The Tory green consensus is breaking – this leadership contest could spell the end of net zero
This weekend, I received a call from a well-known green Conservative, telling me to stop using the phrase “net zero” in myarticles and tweets about the leadership election. It has become too toxic, he said.
While this was shocking, it wasn’t completely unexpected. None of the leadership candidates so far have made the positive case for green jobs and cheap renewable energy. Instead, the only ones speaking out about climate change are culture warriors Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch, who wish to scrap net zero targets.
As a reporter who covers the space where environment and politics overlap, I’ve watched this happen with a sinking feeling, knowing my worst predictions could be coming to pass. Our net zero commitments could be abandoned without the consent of the electorate as the leadership candidate decides to ditch it.
Just three years ago, under Theresa May’s government, the policy to emit no more greenhouse gases than we absorb by 2050 was signed into law. This was championed by almost every Conservative bar a fringe few. Later on in 2019, every single MP stood on a net zero manifesto, led by Boris Johnson, who had a buccaneering vision of a green economy, and was excited to put a post-Brexit vision of Britain as a world leader on the world stage at UN environment summit Cop26 the following year.
Even those in the green space who do not vote Conservative grudgingly said that a lot of the policies put forward were pretty good. But underneath all this, there’s been a slow, creeping campaign by a nimble rightwing group of MPs who have been winning over key colleagues to the climate-sceptic cause.
Fresh from his Brexit win, MP for Wycombe Steve Baker found another cosy consensus to shatter – that of net zero. Baker, who
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