Rishi Sunak's Laissez-Faire Net Zero
The political non-strategies of The Inaction Man open the door to propaganda
Dear Human of Planet Earth,
Rishi’s a lot like Cousin Linda.
Cousin Linda received life-changing news: she has an aggressive stage one cancer. The good news is it’s operable, potentially curable and her doctors have a plan. With an aggressive cancer, it’s imperative she acts with urgency.
So, what does Linda do after all this is explained to her?
She ‘understands’ it all but can’t possibly leave her home town for treatment in the city.
She’s two months away from completing a wonderful project at work and must see it to completion. She needs the finished project on her resumé. Without it, she might miss an important promotional milestone.
She calculates travel costs to and from the specialist treatment hospital for herself and husband over the three-month course of chemotherapy.
Surely, funds for the family trip to Iceland this Christmas ought to be prioritised over her treatment? With the Arctic heating faster than elsewhere, better to enjoy Iceland while there’s still ice.
Her cancer treatment will need to wait.
Besides, next year her son sits his A-levels. News of her cancer and treatment will surely derail his studies. Better if she keeps her diagnosis to herself at the moment.
In a year’s time, her son will be at University and maybe she’ll have her promotion. She and her husband will have saved more money. And it will be the perfect time to head off to the specialist city hospital for surgery and chemotherapy. Her cancer is only at stage one after all. And though the doctors said it’s aggressive, she’s always been both healthy and lucky. She’ll do more yoga; take up running; quit sugar, milk and coffee; and have organic turmeric and green tea three times a day. She’ll be okay. She just needs another year. Then she’ll be ready to treat her cancer.
We both know Linda is likely to kill herself with this ridiculous strategy.
Delay and denial will only amplify her pain. With treatment, there is at least a chance of resolution. With her strategy, unthinkable suffering and a very permanent death are inevitable.
Her husband, son and friends will grieve her loss for the rest of their lives.
Rishi Sunak’s strategic inaction is designed for the deliberate derailing of progress towards Net Zero
Thankfully, Sunak doesn’t deny the need to transition away from fossil fuels. He merely denies we need to go faster, on the basis that we’ve already done so much.
He claims to be protecting us from the pain of transition. He presents himself as a benign and gentle father, saving his adolescents from their reckless shenanigans.
If you’re a little short on time, scroll down for the TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read) and links to articles and podcasts that go deeper.
Did you make sense of Linda’s strategy? Doing what’s convenient for a year allows her to continue enjoying the comfort of her routines and the pleasures of her life. She will act when she feels more prepared to act. She claims the onus is on her doctors to persuade her that her good luck and robust health won’t see her through a year of procrastination. She won’t let expert guidance get in the way of living her life as she chooses.
She’s perplexed her doctors have gently suggested she might be afraid of the difficulties of treatment. Is it not courageous in itself to defy the experts?
On second thoughts, Rishi isn’t Linda. But he wants you and me to be Linda, happily and naively misled by the charlatan who tells her she might even cure her cancer with diet, exercise and prayer.
Rishi is being politically strategic. He’s reassuring voters they don’t have to do too much, that they’re entitled to feel proud of what’s been accomplished so far and that experts can be safely ignored.
Inaction Man appears benign, pragmatic and caring but the chief danger of his narrative doesn’t lie with the headliners of delaying the ban on sale of petrol and diesel cars, nor in slowing the shift away from gas boilers.
The danger is his framing. He is framing Net Zero policy in the negative language of the anti-Net Zero lobby group, Net Zero Watch. His framing sounds likes this:
The transition to Net Zero will be too costly for households, already reeling from the cost-of-living crisis.
[More on this nonsense later]
Your way of life is being threatened eg car-sharing will be made the law.
[Nonsense. Car-sharing has been encouraged for decades but there is no serious move afoot to force this into law]
Voters haven’t given consent for their lives to be changed; therefore the policy changes associated with Net Zero are undemocratic.
[More nonsense. Citizens elect representatives to decide on policy and legislation, so they can get on with their lives and allow paid representatives to work out the details; this is the definition of government. Major policy changes need buy-in, and the politician’s role is to drive policy, not be dictated to]
I expect this framing to be the basis of the Conservative narrative as they begin to fight the next General Election.
We’ve already seen similar framing play out in the practice field of ULEZ’s expansion into Greater London. It bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the pushback by conspiracy theorists against Covid restrictions. In essence:
I don’t trust you ~ we don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change
Stop trying to control us ~ don’t tell us about changing what we’re familiar and comfortable with
There is no greater good to be had ~ I don’t believe my responsibilities extend to worrying about impacts on others
Freedom is an ultimate value and we decide which responsibilities if any, we’ll take with our freedom ~ we don’t believe in laws or taxes
Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party has positioned itself for a war on Net Zero, while claiming to support the principle of the energy transition.
Other than some welcome funding for people switching to heat pumps, Sunak’s narrative is deliberately vacuous.
Rather than leading on policy, he’s saying democracy requires voters’ permission on Net Zero policy. Note well! This was the approach of the proponents of Brexit:
Have a referendum, ask a simple question, get a simple answer and insert the necessary propaganda in between to ensure the desired output.1
Do you see the danger now? Rishi Sunak’s non-policy position this week closes the door on established scientific consensus, technical guidance and creative solutions and deliberately opens what he calls ‘the debate’ space, to propaganda designed to undermine the transition.
Let’s take a closer look at the Sunak framing:
Explain to families why they should have to shoulder the cost of the transition to Net Zero in a cost-of-living crisis.
Actually, we know families should not have to shoulder the cost of the transition. This argument is built on the false Net Zero Watch narrative claiming burdening individual families is the only way the transition can occur.
