Russia’s invasion of Ukraine feels like a pivotal moment in this story. In the autumn of 2022, energy prices in the UK were skyrocketing; response The Prime Minister at the time, Liz Truss, was to double oil and gas exploration. refuse to listen to someone To reduce energy usage. This was the opposite approach from many European countries facing the same problem.
at that time [the invasion] It happened, but I thought it was clearly a real crisis and climate change would be lower down the priority list. But in my technocratic mind, I also thought this would create an incentive to move away from high-carbon fuels. If you want to know what the world will look like with high carbon prices, we are about to find out.
What I didn’t expect was that the green argument came off the block too late, as the fossil fuel argument quickly intervened and claimed “this is why we need a domestic fossil fuel supply” about it. Fossil fuels are so volatile and so expensive that the really important discussion of acting on this was slightly lost in the political ether of the time, and we were left wondering what the country should do. Jumped into another story about what needs to be done.
The irony of this whole period is that oil and gas are running out. Therefore, trying to supply major oil and gas licenses in the North Sea will not be a reliable strategy in the long term.
A year later, Mr Truss’s successor, Rishi Sunak, gave a big speech rolling back key climate policies, most notably a 2030 deadline to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars. Postponed the.
When viewed purely as policy speeches, there were more pro-climate policies than lagging climate policies. For example, he was talking about accelerating green investment.And about electric cars [pushing back the 2030 deadline] Hybrid cars were already allowed until 2035, so it wasn’t a huge change.
But what did the country hear? They heard, “Don’t worry, now is not the time to switch to electric cars.” It’s hard to pin anything down to one speech, but if you look at the share of electric cars sold in the UK, it’s been flat since September. I’m sure there are other factors as well, but some people may be thinking, “Well, maybe I don’t need to buy that electric car right now.”
This government appears determined to make appealing to motorists a key electoral strategy. In July 2023, Labor narrowly lost the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-elections, with many commentators believing that the Conservative candidate won that election thanks to his opposition to ultra-low emissions zones.
What happened there was interesting. Labor also accepted the argument that it was ULEZ’s fault for not winning that constituency. There are inevitably many issues at stake in any election, and given that each party makes environmental policy an issue, it is no wonder that it becomes one of the main themes of subsequent politics.