Net Zero Watch Samizdat: Sunak's Gamble

 

The headlines: 

‘I won’t make you change car prematurely for net zero’, Sunak vows
The Telegraph, 30 May 2024

New Zealand government takes axe to climate policies
The Guardian, 30 May 2024
Home insulation is the latest net zero farce
The Spectator, 30 May 2024

Edinburgh council bans SUV and cruise ship ads in climate crackdown
Financial Times, 29 May 2024

Rishi Sunak’s big net zero UK election gamble
Financial Times, 29 May 2024

German budget crisis to deepen as renewable subsidies double
Bloomberg, 29 May 2024

Europe’s missing climate marches
Euractiv, 27 May 2024

The detail:

‘I won’t make you change car prematurely for net zero’, Sunak vows
The Telegraph, 30 May 2024

Rishi Sunak has said he won’t force people to change their cars “right now” as part of net zero schemes.

Speaking to workers at a factory in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, on Thursday, he said: “Of course I believe in climate change, I want to get to net zero.

“The questions is how do we get there. We need to be more serious. I want to prioritise our country’s energy security…we are better off getting it here at home.

“I also want to prioritise your bills. What I don’t want to do is force you prematurely to rip out your boiler, change your car. We don’t need to do them right now.”

Mr Sunak held a short speech and Q&A at the factory Niftylift, a cherry picker manufacturer, while on the campaign trail.

Full story

New Zealand government takes axe to climate policies
The Guardian, 30 May 2024

The New Zealand government has been accused of waging a “war on nature” after it announced sweeping cuts to climate action projects, while making no significant new investments in environmental protection or climate crisis-related policy.

In its 2024/25 budget, handed down on Thursday, the rightwing coalition announced spending on law and order, education, health and a series of tax cuts, as the country struggles with inflation and cost-of-living pressures.

Finance minister Nicola Willis, who delivered the budget against the backdrop of a technical recession and widening government deficits, said it was a “fiscally responsible budget” that was “putting New Zealanders’ money where it can make the biggest difference”.

But absent from the budget documents was any meaningful new spending on the climate crisis. Instead, dozens of climate-related initiatives, including programmes in the Emissions Reductions Plan and funding for data and evidence specialists were subject to sweeping cuts.

In a media release, climate change minister Simon Watts said “responsible and effective climate related initiatives that support New Zealand to reduce emissions, and adapt to the future effects of climate change are a priority.”

He said the government would invest to reach those goals, including funding climate resilience projects such as stop banks and floodwalls through the Regional Infrastructure Fund, a $200m boost for the Rail Network Improvement Programme, and extending the reach of the Waste Disposal Levy to support a wider range of waste-related and environmental activities.

When asked by the Guardian if there was any significant new funding directed towards tackling climate change and environmental protection, Watts pointed to the resilience projects.

Meanwhile, the environment minister, Penny Simmonds, told the Guardian the increases to the waste levy “will mean a broader range of environmental projects can be funded”, including waste disposal in emergencies, cleaning up contaminated sites and freshwater improvement.

But critics said the government’s approach to protecting the environment and tackling climate change was backward looking, while climate resilience projects were the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff without future-facing climate mitigation plans.

Full story

Home insulation is the latest net zero farce
The Spectator, 30 May 2024

by Ross Clark

Zoe Godrich of Swansea might best be described as collateral damage in Britain’s glorious march towards net zero. Three years ago, she had her three-bedroom home fitted with cavity-wall insulation – which the government is out to encourage through its Great British Insulation Scheme. Sadly for her, it has not worked out quite as intended.

With Labour now promising billions more to retrofit homes with this kind of stuff, what could possibly go wrong?

Within weeks of having it fitted, Godrich says her walls started to run with water, and black mould started to form on her walls. She can no longer use two of her bedrooms, and she and her children now have to slum it on mattresses in the one remaining habitable room. The company which installed the insulation also went bust and the guarantee for the work turned out to be useless. Her only option seemed to be having the insulation sucked out of the wall – for which she had to borrow £7,000 to have done. That work turned out to be botched, too.

