Tories Abandon Net Zero – Watts Up With That?

We are living off the inheritance of previous generations. For three centuries every era in our country’s history left a better legacy for our country’s children.

The greatness of the UK is forged by the sacrifices of our ancestors. They built, they innovated and they took tough decisions. They never assumed that prosperity was guaranteed, they made sure it was.

But that has bred an assumption that Britain will always be wealthy. We are a wealthy country but we are becoming weaker through complacency. We are losing our resilience, we can’t make things like we used to, we don’t build as quickly. We are spending too much on debt, too much on welfare and too little on defence.

We are not growing like we should. … We are not creating a legacy for the next generation. Worse than that, we are mortgaging our children’s future by not recognising that the world has changed. We’re making things harder and harder for them across the board. …

We suffered the worst defeat in the party’s history. We replaced the principles-based government that brought us success with the managerialism of Labour and gave our power to quangos and courts.

We assumed that we would always be wealthy so we focused on the status quo rather than the future and now Labour is back. They are already making everything worse.

Jobs are disappearing, taxes are rising, and growth is shrinking. They are vandalising education and they are completely clueless of the need for real reform on regulation.

The public made it very clear that the Conservative Party needed some time away from government. Our job now is to use that time wisely – just as Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron did in the generations past.

And just like the 1970s and 2000s, our party cannot shortcut our way back into office with easy answers or rushed announcements.

We must develop credible plans that reflect the shared conservative values of personal responsibility, citizenship, sound money, family, freedom and so much more.

And we start today. By talking about one of the biggest problems that our country, and our world, will face in the decades ahead and show that Conservatives are in the business again of dealing with reality and the problems we face. …

Cheap abundant energy is the foundation of civilisation as we know it today. We mess with it at our peril but that’s exactly what’s been happening for 20 years and it’s now starting to cause real pain for everyday people and business.

The cost of electricity [is] far too high, much higher than nearby and comparative countries. …. A big chunk of our existing bills are not direct energy costs. People are struggling to pay them, businesses, especially manufacturing businesses, are closing down and there is no real plan for bringing costs down.

That surely cannot hold. It’s fantasy politics built on nothing, promising the Earth and costing it too. …

There has never, ever been a detailed plan. Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act 2008, no plan. Legislating for Net Zero in 2019, no plan. A multi-trillion, 30-year project touching every single aspect of all our lives was decided in 90 minutes without a single vote.

Of the 22 MPs spoke that day, only two sounded notes of caution. I was one of them. I asked for the plan, I asked for it that day, I asked a few days later. And I waited and waited and waited. 845 days later, one came. And it wasn’t enough. …

We need a serious approach, we’ve got to stop pretending it’s simple and we have got to stop government by press release, announcements without a policy plan.

Anyone who has done any serious analysis knows Net Zero cannot be achieved without a significant drop in our living standards, or worse, by bankrupting us.

Without the rest of the world doing the same we are making our country less safe, less secure and less resilient. Let me give you three truths at the heart of Net Zero. First, the published plans are a completely muddle. It is true that the UK has made the greatest progress on carbon emissions in the developed world but we are only responsible for 1% of global emissions. Even if we hit absolute zero we will not have Net Zero around the world if other countries are following us, and they are not. …

Our success at reducing emissions has also come at a cost, the highest energy bills in the developed world. …

The real reason no one in the Labour Government is talking about a proper overall plan is they know it would reveal just how catastrophic the actual costs would be for families, for businesses and for our economy. …

Second, even where there is a plan, we are behind. Let’s look at one easy example. By 2040 the Committee on Climate Change says more than half of UK homes need to rip out boilers and replace them with a heat pump. There is no way we can do that quickly enough on that timescale. …

Heat pumps run on a lot of expensive electricity and it turns out many people just don’t like them. …

Most of them were installed with some form of government subsidy, or as I prefer to call it, taxpayers’ money. …

The good news is that costs have dropped in the last decade. Here’s the less good news. Ten years ago we were heavily dependent on China for all of the key components. Today we’re even more dependent. Look at the top dozen makers of solar panels, they are nearly all Chinese. …

Those three truths are why I call myself a Net Zero sceptic: muddled plans, unrealistic targets and deadlines, over-reliance on China. We have got to start acknowledging what is in plain sight. Net Zero makes us dangerously dependent on countries that don’t share our values and it is risking our own security. …

It is time to stop pretending that everything will be fine. And I am not debating whether climate change exists, it does. I badly want to leave a much better environmental inheritance for my children and for yours. But it doesn’t look like we are going to get remotely close to Net Zero by 2050. … This is what happens when politics turns into fantasy. Maybe some of it will change, but it doesn’t look promising.

I often say that when you want to help someone, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they need to hear. We have to tell the truth.

The plans for Net Zero by 2050 are impossible. We have to do better than this. That’s why as part of our policy renewal we are going to do something that Labour failed to do in 14 years of opposition. We are going to deal with reality, confront the real problems, answer the real questions and be ready with a plan.