The Conservatives could steal a march on Labour on green policy

The government and opposition are locked into a competition to outdo each other in promising a zero-carbon future, writes John Rentoul

Boris Johnson had something of a green record as mayor of London (AFP)

The Labour Party made a small green splash yesterday by demanding the end of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030 instead of 2035, which is Boris Johnson’s plan. It looked as if Matthew Pennycook, the shadow climate change minister, was winning the green battle – environmental politics currently being fought by the competitive setting of deadlines.  

The reality is more complicated. It was only a year ago, at Labour’s annual conference, that delegates voted for a plan that “works towards a path to net zero-carbon emissions by 2030”. Not just the transport sector but the whole economy to be zero carbon by 2030 – although the promise was only to “work towards” a “path to” it.  

At the same time, the conference also voted for a motion proposed by the GMB union, many of whose members work in energy, that refused to put a date on net zero. So Labour’s manifesto for last year’s election was a fudge. It promised to “put the UK on track for a net-zero-carbon energy system within the 2030s”.  

Thus yesterday’s plan for electric vehicles could be seen as part of a retreat from the ambition of a policy to decarbonise the economy entirely in just 10 years. Or a sensible acceptance of the need to take a step-by-step, sector-by-sector approach to radical and expensive economic dislocation for which public opinion has hardly been prepared. 

People will have their own opinions on where to place Pennycook and Keir Starmer on the spectrum between climate traitors and wild impossibilists, but what is interesting is that the government is not standing still. Some Conservatives thought Theresa May had got ahead of herself when she committed the government, as one of her last acts as prime minister, to the 2050 target for carbon net zero. 

They may be in for a shock when Boris Johnson makes his next green speech. He has always been an enthusiastic environmentalist, and hangs out with green Tories such as his father, Carrie Symonds and Zac Goldsmith.  

For some weeks the prime minister has been planning to make a big speech about his plan to “build back greener”. As part of this plan, he wants to use the huge state intervention in the economy required by the coronavirus recession to drive the country towards clean, green energy. November’s UN climate change conference has been postponed, but it will be held in Glasgow next year, and Johnson is keen to set the scene for it.  

He may be in a good position to outflank Labour on green issues, because Starmer is held back from radical action by the trade unions. Electric vehicles are one thing – the unions recognise that switching from internal combustion engines is the best chance of defending their members’ jobs in the car industry – but the energy sector is another. The unions have members in the oil and gas industries, not to mention what is left of energy-intensive manufacturing, and therefore a strong producer interest in resisting change.  

Labour has already tied itself in knots on aviation, with MPs demanding an extension of the furlough scheme to protect jobs in their constituencies, while radical greens – who once included Anneliese Dodds, the shadow chancellor – think that the coronavirus crisis is a Gaia-sent opportunity to abolish domestic flying.  

I suspect that Johnson is itching to expand on ever more moonshotty ambitions for technological fixes for the climate emergency. Hydrogen is likely to feature, according to James Forsyth, the political editor of The Spectator. “Carbon drove the industrial revolution and hydrogen can drive the green revolution,” one “government figure” tells him.  

I’m no expert, but hydrogen strikes me as similar to carbon capture and storage – a utopian technology that hasn’t actually been invented yet. Making pure hydrogen out of water uses a huge amount of energy itself, and using hydrogen as a fuel for home heating is unproven.  

Even so, it is easy to see how the prime minister’s enthusiasm for grand rhetoric could leave Starmer with a difficult negotiation with the trade unions. In fact, both main parties may find themselves being held back by the industrial interests of their financial backers: the Conservatives by big companies and Labour by the unions.  

Perhaps this will be the chance for Ed Davey, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, who was, after all, climate change secretary in the coalition government, and who oversaw the huge shift from coal power to wind, to come through the middle.