This weekend, I got a call from a well-known green conservative telling me to stop using the phrase “net zero” in my articles and tweets about leadership elections. It has become too toxic, he said.
While this was shocking, it wasn’t entirely unexpected. None of the leadership candidates so far have positively advocated green jobs and cheap renewable energy. In contrast, the only ones talking about climate change are cultural warriors Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch, who want to eliminate zero net targets.
As a journalist covering the space where environment and politics overlap, I have seen this happen with a sense of sinking, knowing that my worst predictions could be fulfilled. Our zero net commitments could be abandoned without the consent of the electorate, as the candidate for leadership decides to abandon it.
Just three years ago, under the government of Theresa May, the policy of not emitting more greenhouse gases than we would absorb in 2050 was enacted. This was advocated by almost all conservative bars, a few. Later, in 2019, all MPs positioned themselves in a clean zero manifesto, led by Boris Johnson, who had a buccaneer vision of a green economy, and was excited to put a post-Brexit vision of Britain as a leader. on the world stage. at the UN Cop26 environmental summit the following year.
Even those in the green space who do not vote for the Conservatives reluctantly said that many of the proposed policies were quite good. But beneath all this, there has been a slow and sweeping campaign by an agile group of right-wing MPs who have been winning over key colleagues in the climate cause.
After the Brexit victory, Wycombe MP Steve Baker found another welcoming consensus to break: that of clean zero. Baker, who leads the powerful ERG group credited with pushing for a tough Brexit, became a trustee of the skeptical climate reflection group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Then, together with his colleague Craig Mackinlay, he created the parliamentary group Net Zero Scrutiny, launched it into the pages of the Telegraph and got about 20 deputies to sign up. They said they wanted to question net zero and argued it was too expensive.
This sounded the alarm to me and so in February of this year my colleague Matt Taylor and I delved into it and found that the group had been pressuring other MPs for months and slowly trying to break the climate consensus. We warned that conservatives were falling into a climate culture war, similar to the one they had for Brexit.
Then some green activists scolded me, noting that most conservatives at the time wanted to reach zero, and that half of all backbenchers are on the Conservative Environment Network, a forum committed to zero net policies and goals.
But as I covered the Brexit campaign, I saw how a small, agile alliance of right-wing militants can leave a large group enjoying a satisfied consensus to the dust.
I’m afraid this has happened. While the anti-net zero faction has been conspiring for months, finding candidates who will abandon net zero in exchange for support, the larger green wing has assumed that net zero is a fact. As Boris Johnson weakened and fell, climate skeptics worked behind the scenes to find a successor to abandon their ecological policies. But the green wing did not fight in the same battle. This weekend, I understand that it was still trying to find a candidate to subscribe to the ecological commitments found in the 2019 Conservative Manifesto. Meanwhile, the climate conversation has been dominated by Braverman and Badenoch.
While reporting on this, I’ve been talking to the Braverman / Baker campaign about their tactics, to try to understand what happened. They agree with me that the green wing has not yet issued a consistent positive message. Baker has a campaign structure called “why / what / how / what-if,” answering all of these questions. He says his rivals are “failing because they don’t have proper answers about how and only going back to why,” and added, “Hysteria is not a survival strategy.”
He is right. Just as the message of the Remain campaign was largely negative, assuming that the positive case for remaining in the EU was already an established consensus, Conservative members and MPs have not heard much about a positive case. for zero net. Language has not talked about better jobs and cheaper bills, but about the dangers and risks of future climate change.
And the result? The net zero is behind us. This is evident by the way the leadership career is developing. Michael Gove, who many think is one of the greenest conservatives, is supporting Badenoch. He even seems to have abandoned the ship. Jeremy Hunt, who is supposedly one of the most centrist candidates, is running alongside Esther McVey, who is part of Baker’s zero-scrutiny group.
Depressingly, libertarian Liz Truss is being cited by many green conservatives as her last hope. While he has not committed to the manifesto’s zero net commitment at the time of writing, he has the support of Green Conservatives, including Vicky Ford and Simon Clarke, both of whom have cited their support for Cop26 as a of the reasons they support it.
While Badenoch and Braverman are very unlikely to reach the last two, candidates, including Rishi Sunak, will compete for their support, and with it, the support of parliamentarians who support them. That is the concern. That a Conservative leader can abandon climate commitments to gain power.
Green Conservatives should put candidates in this position, lagging behind one or the other on the condition that they support positive climate policies and making the last two candidates fight for their support. But from my conversations with the Green Conservatives, they seem incredibly disorganized and weak, and have discussed whether to use the phrase “zero net” instead of presenting their case to the nation.
All this disorganization and unrest has led to a leadership campaign that could strip this country of its climate commitments and end the dream of zero net. We just led Cop26. If we fail, it could pave the way for others to follow. No wonder the green wing of the party is confused and terrified. The livable future of the planet could rest on its shoulders. What a frightening thought.
Helena Horton is an environmental journalist for the Guardian