while continuing to grow GDP and generate wealth. Just today, a new analysis from think tank Transport & Environment showed how the electric vehicle boom is driving down transport emissions, while also reducing fuel costs for motorists and curbing fossil fuel imports across the EU.
At the same time, genuinely terrifying studies now appear pretty much every week detailing how a failure to get to net zero in the coming decades will condemn the world to climate impacts that could obliterate global GDP projections and trigger an era of constant insecurity and mass migration.
It is possible to contest these analyses, especially given the huge number of variables in play, but it is wrong to imply that no serious work has been done to understand how the net zero target might be met. However, it is of a piece with Badenoch's approach to politics to simply dismiss those who do not agree with her as unserious or intellectually lacking, rather than engage with their arguments in any meaningful way.
If there is a lack of seriousness here, it is found in Badenoch's failure to engage with the costs that would come from a failure to reach net zero by 2050 and the refusal to set out an alternative plan for tackling those risks.
Nowhere today was there any engagement with the fact the net zero goal is not some abstract aspiration - regardless of what Badenoch said to the contrary - but a target calculated using the best available science to determine the date by which industrialised economies need to reach net zero emissions if there is to be a reasonable chance of keeping temperature increases 'well below' 2C this century. And that temperature target is at the heart of the Paris Agreement because it is deemed to be the level at which the risks of passing tipping points in the climate system that trigger catastrophic runaway warming become unacceptable. This is not a game. If the global economy does not reach net zero, temperatures will keep rising bringing with them the risk of sea level rise, food system collapse, and rolling disasters.
Badenoch this morning insisted she "badly wants to leave a much better environmental inheritance for my children and for yours". But if that is the case how can she sound so cavalier when endorsing a course of action that loads immense risks on to those generations?
If the scientific rationale makes no sense, the political strategy is barely any more coherent.
Badenoch appears to be betting the farm on winning back many of the voters who ditched the Tories last year in favour of Reform. But as new polling today from More in Common underscores, 45 per cent of Reform voters think it is important that the government makes tackling climate change a priority. And the 55 per cent who do not are much more likely to be won over by Nigel Farage's full blown climate denialism than Badenoch's suggestion we should still try to tackle climate change, but slower and with less urgency.
Meanwhile, the same poll shows once again that almost two-thirds of Conservative voters and target voters think it is important the government makes tackling climate change a priority. Badenoch's attacks on net zero only serve to give those voters yet more reasons to defect to a Liberal Democrat Party which won scores of Tory seats at the last election. Many of the green Tories who were such an influential voice within the party not so long ago will be privately furious today at the vandalism being inflicted upon both the Party's environmental legacy and its hopes of winning back seats it used to regard as impregnable.
The people who will be happiest with Badenoch's attacks on net zero will be the Lib Dems' Ed Davey and the Greens' Adrian Ramsay, who last summer won a previously ‘True Blue' seat in East Anglia. But Number 10 will also be scenting the opportunity to stitch back together the tactical voting anti-Tory coalition that gave Labour a landslide. It is a high risk strategy, but if the next election becomes a de facto referendum on the Climate Change Act and whether or not a Tory-Reform government would follow its MAGA idol in taking the UK out of the Paris Agreement then it will likely benefit those parties still committed to net zero.
Where Badenoch is on firmer ground is in pointing out some of the weaknesses in the net zero policies enacted by her Conservative colleagues and now taken forward by Labour. It is the case current energy market structures are making it harder than it should to curb energy bills, while there are lots of legitimate questions about how some of the short-term costs associated with the net zero transition are shared and the best mechanisms for catalysing clean tech investment and innovation.
But these critiques are undermined by Badenoch's defeatist insistence the entire net zero project is "impossible". That stance simply invites the large majority of voters who want bolder climate action to respond with, ‘so, you just give up then?' It currently looks highly improbably that Badenoch can win the next election, but she would not walk into CCHQ and declare "victory is impossible, let's aim for 2033 instead - and maybe not even then". The job of leaders is to lead. President Kennedy did not famously declare that "we choose not to go to the moon, because it is hard".
This would all be just another vaguely amusing footnote in the ongoing collapse of British politics into the post-Brexit swamp of self-indulgent incoherence, were it not so dangerous.
It has looked rickety for years, but Badenoch has finally taken the axe to the cross-party consensus on the need to prioritise climate action and broadly adhere to the scientific advice on how quickly industrialised economies should decarbonise. In doing so, she has increased the policy and political risk for the many businesses and investors working to accelerate the UK's net zero transition, enhance its energy security, reduce its energy bills, and bolster its exports.
It remains highly unlikely scrapping net zero targets would meaningfully curb costs for households and businesses, but it would do immense damage to one of the few parts of the economy that is growing. To take just one example, deliberately slowing the transition to electric vehicles would not deliver significant gains for UK manufacturers, but it would make it easier for China's BYD to dominate the global market as the demise of the internal combustion engine inevitably continues to play out.
Meanwhile, despite Badenoch's false claim that other countries are not taking their net zero transitions seriously, investment in clean technologies across Europe and emerging economies will continue to motor. The new Tory strategy - such as it is - would leave the UK exposed to volatile fossil fuel markets at the same time as it misses out on booming clean tech markets and torches its support for the multilateral effort to avert a century of climate disasters.
As the CBI's Rain Newton-Smith observed: "Now is not the time to step back from the opportunities of the green economy. Cross-party support for net zero has underpinned international investors' confidence to choose the UK for investment in the energy transition… Achieving net zero by 2050 provides opportunities for green growth – and it can only be delivered by creating the conditions to sustain high levels of private investment. This includes governments committing to the long-term policy certainty established by UK carbon budgets."
The erstwhile party of business and conservation has given up on engaging with what businesses and conservationists actually want. Instead it has retreated into a 'very online world' where climate change is not that big a deal, the economic and industrial transformations that Britain used to proudly lead are beyond the country's means, and anyone who disagrees is deluded. It is a Trumpist strategy at a time when Trumpism has revealed itself to be the geopolitical equivalent of tossing lit matches around an oil refinery. It is also a strategy endorsed by many of the same people who insisted Brexit would be a simple and cost-free endeavour that would unlock myriad economic benefits along the way. They have been wrong about so much, what makes them right about this?
The problem for Badenoch is the vast majority of the British public have little time for such transparent nonsense. If you are going to position yourself as a brave truthteller, you actually have to tell the truth, not simply offer highly contested opinions that are themselves shaped by myriad falsehoods. And you then have to offer credible solutions to the problems you have identified - solutions which extend beyond hoping climate change will not be that bad and fossil fuels will stop being so expensive. The Tory leader is wrong about net zero - it is a genuine tragedy a Conservative Party that was once a proud supporter of world-leading climate action cannot see that.
