Yesterday, at the end of a summer defined by devastating wildfires from Maui to Athens and apocalyptic flooding from Yemen to Hong Kong, rather than being in attendance at the UN’s Climate Ambition Summit alongside other world leaders, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak held a press conference to announce roll-backs on UK climate policy.
These pushbacks on net zero policy included delays on the ban on the sale of new fossil-fuelled cars, scrapping plans to require landlords to upgrade the energy efficiency of their properties, significantly weakening plans to phase out the installation of gas boilers and an affirmation of support for new oil and gas in the North Sea. Every one of these actions goes against what experts and scientists tell us we need to do in order to have a future we can live in.
Sunak said that he's doing this to support people, to save us all money and that none of this is “watering down” our climate commitments. He said he wanted a “properly informed national debate” about climate policy, but he isn’t being straight with the British public.
Let’s be very clear: these delays are dangerous, irresponsible, and completely inconsistent with both climate science and what the public consistently shows they want.
The Prime Minister says that he cares about tackling climate change, but the changes he has just announced could mean that we miss critical climate targets. Targets that aren’t abstract or arbitrary but are constructed by what climate science demands to avoid catastrophic climate change. These targets cannot be massaged or missed without consequences – reducing emissions at the very least to be in line with them is essential if we want a liveable future.
These delays would create an increasingly large gap between where the UK’s emissions are heading and where they are supposed to go. It’s serious: the UK’s legally binding emissions targets, as well as its international pledge under the Paris Agreement, could be put out of reach. Despite what the Prime Minister says, there’s nothing “proportionate and pragmatic” about missing these targets. It’s lazy and dangerous.
The climate crisis is not a future or existential threat, but a real and present one for billions of people across the world already. At an international climate justice camp in Lebanon last month - attended by over 400 mobilisers from more than 100 different countries - I heard so many harrowing stories from the frontlines of this crisis. Tuga, a youth climate organiser in Tanzania, shared how, as increasing droughts have made water more scarce in her community, sexual violence has increased. Men have taken control of the only pumps or sources, forcing women to provide sexual acts in order to access water. This is not a stand alone story, all over the world those who are already marginalised due to longstanding oppressive systems - like patriarchy, transphobia, racism and more - are made more vulnerable to the worst impacts of this climate crisis.
Sunak is not only in denial about the seriousness of the climate crisis, but also the reality of the interconnected cost of living crisis for millions of people in the UK. This parallel crisis is driven by unaffordable energy bills and our continued dependency on gas.
As we soon enter into another winter, with energy prices still double what they were two years ago; 5 million people currently in debt to their energy supplier; one in four private renters living in fuel poverty and millions of families having to make the impossible choice between heating and eating, what the public really needed to hear from the Prime Minister was what the government would be doing to address these urgent and material concerns.
Instead, the Prime Minister dropped a list of policies that have never even been proposed by the Conservatives or Labour – from sorting your rubbish into seven different bins to taxes on meat – that Sunak proudly announced he’d be cancelling. The final statement was: “nor will we ban new oil and gas in the North Sea, which would simply leave us reliant on expensive imported energy from foreign dictators like Putin.”
This idea that new oil and gas in the North Sea is needed to tackle both the energy security and cost of living crises is completely untrue. More oil and gas will actually do the opposite: it will leave us beholden to the volatile and expensive gas markets for even longer. Moreover, most of what is left in the ageing North Sea is oil, 80% of which the UK exports, with only tiny amounts of gas left – and any oil and gas extracted in the UK is sold on the global market to the highest bidder. The UK can’t change prices set by international markets, no matter how much we produce in the North Sea, and there is simply no guarantee that any gas extracted in the North Sea will stay in the UK or help anyone with their energy bills.
Opening more fields only helps the fossil fuel industry make more money and makes us all dependent on them for longer. Sunak knows this. He is closer to the fossil fuel-linked donors propping up the Conservative Party with £3.5 million in donations and his wife’s investments in the fossil fuel industry, rather than the one million children in the UK living in households that went without heating, hot water and electricity for the first half of this year due to unaffordable energy bills. We are being sacrificed for profit.
What is so deeply frustrating about this is not just that Sunak is using the climate crisis – and the action needed to secure a future we can all live in – as a culture war, but also because climate action creates a future that we can not only live in but thrive in. It's so possible.
We have all the solutions we need, from implementing mass rollouts of insulation – which would tackle fuel poverty, reduce winter deaths and make homes safer – to scaling up renewables, knowing that producing electricity from them is far cheaper than gas and creates more jobs. Climate policy centred on justice comes with co-benefits that can improve all of our lives. The British public is way ahead of the government on this. People want support to insulate homes so that we do not waste money. We want cheaper renewables so that we can get off expensive oil and gas. We want clean air and a liveable planet for our children. Rishi Sunak has no mandate for this.
This is, frankly, a desperate and dangerous government. It’s now up to us to hold them to account.
Our power goes beyond individual lifestyle choices and social media posts.
