Public opinion is leading the way on climate – while nimby MPs lag behind
The prime minister hopes to be able to parade his green credentials while at the same time keeping his net-zero sceptical backbenchers happy
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Your support makes all the difference.There’s a new divide in British politics. Brexiters and Remainers are so 2016. Six years on, the split might now be characterised as nimbys versus yimbys.
The nimbys want all efforts to tackle the twin energy and climate change crises to be located as far out to sea as possible, extracting “every last drop” of oil from the North Sea as minister for Brexit opportunities Jacob Rees-Mogg put it, or sourcing green energy from offshore wind farms that can’t be seen from transport secretary Grant Shapps’ Welwyn Hatfield back garden.
The problem can’t be made to go away but it can at least be made as invisible as possible, is the nimbys’ mantra.
The yimbys – “yes in my backyard” – on the other hand, are quite content to host big infrastructure projects like onshore wind farms in their neighbourhoods, just so long as they see the benefit in their wallets.
The difference of opinion is about to burst into the open with the publication on Thursday of the government’s delayed energy strategy. Boris Johnson knows he must answer increasingly urgent questions about the cost of living, while at the same time heeding the UN’s desperate calls for action, set out in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this week.
Johnson characteristically appears to want to have his cake and eat it – caving into cabinet nimbyism on onshore wind, exploiting more North Sea oil and gas and joking that he’ll put a new nuclear reactor in every Labour seat. He hopes to be able to parade his green credentials while at the same time keeping his net-zero sceptical backbenchers happy. For the moment, the nimbys in the cabinet are in the ascendancy.
Transport secretary Grant Shapps has called onshore wind an eyesore, and nine other ministers attending cabinet signed a letter a decade ago calling for a cut in support for onshore wind. It’ll be interesting to see if any of them have had a change of heart.
The yimbys are a cabinet minority group. Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng argued for a massive expansion of onshore wind and the levelling up secretary Michael Gove is also a supporter. And when I interviewed the president of Cop26, Alok Sharma, about it on Channel 4 News earlier this week, he said he’d be quite happy to have an onshore wind farm in his constituency.
I thought this was fairly brave. But I’ve been struck by how many senior politicians are now happy to make the argument for onshore wind on their doorstep as a route to cheaper energy for their constituents, and a cleaner world for their constituents’ grandchildren. I got the same response from Labour’s shadow climate change secretary Ed Miliband when I asked him last week.
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The yimby MPs may yet have the last laugh. Look at the polling – they might be onto something. According to the latest public attitudes tracker from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy carried out this winter, 86 per cent of people surveyed said they supported the use of renewable energy such as wind, solar or biomass power. Backing for onshore wind, at 80 per cent, was only just behind offshore wind (84 per cent).
The explanation of why can be found in the high proportion of people who are now concerned about climate change: 85 per cent. This is unsurprising, given the impassioned pleas for action from the UN, whose secretary-general accused countries of a “litany of broken climate promises” this week. Perhaps the public are leading where politicians are, or should be, following.
The science backs up the public enthusiasm for onshore wind. According to the National Grid, “it’s one of the least expensive forms of renewable energy and significantly less expensive than offshore wind power”. The grid also claims such wind farms can be constructed in months, and there’s an economic rationale to it too, with tens of thousands of jobs at stake.
Remember when Conservative MPs used to say “we’re all Brexiters now”? Perhaps in a few years’ time, we’ll all be yimbys too. The public might just have got there first.
Cathy Newman presents Channel 4 News
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