John Flesher: Badenoch must tell us – where next for the Tories on Net Zero?

John Flesher is deputy director of the Conservative Environmental Network.

Conservative support for the UK’s 2050 net zero target is no more, Kemi Badenoch has announced, somewhat pre-empting the policy review she has launched in parallel.

But rhetorically dropping the target is by no means the end of the story, and Tories cheering this announcement still have some big questions to answer.

I supported Kemi in last year’s leadership contest, despite her professed net zero scepticism, because I respected her intellectual curiosity and her badly needed approach of rejecting easy answers in favour of detailed policy work, including on climate and the environment.

But to write net zero off as “impossible” at the beginning of a policy review process runs counter to that approach.

There is much to criticise about the UK’s record of climate action.

The last Conservative government, for all its success in cutting the UK’s emissions, was too quick to adopt statist policies to meet our targets. And while it is simplistic in the extreme to claim that the push towards net zero is the cause of our high energy prices, the Conservatives did not do nearly enough to reduce energy costs for households and businesses alongside decarbonisation.

Now Labour is making things much worse, with billions being wasted on a state-owned energy company that we don’t need and the pursuit of an unnecessarily fast mission to decarbonise the power grid by 2030.

Ed Miliband’s repeated claim that his plans will cut energy bills is a disingenuous fantasy.

But too many Tories are making the mistake of confusing net zero with Labour’s misguided plans to get there.

Rather than junking the 2050 target altogether, the policy review is an opportunity to develop an effective path to get there, rooted in the conservative principles of intergenerational inheritance, national security, and the power of free markets. The truth is that not engaging with this challenge would be an environmental, economic, and political mistake.

Kemi Badenoch has rightly eschewed climate scepticism, acknowledging that we do need to cut emissions.

But net zero is not the arbitrary target that its opponents often claim: it is grounded in scientific reality.

As long as the world continues to emit greenhouse gases without balancing them with removals, we will continue to drive ever rising temperatures, with more frequent and more intense extreme weather events and their impact on global security and stability.

Net zero is a big deal, but it remains fundamentally a necessary goal in order to limit temperature increases.

If it is now Conservative Party policy not to reach this goal by 2050 but still to tackle climate change, then what is the alternative plan to reduce emissions?

If this means we will still be net contributors to climate change, then how will we have any authority to tell other countries to pull their weight and cut emissions too?

Are we really content to fork out huge sums of money on adapting to rising temperatures and dealing with the impacts now that we’re slowing down cheaper efforts to mitigate them?

And how will we enhance our domestic energy security without much more clean energy, given our North Sea oil and gas reserves are in terminal decline?

This matters for the economy too.

As Conservatives, we rightly worry a great deal about Chinese dominance of major supply chains in key clean technologies like solar, wind, and electric cars. But what signal would it send to those looking to invest in British manufacturing in these sectors to drop the lodestar of climate policy?

Competitors like China can afford to think in decades, not electoral cycles; the 2050 net zero target is the best tool we have to guide our policymaking over the long term. This matters, for the sake of business and investor confidence in a transition that is still being pursued by the vast majority of our allies and rivals alike.

And what of the electorate, who have consistently backed the net zero target and serious climate action?

The audience for net zero scepticism is a small one, very largely limited to diehard Reform voters, who are highly unlikely to change parties in any case. Successive Tory leaders recognised that many swing voters treat the environment as a smell test for parties aspiring to government. The Conservatives’ credibility on the environment took a long time to build; it may take somewhat less time to destroy.

Kemi Badenoch is absolutely right to undertake a thorough and detailed policy review in her endeavour to renew the Conservative Party’s offer.

When it comes to climate change, pretty much everything should be on the table as the party seeks to craft a policy platform that decarbonises the economy in a way that boosts our energy security and keeps bills as low as possible.

But ditching the 2050 net zero target at the start of that process risks being a costly mistake.

Reaching net zero by 2050 is a huge challenge, but one that we must meet. Rather than walking away from that challenge, today’s Tory leadership should build on the party’s proud environmental legacy and chart a course to net zero that is both possible and desirable.