Labour’s oil and gas ban shows it’s ready to fight the next election on climate issues

theguardian.com:

I t’s been a long time coming, but at last it seems that voters who give a damn about the climate emergency will have a real choice at the next general election. While the Tories have fiddled, Labour has been putting together a pretty impressive pro-climate portfolio.

The latest pledge to ban all new domestic oil and gas developments and cut off borrowing for fossil fuel-related projects sits in diametric opposition to Tory plans to suck as much oil and gas as possible out of the North Sea. And Labour’s goody bag of climate measures contains plenty more that environmentally informed voters can cheer.

At its 2021 annual conference, the party flagged plans, should it win the next election, for an annual £28bn green investment fund. Alongside this were pledges to decarbonise the steel industry and, perhaps most critically, to test all its other policy against its potential consequences for the environment and the goal of net zero emissions.

A year on, Labour committed to the establishment of a new state-owned energy company, and a £60bn programme to insulate 19m homes. The cherry on the cake was the announced ambition to decarbonise the UK’s electricity supply as soon as 2030.

Contrast all this with Tory efforts. It says everything about the importance Rishi Sunak and co attach to green measures that Ukraine – a nation fighting a bitter war for survival – installed more onshore wind turbines in the past 15 months than the UK. It shouldn’t really come as a surprise, though. The Tories have come a very long way since David Cameron’s putative greening of the party, but the direction of travel has been almost entirely backwards.

It is unlikely this will change before the next election. Serious government action on the climate is