Godrich’s experience, it turns out, seems to be becoming commonplace. Twenty miles away in Rhondda Cynon Taff, 280 homes had to have cavity-wall insulation removed after it made their walls damp. The BBC is reporting that Ofgem has told it that ‘hundreds of thousands’ of homes which have been fitted with cavity-wall insulation have been left with problems due to it being badly fitted. There are an estimated 15 million homes in Britain which have such insulation fitted – many of them courtesy of subsidy schemes launched by the present government and the last Labour government.

But if there is a lesson here, it is one that our leaders seem determined not to learn. While the present government has launched its Great British Insulation Scheme, which aims to insulate 300,000 households in a three-year period from last March at a cost of £1 billion, Labour is promising to go much further. Under its Warm Homes Plan, every home in Britain would be brought up to the standard of a ‘C’ on an Energy Performance Certificate over the next decade – using loft insulation, cavity-wall insulation and solid-wall insulation. A Treasury analysis suggests that it would cost taxpayers between £12 billion and £15 billion a year for the next 10 years.

According to Labour, it will save households £500 a year on bills – unless, presumably, they have the same experience as Zoe Godrich and many others, in which case they may find themselves having to take out emergency loans to put right botched work.

Full story

Edinburgh council bans SUV and cruise ship ads in climate crackdown
Financial Times, 29 May 2024

Adverts for sports utility vehicles and cruise holidays are to be banned by Edinburgh council as part of a wide-ranging crackdown on promotion of the fossil fuel industry across the Scottish capital.

The prohibition of advertisements from council-owned spaces such as billboards and bus stops also covers airlines, airports, fossil-fuel powered vehicles and arms manufacturers — though stopped short of outlawing meat adverts.

The council said “the promotion of high-carbon products is incompatible with net zero objectives”. Its ban echoes similar ad crackdowns by councils across Sheffield, Bristol, Cambridgeshire, Coventry, Liverpool and Somerset, as well as a decision by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority last year to ban a Toyota pick-up truck advert that showed vehicles driving off-road.

In Ireland, opposition party Sinn Féin has introduced a bill to parliament calling for a ban on fossil fuel advertising. Edinburgh has an ambitious net zero target for 2030, seeking to remove as much greenhouse gas as the city emits by the end of the decade.

The council said the target recognises the need for cities to make faster progress on reducing emissions if Scotland is to meet its national 2045 net zero target. “It’s just basic common sense that if the council is serious about its commitment to climate justice, we cannot allow council advertising space to be used to promote fossil fuel companies,” said Ben Parker, a councillor for the Scottish Greens, who spearheaded the policy.

The ban will be applied to all advertising and sponsorship agreements when they come up for renewal, with some contracts still in place until 2030.

Full story

Rishi Sunak’s big net zero UK election gamble
Financial Times, 29 May 2024

by Pilita Clark

Any British voter who believes in climate change should not vote Conservative in the July 4 general election.

That’s because, in its current state, the Conservative party is endangering people’s lives, jobs and opportunities for economic growth by taking a negative approach to climate action and rowing back on the energy transition.

If all that sounds overly dramatic, don’t blame me. It is almost word for word what a former minister in the Conservative government, Chris Skidmore, told a Bloomberg podcast earlier this month, just before Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called the election.

It was only part of a salvo from Skidmore, an ardent net zero advocate who quit as an MP in January over what he called the “toxic message” sent by government moves to boost North Sea oil and gas extraction.

He went on to describe Sunak’s decision to water down a series of net zero policies last year as “the worst mistake of his premiership”.

“Historians will look back at this moment and recognise this was the moment the Conservative party lost the country, because it no longer spoke to the country about what its future was going to look like.”

I agree with a lot of what Skidmore said. But the bigger question is this: how good is his political assessment? Will Sunak’s move to talk down net zero be a serious vote loser? Or has he cannily improved his chances of staying in power by aligning his party with a green backlash that threatens to weaken climate progress across Europe and beyond?

