Of all Rishi Sunak’s blunders and policy decisions in 2023, perhaps the most consequential was his move to delay key milestones on the way to net zero. Sunak postponed the banning of sales of petrol and diesel cars and domestic boilers two months after the government authorised more carbon extraction from the North Sea. Cue outrage from the capitalists to the greens, from greens to even some Tories. What on earth was he doing?
There is perhaps some sense in his decision to slow down. If net zero by 2050 is the final target, then the means of getting there must be realistic. But as our climate becomes more inhospitable, affecting food imports, infrastructure and ultimately living standards, the goal must instead be to reduce global emissions as quickly as possible, not meet a distant date for net zero. Yes, realistic means to decarbonise the British economy are needed, but he has not provided them. On the contrary, he is willing away the means, as he admits they are lacking.
The reality is that this delay is not about realistic decarbonisation, but about the further Faragisation of the Conservative party, which is now a hard-right party of a sort familiar from the US. The core programme of this party is Brexit and all the fantasies this entails, and it is being further radicalised with a culture war and denial about anthropogenic climate change.
Net zero is the new Brussels. This is all too clear in the oil and gas bill, to be debated in the House of Commons on Monday, which will compel the government to do annually what it can already do and has done – licence new North Sea oil and gas production. Shrouded in irrelevant mendacities about emissions and energy security, this is a performative bill throwing a bone to the Faragists and forcing Labour to tack and twist some more. Again, the Tories set the agenda for their own purposes, quite deliberately undermining what consensus there has been on climate policy – to the despair of Tories who have been concerned with the issue, notably Alok Sharma and Chris Skidmore.
The Tory party is a party of rentiers for rentiers; its electorate is old and propertied. Once the party of British national capitalism, of big business, before it undid the very bases on which it depended, it no longer acts as the agent of productive change. Its aim is essentially to transfer resources from young to old, from workers to rentiers, from poor to rich; to support the landlord, the property developer and the extractive monopolies. Far from being incompetent, it has been extraordinarily successful in pursuing its agenda. It has no interest or competence in promoting a successful, transformative, decarbonised capitalism; indeed it shows a remarkably inadequate understanding of the dynamics of modern capitalism.
Significant sections of global capitalism have noted that they will be forced to decarbonise. Massive investment programmes are under way that require corresponding actions by states to complement and support them. That is why there was so little support from capitalists operating in the UK for Sunak’s net-zero U-turn. Car investors need to know when new petrol and diesel cars cars will be banned, and have confidence that they will be. And they need confidence that there will be an infrastructure to support electric cars, as the car industries, and others, have made clear.
This is not to say that the British government has not supported elements of decarbonisation. Such is the pressure generated by subsidies offered in the US, the EU and China, that even free-market Tories have already been forced to pour subsidies of various kinds into nuclear reactors, battery plants, car factories and steelworks (as well as subsidising oil companies).
Handing out subsidies to foreign companies to keep them operating in the UK does not equate to a coherent industrial policy that will lead to adequate decarbonisation. But the policy does at least recognise that the fantasies of world-beating British green tech are dead; there is no realistic prospect of creating a new British electric car or battery industry. The focus should not be on manufacturing new technology, but creating a domestic infrastructure that can provide clean energy to people cheaply.
In fact, a whole new way of thinking about the economy is needed to decarbonise successfully, something that Labour has not yet embraced. It will involve thinking in new ways about the foundational economy, or everyday economy, as proposed by the five authors of a vital new book When Nothing Works: From Cost of Living to Foundational Liveability. These authors – Luca Calafati, Julie Froud, Colin Haslam, Sukhdev Johal and Karel Williams – rightly argue that instead of the economics of fantasy growth, we need a political economy of improvement. Instead of wishful thinking about science and entrepreneurship, we need to change things. We cannot think of decarbonisation as a green industrial revolution, or as a tool for new R&D programmes and entrepreneurial startups or industrial policy. Instead we face a systemic issue that must be dealt with as such; at the centre of this needs to be a multi-dimensional analysis of the households nearly all of us live in. Whether the change needed can be achieved with private, barely regulated utilities extracting huge profits needs to be discussed.
Furthermore, we will need to restrict certain things – including subsidies to air travel, airport expansion, new oil and coal production. All this will require a creative and competent state, and popular consent and engagement.
Labour has shied away from all this, letting the Tories set the agenda, and is now seemingly confining its promises to a strangely unrealistic programme to decarbonise electricity by 2030 rather than the much more expensive and ambitious general decarbonisation that will be needed. It has been reluctant to think through what might need to be done, or to mobilise and campaign for the political support that will be necessary. Decarbonising will take much more than evoking Bidenomics, indulging fantasies of “world-beating” British green tech, or liberalising planning and de-risking the investment of rentiers.
David Edgerton is Hans Rausing Professor of the history of science and technology and professor of modern British history at King’s College London