The green industrial transition is about prosperity for communities; it’s not about incurring costs to families.
On that note, there’s a lesson to be learned from the ULEZ expansion. Though the vast majority of people were not negatively impacted by ULEZ, the process didn’t fully protect all vulnerable families.
The state, investors and researchers in both private and public sectors must work together to ensure the transition leads to net gain: to investment, profit and jobs, rather than unsustainable debt and impoverishment.
The type of right-wing policymakers influencing the likes of Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak worship the market and don’t believe governments should exercise over-arching structure or vision.
We need a government that believes in driving policy with central planning, while trusting and giving local leaders in politics and business the flexibility to deliver strategies meeting the needs of the communities they know intimately.
Rishi Sunak and his laissez-faire hands-off approach to Net Zero will only stall the transformation we need, while allowing big corporations to put profit over people and shape the transformation to suit their shareholders and company vision.
We only have to look at how Big Tech remains minimally regulated and minimally taxed, while maximising profits across borders and siphoning money out of economies and into shareholder pockets, to understand what transformation without planning in citizens’ interests looks like.
TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read)
Rishi Sunak wants you to believe:
Families will have to shoulder the cost of the transition to Net Zero.
Your way of life is being threatened.
It’s your democratic right to decide climate policy.
Tell him:
The road to Net Zero is a transformational one, with net benefits to our economies if we move fast enough. But if we delay while other countries race ahead to green their grids, insulate their homes and upgrade their transport systems, families will continue to suffer the cost of political inaction.
We’re already suffering the consequences of Tory short-sightedness:
Dr Simon Evans of Carbon Brief, who conducted the analysis, said: “Cutting the so-called ‘green crap’ has left UK households highly exposed to soaring global gas prices and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Energy efficiency and cheap renewables are the fastest and most effective ways to cut gas imports – and household bills.”
Cameron won the Tory leadership by forging an eco-friendly reputation …
… but reports emerged that he had told aides to “get rid of the green crap” in 2013 … Then, a series of policies designed to push energy efficiency and renewable energy was scaled back.
The number of homes having their lofts or cavity walls insulated each year dropped by 92% and 74% in 2013 respectively and has never recovered. Subsidies ended for onshore wind turbines, and planning reforms made them harder to build. Meanwhile, solar power was excluded from government support in 2015.
But Rishi Sunak is right about a few things:
Our way of life is being threatened. Net Zero is an ambition to avert the worst, in an uncertain effort to secure a habitable planet. It’s too late to stop climate change. It’s happening. The question is how fast can we implement system change and how bad will things become. We know our curbing emissions faster improves the odds in our favour. Since there is no civilised society without a secure supply of food and materials for exchange - monetary or otherwise - yes Prime Minister, our way of life is being threatened.
It is our democratic right to be involved in decisions about our future.
And policy-making should never be arbitrary or ad hoc or dictated by placards and protest. We deserve a transparent process. We haven’t, however, seen any evidence that a Conservative government will deliver climate policy we can trust with transparency. They are ad-hoc, reactive and perpetually in-fighting and preoccupied by short-termism.
Meanwhile, much of our mainstream media delivers endless gossip about trivia, while remaining very light on explaining, exploring and highlighting why change is imperative. Empty-headed politicians are stuffed onto panels on climate discussions but we have a right to hear from climate experts.
The result?
In the absence of accurate information, propaganda is more easily seeded. It’s not always the obviously deranged rambling of a conspiracy theorist. Propaganda can be found disguised on respectable-looking climate-focused websites. It’s often dressed in a suit and tie.
Fossil fuel propaganda via lobby groups dressed up as think tanks will be ramped up to inform Rishi Sunak’s public debate on Net Zero. Don’t fall for it.
What did Sunak say anyway?
Here’s the transcript of his speech from the UK government’s website and here’s the BBC’s reporting of it, with video clips.
Volts.pdf is the most objective climate journalism podcast I’ve come across so far. Here’s David Roberts interviewing a journalist who’s helped uncover exactly the type of community-inserted propaganda I’m anticipating Sunak is swinging open the door for:
Veteran climate politician and activist former US Vice President Al Gore didn’t think much of Rishi Sunak’s position. Here he is a few weeks ago, fighting the good fight on the Outrage and Optimism podcast:
We’re Back! with Al Gore (outrageandoptimism.org)
If you think I’m paranoid or uncharitable, that’s okay. But do believe Al Gore when he says,
But you know, the extent to which the fossil fuel companies and their lobbyists, their campaign contributors, their fixers, their revolving door colleagues have captured, they have spent way more time and money capturing the policy making process than they have capturing the emissions. They want to pretend that they're going to capture the emissions, but they're dead set in earnest in capturing the policy making.
Which brings us to the billion dollar question: is Rishi Sunak a captured ‘politician’?
About a year ago I was invited to an event at which representatives from the Net Zero Watch and the Tax Payers’ Alliance were speakers. After six months or so on my local Next Door app, the madness of that evening makes so much more sense now.
Here’s that story:
And yes, I haven’t made good on the dutiful promises I made a year ago in that article. I really shouldn’t make promises on the internet! I promise I not to make any more!
Finally, let’s tone it down a little with a politely neutral piece on retrofitting.
This was long and I’m tired now. Till next time,
Lots of Love,
Your Friendly Neighbourhood Radical,
Croydon,
London,
That patch of earth known today as the United Kingdom
Lat +51.51 Long, -0.118
This is in striking contrast to the idea of a citizen’s assembly, where informed discussion and debate among participants who represent different segments of society, leads to considered decision-making in a transparent process.