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LONDON – The man who signed Britain’s ambitious climate pledge into law is leaving – and it’s not clear anyone wants to step into the breach.
Chris Skidmore was energy minister under Theresa May and helped the then prime minister secure the country’s goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 as one of his last acts in office.
He has been called to one last assignment, as the author of a major UK net-zero policy review, It was commissioned under short and turbulent times of the previous Prime Minister, Liz Truss.
“It’s like a rare Tudor coin,” he tells POLITICO. “The report is probably one of the only things that exists as a legacy of the Truss administration.”
Skidmore sees the report as his last chance to influence policy before stepping down as MP at the next election.
His planned departure coincides with a host of Conservative Party bigwigs on climate change going into retirement in one form or another.
Boris Johnson embracing both net-zero as a personal cause and a vote winner, was forced from office and can no longer act as the party’s conscience on the subject. Of course, he can harbor heir-but-a-sage cynicism from the sidelines – as he clearly showed at the COP27 climate summit. But Johnson cannot coerce his more skeptical allies into action as he once did.
Under Johnson, maintaining a net-zero target was one of six promises that led to the 2019 Conservative manifesto. Climate action is notably absent from the five pledges Sunak has identified as his priorities in government.
UK’s COP26 President Alok Sharma earned praise For his firm leadership of the COP26 summit last year, handed over the baton to Egypt and was not subsequently offered another job in the government.
There is now a minister clearly responsible for climate change – Graham Stuart – who does not attend cabinet and has kept a low profile since his appointment to the role.
“There’s this emptiness out there,” Skidmore said.
At the same time, the opposition Labor Party is attacking the climate.
Keir Starmer’s plans for a national energy company were at the center of the Labor leader’s final party conference speech. A shadow cabinet minister confirmed that this grab for the agenda had been made possible by Johnson’s departure and the apparent reluctance of anyone in the Conservative Party.
Sunak has vowed to uphold the net-zero agenda, but he is less rigid in his approach than Johnson and has been accused of delivering mixed messages on the subject.
Skidmore fears that inaction on climate change will create “a perfect storm” that could see the Conservatives lose votes in the north and south of the country at the next election.
The so-called “Red Wall” – parts of England’s de-industrialised north and midlands that went Tory for the first time in 2019 – could be overturned if the government does not approve new job-creating green projects. And, in rich southern seats, the Labor Party is now less vulnerable to the Green Party than it was in the last election.
Green investment panics
The Overriding Message, Beyond the Potential Electoral Cost of Inaction Skidmore’s 340 Page Review is that the UK is getting out of green investment Inconsistent decision-making at the top of government and delays in important planning decisions at the local level,
“People are telling us they want to invest money in the UK, but they haven’t committed yet because they don’t think the environment is there,” says Skidmore. They believe this is a business concern fueled by the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in the United States, which brought in subsidies and tax breaks to spur new climate-friendly investments.
the british government allegedly careful EU moves to replicate IRA, and there are concerns Could be caught in the middle of a transatlantic green subsidy war,
Skidmore meanwhile warns of a “complete dissonance between our climate commitments and the reality of meeting them”, with some projects that have already given the thumbs up suggesting it could be possible to connect to the country’s power grid by 2032. Will not done.
His review calls for an infrastructure strategy to underpin new clean energy initiatives, and a ban on gas boilers in new homes from 2025.
Skidmore also wants Sunak’s government to set up an Office for Net Zero Delivery, as a sign that he is unimpressed by the inability of successive Conservative governments to pursue a coherent line on the environment.
The former minister says, “There are mistakes that have been made and the cost has been borne by the British people.”
He cites the love affair of truces, the spread over nuclear power, and the abandonment of home insulation initiatives under David Cameron. with fracking for shale gasand the recent decision by Sunak’s government to approve a new coal mine in Cumbria.
was stuck in skidmore chaotic vote Which was preceded by a truce as prime minister, where Tory MPs were threatened with losing the party whip if they failed to vote against a Labor motion to ban fracking.
“I became an independent MP on the strength of that vote,” he says, “because I could not believe a government that was going to break the manifesto commitments that we originally made on fracking.”
he is equally scared about sunak move forward to move forward With the construction of Britain’s first new deep coal mine in three decades.
“We wanted to be a major leader in green steel and the British steel industry wanted to be able to make a low carbon steel that they could export overseas … It’s a classic decision where the left hand doesn’t know what the right What is the hand doing?
At the time of the announcement, the UK’s Department for Leveling-Up released a rationale document seeking to explain the decisionwhich argued that the proposed mine was likely to be better “at reducing greenhouse gas emissions” when set against “comparable mining operations around the world”.
The government is yet to give its official response to Skidmore’s net zero review.
The former minister estimates that the Sunak administration has a little more than a year to feel its impact on climate, and argues that the establishment of an Office for Net Zero Delivery would “provide a coherent single voice from government”. which needs to happen.”
Asked who could take it forward, he categorically did not name anyone in the current cabinet.
And, as he heads toward the exit door, all Skidmore can offer is that he’s placing his hope in “the new generation that will take it.”