Kemi is right to rip up the Net Zero target

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has called for the UK to scrap its Net Zero target. In a speech earlier today, she branded the drive to decarbonise the economy in the next 25 years ‘impossible’ and warned that it poses a ‘threat to living standards’.

Badenoch’s basic point is inarguable. Even just in terms of energy policy, the mounting costs of Net Zero are now unignorable. Thanks to successive governments’ embrace of unreliable renewables, and continued refusal to exploit homegrown supplies of fossil fuels, UK energy prices have soared to some of the highest in the world. This is an economic disaster on two fronts – it hikes inflation for households and pushes the cost of manufacturing to unsustainable levels, leading to devastating deindustrialisation.

Other measures that have been taken to hit the Net Zero target have proven equally damaging. The steel industry will be forced to shed thousands of jobs as it transitions to a more climate-friendly manufacturing process. The car industry is being decimated by the Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate, which forces car and van manufacturers to sell a minimum quota of electric vehicles or face crippling fines. Proposed taxes on gas boilers to encourage heat-pump take-up, as well as incoming rules to force insulation on rental homes, will only push up the cost of living further.

So far, Badenoch has not said which of these specific policies she plans to scrap – only that the 2050 decarbonisation target is unachievable and needs rethinking. Still, this is undeniably a step in the right direction. In challenging the Net Zero target itself, Badenoch has become the first leader from one of the establishment parties to break with a decades-long consensus that says tackling climate change must come before all else. Ever since New Labour’s 2008 Climate Change Act, Labour and the Tories have competed with each other to see who could impose the most stringent green targets. The Tories would later impose the Net Zero target in 2019, after just 90 minutes of parliamentary debate and without a vote. Whether you voted Tory or Labour, you’d end up with greenism. But not anymore, it seems.

Crucially, in her speech, the Tory leader also challenged the myth that Net Zero can be a catalyst for growth – a myth recently repeated by UK chancellor Rachel Reeves, who declared climate policy to be the ‘economic opportunity of the century’, and by one Kemi Badenoch in 2022, when she was a minister in the last Conservative government. The Badenoch of 2022 hailed the alleged ‘opportunities’ that could be seized from ‘growing our green industrial base’. Which is essentially the diametric opposite to what she said earlier today. Still, whatever led to this Damascene conversion, it’s a welcome development.

Other leaders have tinkered with climate policy before, in a vain attempt to reduce its costs and sidestep its constraints on growth. In 2023, Rishi Sunak promised to reach Net Zero in a more ‘proportionate’ and ‘pragmatic’ way. The Labour government is currently pushing through plans to build a third runway at London Heathrow airport, against the wishes of Net Zero secretary Ed Miliband. But Badenoch is now questioning the target itself, following a trail blazed by Reform UK and many more sceptics, like spiked, who have been railing against Net Zero from the off. This crack in the elite climate consensus couldn’t have come soon enough.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.