Labour’s green contortions are a foretaste of trouble ahead

Editorial: In purely political terms, Keir Starmer may be right to scale back on his party’s £28bn-a-year green pledge. But now comes the hard bit – creating a workable plan to move Britain closer to net zero carbon emissions that will also be a hit with the electorate

(Dave Brown)

Confirmation that global warming has exceeded 1.5C over the past year will rightly be seen as a flashing red light on the climate crisis dashboard.

As responsible news organisations – including The Independent – have reported, there are short-term factors behind this rise, notably the El Nino natural variation in winds and sea surface temperatures. And while that warning level set by the Paris climate agreement has not yet been breached by long-term average temperatures, the latest figures reinforce the likelihood that the long-term average will breach that 1.5C threshold within the next decade.

So it looks like bad timing for the Labour Party, which is likely to form a government by the end of the year, to announce the same day that it is retreating from its central policy aimed at minimising climate change.

Sir Keir Starmer, who could well be the next prime minister, and Rachel Reeves, who could be the next chancellor, argue forcefully that, if they are scaling back on their £28bn-a-year spending commitment, that is only because the Conservatives will be leaving the public finances in such a terrible state.

But they also urge us to look at the outputs of their policies rather than the inputs. They want to focus, they say, on the clean power revolution, rather than on a sum of money that was chosen three years ago to be allocated to it.

There is a lot to this argument. There was an unreality to the £28bn pledge, as no one had done the work on how home insulation and national grid connections could be increased at such a scale in such a short period of time. Ms Reeves had, in any case, already rendered the figure meaningless by declaring that it was subject to Labour’s fiscal rules, in particular the requirement to reduce debt.

The yah-boo between Labour and the Conservatives about the £28bn figure had become a distraction from a serious national debate about how to progress as a nation towards the target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

So by all means drop the figure, Sir Keir – but you must put in its place a credible plan for delivering net zero. At least a Labour government will now start with a plan that has a more credible price tag attached: about £5bn a year, and funded by an extended windfall tax on oil and gas, instead of by borrowing.

If the new plan goes well, and if the economy recovers, then there will always be scope to increase the government’s green ambitions, rather than to make the mistake of radical administrations in the past, of trying to do too much and then retrenching, demoralising supporters and alienating public opinion.

The danger for Labour is that, if the argument now moves away from the “arbitrary” figure and on to how the party plans to decarbonise UK electricity generation by 2030, it will expose the implausibility of its ambition. It has already been described by trade union leaders and industry bosses as “impossible”.

Labour’s agonies over the ditching of the £28bn are a foretaste not just of problems with the public finances to come for a government led by Sir Keir, but they are typical of the choices that will be faced by nations across the world as some of the easy early gains of decarbonisation are banked and the harder decisions come into view.

The Conservative government in the UK has already shied away from ambitious targets for switching to electric vehicles, and is about to retreat from targets to replace gas boilers with electric heat pumps for home heating. It almost looks as if the two main parties are in a race to be less green.

And yet these adjustments reflect the pressures of public opinion in a democracy. Similar pressures have forced adjustments even in ultra-green Germany. There is plainly a tension between the urgent measures needed to reduce the harm of the climate crisis and the willingness of peoples around the world to bear the cost of those measures.

But that is the challenge for those who argue, as The Independent does, that the UK government, of whichever party, can lead the world in showing that green investment leads to cheaper energy bills in the long run. The £28bn was a distraction in that task, and it is right that it should go.

That was the easy part. Now all parties need to produce popular and workable plans to limit global warming.