Keeping calm and carrying on
Are the brakes going on Net Zero? Let's not panic yet.
When Rishi Sunak made his new approach to Net Zero announcement last week, The Green Edge experienced the briefest of existential crises. If this indicates the course of events for the future, we bethought ourselves, is it worth us even carrying on? The thought only stayed with us for mere seconds, mind, as we do believe that sustainability is a corner worth fighting, that dangers like accelerating environmental migration are clear and present, and that a formula can still to be found to bring everyone in to the fight. In a sense, it’s almost like finding the key to a new world religion.
But enough of the navel gazing. What actually happened last week? That it was some kind of U-turn there is little doubt, at least among those media commentators who see their value as being the chronicling of such things. But many might agree this is something that has been a long time coming: starting perhaps with an action that in some part at least was intended to keep a certain previous Prime Minister a job; then sloganised by the next PM into a pithy ten points that seem to be getting a little less pointy each year:
Despite new detail from Government, our confidence in the UK meeting its medium-term targets has decreased in the past year. The increased transparency embodied in the [new Carbon Budget Delivery Plan] is welcome, but a key opportunity to raise the overall pace of delivery has been missed.
Source: Climate Change Committee 2023 Progress Report to Parliament (June 2023)
There was, of course, one other PM in the timeline, although the major contribution there – viewed through our skills lens at least – was what we saw as a slowdown in the confusion in 2022 of the political process driving the Green Jobs Delivery Group (GJDG). Having said that, certain conversations we’ve had recently have indicated to us that the GJDG process is back on track, and we might even speculate that we could see some sort of useful output before the next election. We look forward to that.
That Sunak’s announcement last week drained even more of his political capital, in the shorter term at least, is also clear. We leave much of the commentary on that to those media voices much louder than ours who measure their success in terms of column inches and eyeballs on screens. But we will note that the announcement has made an already-complicated policy and regulation landscape even more so. As it stands right now, from 1st January 2024 both the Zero Emissions Mandate and the Clean Heat Market Mechanism are still on the cards, despite some dissent from the big players even before Sunak spoke last week. In effect, these instruments will put penalties in place for vehicle and boiler manufacturers if they don’t meet certain sales quotas for the cleaner versions of their wares. Added to that, we can sense the howls of outrage brewing around the potential waste of Government money going into the clean car industry – around £5bn in total across the Faraday Battery Challenge (£318mn); the Advanced Propulsion Centre (£1bn); Driving the Electric Revolution (£80mn); the Office for Zero Emission Vehicles (£2.5bn); Automotive Transformation Fund (£1bn); and the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (£440mn). For many, these endeavours might pass under the radar; but we’ve also seen a few high profile investments both with and without government help, including the Tata gigafactory in Somerset, BMW’s commitment to make the EV mini at Cowley, and Sunderland’s second Envision battery plant. We’ll leave the gloomier voices to tell the story of Britishvolt.
Now, in leaving that part of the commentary to the eyeball-counters, we do realise we may draw more comments of the type we did recently about us leaving too much to the ‘experts’. Perhaps so, but on this occasion we feel it’s more important to focus on those elements of Sunak’s announcement that – if we do take him at his word that this is nothing to do with politics and more about achieving Net Zero in a ‘proportionate, pragmatic and realistic way’ – could be more important in the long run than the shorter-term chaos in which the mainstream media is currently revelling.
Before we do that, though, we have to say that in our opinion, throwing Suella Braverman into the morning media newsround the day after the announcement was not the brightest thing in the world. Granted, if we accept that discussion of the misdemeanours of a loudmouthed comedian with an (allegedly) carnal appetite on a parallel with Mr Creosote is more important than the preservation of the planet we live on, then she was the right person for the job. But her responses on the No. 10 announcement were weak and, it seemed to us, hazily grasped, and the mainstream quite understandably picked up on the emotive tone of statements like ‘fundamentally we're not going to save the planet by bankrupting the British people’.
But one other statement made by Braverman struck us, which was ‘…we need to put economic growth first’. We’re hearing this a fair bit now, with even some kind of rapprochement being extended towards the aforementioned PM who was bounced from office last year for daring to say the same thing. The big argument here, of course, is the degree to which prioritising economic growth is counter-productive to sustainability. We all know economic growth is about achieving higher standards, creating jobs and reducing poverty, increasing investment and innovation, improving the government's fiscal position, and enhancing infrastructure and global competitiveness. But the mantra of growth as a primary focus brings along its impact on the environment, along with resource depletion, income inequality, quality of life vs quantity of goods, consumerism and materialism, and, some would argue, an erosion in well-being and happiness. Put crudely, infinite economic growth is not possible in a finite world.
