Opinion: Ten lies Rishi Sunak is telling about net zero
By Jeremy Williams
“We need sensible, green leadership,” Rishi Sunak told the country last night, and “a better, more honest debate about how we secure the country’s long-term interest.” He used the words ‘honesty’ five times during a speech which contained dozens of falsehoods about climate policy. So, in the interests of an honest debate, here are ten of the lies I spotted.
1: Sunak is standing against short-term thinking for political gain.
“Motivated by short term thinking, politicians have taken the easy way out,” complains Sunak, speaking in front of a lectern that reads ‘long term decisions for a brighter future. “Can we put the long-term interests of our country before the short-term political needs of the moment?” This is perhaps the most offensive of the false statements in Sunak’s speech, because short-term political need is exactly what motivates him here.
There’s an election next year that he will lose. His political strategists are desperate for wedge issues that they can use against the opposition. Since the (misinterpreted) results of the Uxbridge bye-election, many Conservatives have been calling for a re-assessment of net zero in the hopes of scoring some votes. Plenty of other Conservatives have warned against this, but the Prime Minister has decided to gamble on it. And in order to obscure the fact that this is a short-term electoral gambit, Sunak is dressing it up as its opposite.
2: Sunak is bringing change.
“The real choice confronting us is do we really want to change our country and build a better future for our children, or do we want to carry on as we are?” asks Sunak, and then delivers a complete non-sequitur. “I have made my decision: we are going to change.”
Britain’s net zero policies are the change – change to the way we travel, to the way we heat our homes, to the wasteful expense of uninsulated homes. By cancelling or delaying the programmes that are bringing change, Sunak is prolonging the fossil fuelled status quo. Like lie number one, this is Sunak literally claiming the opposite of what he’s doing. He is pulling the plug on change while calling himself the agent of change.
3. Net zero decisions have been undemocratic.
Decisions about climate change have been made “without any meaningful democratic debate”, says Sunak. “In a democracy, we must also be able to scrutinise and debate those changes.”
The government’s net zero policies are his own, which were put in place by Conservative governments over the last decade. The net zero targets and policies to work towards them were set out in the Conservative manifesto at the last election. His party was elected to deliver them – democracy in action! Following the election, there were extensive consultations on the most important policies. Here’s the one for the phase-out of diesel and petrol cars, for example, which has broad industry support. By scrapping policies that he was elected to deliver, Sunak is the one overruling the mandate and for the third time now, is claiming the exact opposite of what he is doing.
4: Sunak is scrapping a series of outrageous green impositions.
“There have even been proposals for taxes on eating meat, new taxes on flying, compulsory car sharing if you drive to work, and a government diktat to sort your rubbish into seven different bins,” says Sunak. Then he lists them all again later in the speech and says “I’ve scrapped it” to each one.
You can’t scrap something that doesn’t exist. Nobody has ever proposed compulsory car sharing, and you can read the government’s advice on car sharing for yourself to check. None of these things were ever Conservative party policies – not even in draft form. Even if they were, Sunak is too late to scrap them because they’ve already been rejected. That meat tax, for example. “This is categorically not going to happen,” said a Number 10 spokesman for Boris Johnson in 2021. Almost exactly two years later, Sunak boldly declares that it was he who scrapped it, just now. This is a lie.
5: Britain is further ahead of anyone else in the world on climate change.
“We’re so far ahead of every other country in the world,” Sunak says glibly as a reason for lowering our ambitions. For one thing, this is a strange response to being good at something – we’re leading on this, so we’ll burn our competitive advantage and let everyone else catch up. But it isn’t true anyway, so it’s nonsense squared. There are multiple countries that are ahead of Britain on all sorts of metrics – countries that have already reached net zero, or countries with 100% renewable energy.
Don’t get me wrong, Britain has performed very well on reducing its carbon emissions, provided you ignore imports. I’m very proud of that. But it simply isn’t true that we’re “so far ahead of every other country in the world”. We’re not even in the lead – that would be Denmark.
6: This round of announcements doesn’t compromise our climate targets.
Sunak suggests that he is not “abandoning any of our targets or commitments,” and that “I am unequivocal that we’ll meet our international agreements.” He is confident of this, he says, because we met all our previous climate targets.
The government’s own advisors are very clear in their assessment that “emissions are currently not decreasing at the pace required to meet future targets.” So lowering ambitions and weakening the policies to get us there means we will definitely, catgorically, one hundred percent miss those targets. Let’s be generous to Sunak and say this might not be a lie. Maybe he just hasn’t read his briefings, listened to his advisors, or didn’t understand them when they said “the government must go further than its current plans to meet the 2030 target”.
7: Heat pumps cost £10,000.
Let’s be kind to Sunak again and say this is an exaggeration rather than a lie. “For a family living in a terraced house in Darlington, the upfront cost could be around £10,000.” The nod to a ‘red wall’ constituency is noted, naturally, but I’d like to see this terraced house. Perhaps Sunak has a five-storey Georgian townhouse in mind, rather than the little Victorian terraces that they have in… well, like they have in Darlington. Or perhaps he’s forgotten to mention that with his own government’s support scheme, you’d only pay half of that.
Either way, I’d suggest our Darlington family get a couple more quotes. British Gas and Octopus both offer heat pumps from £3,000.
8: Scrapping energy efficiency policies will save people money.
This is a bizarre one. “Energy efficiency,” says Sunak, “is critical to making our homes cheaper to heat.” But people shouldn’t be compelled to do it, and “some property owners would’ve been forced to make expensive upgrades in just two years’ time.”
What Sunak leaves out is that the “property owners” he refers to here are landlords, and the upgrades he appears to be scrapping are the minimum efficiency requirements for rented properties. This condemns millions of households to paying high energy bills in homes that they aren’t allowed to improve. Energy poverty campaigners fought for years to get rules in place for private renters. We don’t know the full detail of this ‘scrapping’ yet, but at face value it looks like saving money for landlords while locking poorer households into higher bills.
9: We are at risk of dependence on Russian gas.
Sunak reiterated that he won’t “ban new oil and gas in the North Sea which would simply leave us reliant on expensive, imported energy from foreign dictators like Putin.” This old chestnut. There are only two sources of oil and gas in Rishi Sunak’s mind: the North Sea or Russia, and nobody else gets a look in. In reality, 77% of our gas comes from Norway.
As I wrote about recently, Britain’s energy imports from Russia are currently zero, following a successful government target to eliminate them. Own it Sunak! You did it already! The best way to reduce our dependency on foreign fossil fuels is to move beyond them as North Sea supplies decline, so delaying the transition on gas heating and energy efficiency actually increases the risk of import dependency.
10. Watering down green policy supports green industry.
As he pares back Britain’s climate targets, Runak aims “to embrace with even greater enthusiasm, the incredible opportunities of green industry and take the necessary practical steps to create whole new sectors and hundreds of thousands of good, well-paid jobs right across the country.”
This is a tricky circle to square. Scrapping targets on electric cars, boilers and efficiency directly sets back investment and job creation in those sectors. Don’t take my word for it: here’s the head of the car company Ford on the reset of the electric car target. “The UK 2030 target is a vital catalyst to accelerate Ford into a cleaner future. Our business needs three things from the UK government: ambition, commitment and consistency. A relaxation of 2030 would undermine all three.”
Am I wrong? I don’t think all policians are corrupt and dishonest, and I choose my words with care – so come back at me if you think I’m being unfair. Here’s the speech below, and the text in full.
First published in The Earthbound Report.
