Theresa May’s climate legacy makes Britain a world leader, but only if followed by 30 years of good diplomacy

The grey, smoggy overcast skies above China’s megalopolises demonstrate the disconnect between economic and environmental priorities

Protesters demanding systemic change (Getty/iStock)

With a gay abandon rarely glimpsed when she was at the peak of her powers, the prime minister is making frenetic efforts to ensure that her legacy is rather more than a botched Brexit.

Hence her attempts to wrench billions out of the Treasury for higher education and a fresh, ambitious, mandatory target for reducing net greenhouse gas emissions in the UK to almost zero by 2050 (allowing for offsetting measures such as planting trees). It replaces the legal requirement set in the Climate Change Act 2008 to slash emission by 80 per cent.

Britain is the first country to set such a target – albeit far into the future.

The schoolchildren of today will be well into middle age by the time this happens, and may have only a dim memory of the odd figure who once occupied No 10 Downing Street, but they will benefit from her far-sightedness. Or rather the earth will still be habitable if and only if sustained action is taken now and for decades to come, and if the UK’s initiative is emulated by other, much larger, industrial powers. There must be doubts about how realistic that hope.

What critics say about the UK itself only producing a tiny proportion of the world’s CO2 and other pollutants is right, even if the necessary adjustments are applied to the judgement. The UK’s greenhouse gas emissions are relatively small, and not growing rapidly, even if account is taken of the fact that a deindustrialised Britain is “exporting” its pollution to other countries when it imports steel, cars, electricity and much else made outside the UK.

There is a case – probably to be negotiated on an international basis via the World Trade Organisation – to construct a form of taxation on such goods as they are imported, and to count an estimate of their impact in the official statistics. But unless an even more radical change in lifestyles takes place – people not flying on holiday, for example, or readily embracing veganism – such reforms will make only a modest impact. It will be difficult, in other words, for Britain to hit the target Ms May has set even in 30 years’ time.

Thus Britain will also need to make contingency plans for the possibility that the target will be missed or, if it is met, it is still not tough enough. Climate change may be accelerating even now, and more rapidly than the science indicates. Our culture of consumption and waste will, most likely, not undergo some green Damascene conversion. The emerging economies of Asia and Africa will continue to put economic growth ahead of environmental concerns.

It is as well, however, to be realistic about the impact Britain can make. It would be nice to imagine that minsters in Abuja, Beijing, Brasilia and Delhi will be so inspired by the British government’s example as to adopt similarly demanding targets themselves, but the record suggests otherwise. The fastest-growing cities in the world, the likes of Kinshasa and Lagos, are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change themselves, but even that is not enough to translating into action for the local inhabitants, let alone for the sake of the wider planet.

The grey, smoggy overcast skies above China’s megalopolises demonstrate the disconnect between economic and environmental priorities. It is the economic phenomenon known as the tragedy of the commons, but writ on a vast scale.

Emerging economy nations might regard the British as a touch hypocritical in importing the industrial goods they produce while lecturing them about their attempt to enjoy rising living standards that the west went through from the 18th century onwards. In that context, the achievement of the International Paris Accord on Climate Change was a towering achievement, though one that the United States has since abandoned. Global action can be taken, and has been; but it is done through hard multilateral bargaining, rather than asking others to follow a unilateral British target.

Even so, Britain should press on because the nation has no choice but to do its bit when life on earth is in jeopardy.

There are tangible benefits to trying to make the UK the greenest economy on earth. The switch to renewable energies creates new jobs and holds the potential to build the UK into a global leader in technologies such as wind turbines, large-scale battery storage, all-electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel cells, organic agriculture and tidal energy generation. A round of comprehensive insulation of homes and workplaces would also create work that will be badly needed in post-Brexit recessionary Britain. Solar panels could be installed on a huge scale.

If we follow up this target with such a workable agenda for action, then the air in our cities will be cleaner, our countryside more inviting, our tourist sites more appealing and our wildlife more diverse and thriving.

As we move towards a leisure society, we will need open spaces that are safe and unpolluted to enjoy: improbable as it might be, they could be Ms May’s abiding legacy.