Green Policy suckers slowly turning into sceptics

Here we go again.  The annual COP climate jamboree kicks off next week.  And each year, the climate moguls decide to meet somewhere ever more jarring.  Last year in Baku, a booming oil and gas capital.  This year, they go for the exact reverse, in Belem in Brazil, in the middle of the Amazon, forcing the Brazilians to chop down forests to build new roads and airports to make the summit happen.  It’s as if they are trolling us: “We don’t take this stuff seriously, but you have to.”

Still, the ground is beginning to shift.  Each year, it has got a bit harder to agree the communiques.  It’s no longer taboo to question whether the pain of deindustrialisation and civilisational decline is really worth the gain of reducing global temperatures by a tenth of a degree in a hundred years’ time.  The costs are getting higher and the glib predictions of so many, that renewables would usher in a paradise of cheap and clean energy, are beginning to be disproven by reality, as so many of us said they would be.

And so the politics in the West is beginning to change. Trump, of course, has opted out entirely by withdrawing from the Paris Agreement.  Mark Carney had to pivot on fossil fuel production and green taxes to help win his election this year.

In Britain, climate politics is now a matter of mainstream political debate.  Both main parties on the Right, Reform and the Conservatives, have said they would abolish the UK’s Climate Change Act and start unwinding the flow of subsidies to renewables.  Even in the governing Labour Party there are signs that people are wondering whether the game is really worth the candle.  The trade unions are starting to get restive as they see well-paid productive jobs being vaporised.  Keir Starmer goes only reluctantly, and late in the day, to Brazil.  Only the high priest of British green tokenism, “Windy” Ed Miliband, remains a real enthusiast – and we know that Starmer tried to move him from his job a couple of months ago, recognising the damage he was doing.

Of course the last place you expect to find politics affected by reality is in the corridors of Brussels and its dependencies.  In the Commission, von der Leyen will brook no criticism of the EU’s Green Deal.  Most of the European Parliament takes a similar view.  And Europhile leaders across Europe dare only mutter occasional grumpy criticisms about the “pace” and “ambition” of the climate and energy policies imposed on them, for fear of a tongue-lashing from the zealot Commissioner Ribera.  The climate priesthood has even come up with the idea that somehow European forests absorb less carbon than the rest of the world to try to keep people in line – and guess what they attribute that to.  Yes, “climate change and more frequent and severe natural disturbances, including forest fires, droughts and pests, have affected forest carbon stocks”, says the EU Environment Agency.  Climate change is causing climate change.  There you have it: the reductio ad absurdum of the climate ideology.

Still, even in Brussels things are changing.  Environment Ministers meet there on November 4 to finalise the EU’s position for COP30 and in particular the absurd, probably unachievable, target to cut emissions by 90 per cent by 2040.  There isn’t a revolt – far from it – but there is a new level of concern.  Of course a consensus will be found in the end.  The recalcitrants will be bought off by revision clauses and enhanced flexibility to use carbon credits (aka, paying others to reduce their emissions instead – but why would this be necessary if it was so self-evidently beneficial for other countries to go down the green transition path too?)

But in truth concern is growing across Europe too.  Various political and economic forces are gradually coming together.  Energy-intensive industrial companies, notably but not only in Germany, see their business model being casually wrecked by the shift to “unreliables”, as renewables would better be called.  The “non-traditional” Right, for want of a better phrase, as in Britain, are lining up against the Green Deal, which they see as destroying Europe’s competitiveness – and clearly they have sympathy in the EPP, too.  And in central and Eastern Europe, climate and energy policy seems to be slowly becoming seen as an integral part of the package of fashionable progressive ideas, from migration to the transgender agenda, that politicians in the region see as imposed upon them by the insouciant progressives governing the older and bigger member states.

At some point these forces will align and the politics will have to change to come into line with reality.  There is, after all, no policy choice in whether you respect the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Moving to a renewables-based grid, as most of Europe is doing, puts in place a system that is inevitably higher in cost and lower in efficiency. The consequences will be not just higher costs but weakened industrial competitiveness, offshoring of more businesses, stagnant productivity, and new industry going outside Europe.  More flexibility and more subsidy cannot change this reality: They can only change which groups in society bear the costs.

The only way of changing it is to change the plan: To abandon net zero as a policy, to drop the dangerous 2035 targets for scrapping petrol cars and the 2040 target for emissions, and to do what the rest of the world is doing, subordinating energy and climate fashion to the need to reduce costs and generate wealth.  Maybe, just maybe, European leaders are waking up to this.  Whether next year’s COP31 ends up in Adelaide or Antalya, it would be good if the Europeans, and whoever is UK Prime Minister by then, could go as leaders who put their countries’ prosperity first: Not as suckers – but as sceptics. Then we might get onto a better path.

The Rt Hon Lord Frost of Allenton CMG was Britain’s chief negotiator for exiting the European Union