Now, we’re not so naïve as to suggest that growth should stop so that a sustainable planet can be restored. But a balance does need to be struck and the fact that growth and sustainability don’t exactly go out on hot dates together needs to be more widely appreciated, we feel. One good example of this that we listened to just recently concerns the challenge economic growth creates for patient capital. Pressure for short-term gains and risk aversion from investors – we’re trying to avoid using the word ‘banks’ here – can override the long-term, patient capital investment that is often part and parcel of projects focusing on environmental and societal well-being. Balancing these priorities often requires a nuanced approach that considers the broader impact of investments beyond immediate economic growth.
Moving on from Braverman’s performance, we have to say Sunak himself made a much better fist of explaining himself at a press conference late last week, a few days after the announcement. So much so, we found ourselves asking if his heart is in the right place after all. (We must be careful with that, as we like to maintain a healthy scepticism of the motives of all members of the political class, of whatever hue). In a typically lucid justification of his actions, he said a couple of things that, among the headlines about U-turns on key green targets and major roll-backs on net zero policies, we’re not seeing so widely reported. But we think these could be critical and might just be the wood we should be looking for among the trees.
First, he talked about maintaining the consent of the British people in the transition to Net Zero. He challenged ‘those people who disagree [with him] to explain to families around the country why [they] should be forced to pay five, ten, fifteen thousand pounds to do things that are not necessary to get us to Net Zero’.
Both sides might dispute the cash figures being thrown around in this argument, but for us, the key word is consent. Because without consent in the hearts and minds of the British people – or any other nationality in any country in the world, for that matter – then the right actions by populations for sustainability will at best be done half-heartedly and at worst not be done at all.
But here’s our challenge to all the major voices on all sides of this particular argument: if you’re going to maintain consent, then simplify the language of sustainability so that people know what they’re consenting to. Time and again in our production of The Green Edge, we find new terms being introduced, some of which confuse, conflict or even contradict previous terms. 7R’s of Sustainability? Or perhaps 10? We’ve commented on that previously. And that’s before we even start to bring in terms like offsetting, sequestration, conscious consumerism, doughnut economics, biodiversity, climate mitigation, triple bottom line, and even net zero itself. There are lots of glossaries, of course, but how many people are seriously going to read those? Again, in recent conversations, we’ve listened to people on the coalface of green happenings say the same thing, that the language needs to be simplified for presentation to (forgive us if this sounds elitist and arrogant) the common folk.
One prime example here is the Circular Economy (CE). For those who haven’t taken the trouble to delve into the fine work of the MacArthur Foundation, what does CE mean? Seven bins? Actually, there’s a more frustrating undertone to this: through a range of factors, even in the minds of many who may be familiar with the concept, CE equals Recycling. No, no, no! Those versed in CE will tell you that recycling is circular pond life. Meanwhile the repair sector, a higher life form, is – as the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management (CIWM) tells us in its highly-readable report Beyond Waste: Essential Skills for a Greener Tomorrow – largely run by volunteers while being in big need of industrialisation, with all the support for the right to repair that entails. Shouldn’t everyone be made aware of that?
Finally, on to the second point from Sunak that struck us. Several times in the press conference, he referred to ‘a change in the way we do politics’. And on this point, regardless of whether he’s being sincere or not, we wholeheartedly agree – though not necessarily in the way he might want us to. Forgive us a moment of emotive language, but the effort required to achieve sustainability in the UK and across the world is a war against forces that could – could – destroy our planet. In times of war, politics get put aside. At least part of what we have seen in the announcement and its aftermath over this last week or so is an undoing of much of Sunak’s predecessors’ efforts toward political survival or political capital. Put bluntly – and again, this is something we have heard said in recent conversations – sustainability is too important to be in the hands of politicians.
Rishi Sunak and his government may not survive this. At some time before 25 days have elapsed from the final date of the dissolution of the current Parliament on 17 December 2024, a new government may be handed enough rope to hang itself on the scaffold of Net Zero. Or perhaps, by then, Rishi Sunak has had the guts to take the politics out of sustainability, gained the consent of an informed and understanding British public, and found a way to appease the wheels of industry currently fuming at the sand he’s just thrown down. He may even consider the formation of a separate Net Zero Authority with a mandate for jobs and skills, and programme and policy coordination, along the lines of the one that seems to be crystallising in Australia. Who knows, perhaps heading up something like that might even his first post-PM job.
Whatever the outcome, The Green Edge has no immediate plans to do anything other than keep watching.