The signs so far are not encouraging for the Tories. Let’s remember how this net zero rollback began. In July last year, the Tories clung on in Boris Johnson’s old Uxbridge seat in London’s suburbs by a few hundred votes — on a night when they were defeated heavily in two other parliamentary by-elections.

The winning Conservative candidate had vigorously opposed the plans of London’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, to expand an ultra low emissions zone to outer London, costing some drivers of heavily polluting cars £12.50 a day.

Eight weeks later, Sunak announced a “new approach to net zero”. In what became known as his “seven bins speech”, he pushed back plans to end new petrol car sales and phase out gas boilers and cancelled moves to make rental properties more energy efficient.

To widespread bafflement, he also declared he would scrap rules that did not seem to formally exist — including “a government diktat to sort your rubbish into seven different bins”.

Two points deserved more attention than they received at the time, starting with the jolt of hearing a Conservative leader sound as if he wanted to ditch the relatively bipartisan approach to climate policy that has characterised UK politics for much of the past two decades.

Full story

German budget crisis to deepen as renewable subsidies double
Bloomberg, 29 May 2024

Germany will need to find more cash to fund its energy transition ambitions this year after the subsidies it must pay renewables producers doubled on the back of tumbling wholesale power prices.

The state will pay as much as €20 billion ($21.7 billion) to wind and solar operators through the end of 2024, twice what grid operators had forecast in October, Economy Minister Robert Habeck told reporters in Berlin on Wednesday.

European wholesale power prices have fallen sharply over the last year and are hovering at levels seen before the energy crisis set in motion by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That means the government must shell out the difference to ensure renewables producers get paid their guaranteed minimum strike price.

The nation’s renewable fund has already been hit by losses of over €130 million in February, according to data from energy think tank Fraunhofer ISE. The cash crunch will complicate the country’s often-heated budget discussions this year with Finance Minister Christian Lindner having ruled out additional allocations in next year’s budget and vowing to enforce strict borrowing rules.

While lower power prices are generally good news for consumers and businesses, “it has the consequence that this difference has to be paid now,” Habeck said, especially since the old contracts are “expensive.”

Full story

Europe’s missing climate marches
Euractiv, 27 May 2024

Ahead of the 2019 European Parliament elections, Europe was rocked by massive climate marches. But as the 2024 elections approach, the streets remain silent.

As a series of climate marches swept across Europe in spring 2019, Brussels was no exception. At the movement’s peak, 70,000 people massed in the EU quarter to loudly demand greater climate action.

The mobilisation paid off: The subsequent electoral ‘green wave’ unleashed five years of ambitious climate lawmaking.

Five years later, Europe is again getting ready to vote, but this time, climate marches are small and scattered. Neither record-breaking global temperatures nor threats to the Green Deal have been enough to motivate protestors to return to the streets en masse.

Euractiv spoke to activists and academics to understand why.

“If there hadn’t been a genocide in Gaza (…) there would have been a reasonable chance of a new cycle of climate activism” said Dr. Anneleen Kenis, lecturer in political ecology and environmental justice at Brunel University London, who has long studied the climate movement.

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s focus on the plight of Palestine exemplifies the dilemma facing activists: Should they ignore huge human injustice, or risk diverting attention from climate just as the issue is slipping down the political agenda?

The question continued to divide the climate movement.

Dr. Kenis felt that “it would almost be cynical to organised huge demonstrations” on climate, given the desperate situation in Gaza. ‘’Gaza is where the movement’s main attention should go now”.

Conversely, Larry Moffett, a climate activist in Brussels, said “we prefer to keep our focus on the climate as a unifying issue”.

Full story

The London-based Net Zero Samizdat is a campaign group set up to highlight and discuss the serious implications of expensive and poorly considered climate change policies. The Net Zero Samizdat is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.netzerowatch.com.