It’s not looking great for the climate, our change of prime minister: Liz Truss, who has about as much expertise in British geomorphology as she does in cheese, seems to think we can frack our way out of the energy crisis by Christmas, and that nuclear power is a similarly quick answer.
Her newly appointed chief economic adviser, Matthew Sinclair, wrote a book entitled Let Them Eat Carbon in 2011, in which he argued that “the temperatures we face today may not be the ideal conditions for humanity to live and flourish”. Let warming go wild, in other words. It might be fun. Sure, it was over a decade ago and don’t let’s cancel him for ever over a tiny little book – all he did was mindlessly risk the end of the species.
However, beneath these morbid symptoms the global energy crisis has sparked conversations that are real, perhaps for the first time – certainly, it’s the first time that so many nations have been having them simultaneously.
It seems likely that the prime minister’s first move will be to tear up everything she campaigned on and roll over to the opposition’s suggestion that energy bills be frozen at April 2022’s levels. Partly because of her inelegant flip-flopping, partly due to harsh economic realities, it is obvious that this sticking plaster, while necessary, is insufficient. The competing alternative narratives are red (sequester North Sea gas and let wholesalers take their rampant profiteering elsewhere) and green (ramp up renewables until fossil fuel supply is no longer relevant – 45% of UK electricity is already from renewables).
Crucially, these narratives don’t compete with each other. You don’t need to gate off the conversation about the pros and cons of retaking gas at source before you can start talking about expanding renewables. It would be reasonable to split the energy market into clean power and fossil power, so that the price of gas was not setting the price of solar and wind, and the incentive to lean heavily on the latter and reduce consumption of the former became universal. Ideas that seemed unthinkably radical a year ago now look much less extreme than the reality we’re facing this winter.
We’ve now spent 12 years living this cognitive dissonance, where we have longstanding net-zero ambitions enshrined in law, a climate crisis unfolding with alarming speed, and successive Conservative prime ministers making asinine remarks about “green crap”, then throwing the environmental agenda to the wind whenever they needed to assuage their sociopathically short-termist party members.
Any progress we’ve made has been despite our own government, and so much of our collective mental energy has been lost to denial: denying that we’re not moving fast enough, denying that the heatwave was of our own making, denying that we’ve probably already left it too late to save the things we love – whether that’s beaches or biodiversity .
We needed Vladimir Putin’s energy war to get serious about how stark our situation is. This is not to predict any sudden conversion to sense from Truss, but rather to point out that the brass-necked irrationality of Tory arguments – that somehow net zero targets were pushing everyone’s bills up, and woke warriors had started it all by cancelling Nigel Lawson – will no longer fly. Having given the opposition a lead in the polls, the Conservatives have also given it an electorate sick of rhetoric and inaction, ready for bold ideas.
Even with an energy bill freeze, the cost of living crisis has already moved the dial. The idea that hardship is mainly down to personal inadequacy has become fanciful. The notion that people can scrimp their way to solvency, which is given in justification for so many harmful policy decisions, has been comprehensively overturned. There are the green shoots of a new solidarity across all nine bottom deciles. For goodness sake, this woeful party has radicalised centrist dad Martin Lewis, and they don’t even seem to understand how serious that is, what it means for their prospects.
Putin, meanwhile, has overplayed his hand: his threat of disruption to energy supply has historically been enough to keep his neighbours docile, and maintain the scratchy equilibrium between democratic states and his increasingly authoritarian one. Actually disrupting the energy supply, conversely, will force us and the EU towards renewable alternatives, and once that gains momentum, the link between geopolitics and carbon resources will ultimately be severed. Good luck with strongman politics when there’s nothing underpinning them but bot farms tweeting mean things.
No one would ever wish to have been brought to a place where there are no alternatives. It would be better if Russia had not invaded Ukraine, if inflation were under control, if energy bills weren’t spiralling into impossibility. It would be better if the UK’s situation weren’t so particularly, idiosyncratically, bad. This is what a country looks like after 12 years of people who don’t believe in government, being in government. It turns out if you focus all your energy and resource on cronyism and getting re-elected, you can make life much harder for millions of people in a relatively short space of time.
But, for the want of alternatives, we will emerge from the next election with not only a new government but a radical and uncompromising plan for energy that will transform the way we live. We’ll look back on this as the inflection point that got us to net zero.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
