By Alliance President Terry Gips
If you care about the climate crisis and the future of our planet, it’s hard to know if we should laugh or cry upon hearing the ridiculous comments from the UK’s conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak where he walked back his nation’s climate commitments. Instead of crying and being furious, we just had to laugh. We couldn’t decide what category to give it — Bad News, BS or an entirely new category, Humor of the Week — which ended up being the clear winner.
Sad to say, this set of seemingly persuasive arguments by the UK’s conservative Prime Minister is how I think the right will argue against efforts to address climate and avoid their previous commitments. I’m afraid you’ll be hearing this “populist”, in-defense-of-the-poor argument much more and it will become a major right-wing talking point. I wish I had the time and energy to refute each and every one of Rishi’s pathetic excuses as reported by Business Green, but I think we need to focus on real solutions. I’ll just let him speak for himself. Let us know what you think.
Rishi Sunak declares Conservatives have ‘solved’ net zero ‘problems’
Prime Minister again defends decision to rollback climate policies, insisting he will ‘take no lectures’ from countries that are not decarbonising as fast as the UK
Rishi Sunak has today declared that the government has “solved” the problems presented by the government’s previous net zero strategy, as the Prime Minister again defended his decision to rollback a series of key decarbonisation policies.
Positioning his decision as the embodiment of his desire to take “long term” decisions in the national interest, Sunak pushed back against criticism of his decision to delay several green policies — such as the phase out of new internal combustion engine cars and gas boilers — as he insisted the UK would continue to meet its domestic and international climate goals.
“Conservatives love our natural world — we’re determined to be good stewards of it,” Sunak told the conference, but added that his Party “also values frankness and consent” as he again sought to frame various net zero policies as an unnecessary cost to consumers.
“We believe politicians have a duty to treat household budgets with respect, and that change only endures if we bring people with us,” Sunak said. “As you can tell by the reaction to my decision to chart a new course on net zero, it was not the easiest argument to have.
“But when I looked at the reality of what people were being asked to do: the thousands of pounds people would need to pay — with all of that disproportionately falling on the poorest in society, by the way — and all of it not necessarily actually necessary in those timeframes to meet our net zero targets, and in spite of us doing more than any other country, I concluded that it simply wasn’t right.“
Many businesses, economists, and the government’s own advisors on the Climate Change Committee (CCC) have concluded that achieving a net zero economy could deliver net benefits to the UK economy while creating millions of new green jobs, in addition to saving households on energy bills by reducing exposure to expensive fossil fuels. Experts have also argued that the cost to households of switching to new electric vehicles (EVs) and heat pumps is set to fall drastically, well ahead of any ban on polluting incumbent technologies.
But Sunak insisted the costs faced by households were unreasonably high, and in comments that are bound to infuriate countries around the world that are working to accelerate their own decarbonisation efforts, the Prime Minister said, “I decided to take a pragmatic, proportionate and realistic approach to reach net zero…And I won’t take any lectures from other countries that have done far less than us, or from those for whom spending thousands of pounds means nothing.”
Editor: Are you laughing or crying? I’m speechless and can only laugh through my tears.