Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seems to be a truly pivotal moment in this narrative. In the autumn of 2022, energy prices in the UK skyrocketed, and yet then-Prime Minister Liz Truss’s response was to double down on oil and gas exploration and not to ask people to reduce their energy consumption. This was the completely opposite approach compared to many European countries facing the same problem.
By the time [the invasion] It was obviously a real crisis and I thought climate would fall to the bottom of the priority list. But in my technocratic thinking, I also thought this would create an incentive to abandon high-carbon fuels – if you want to know what the world looks like with a high carbon price, we’re about to find out.
What I didn’t expect is that the green arguments came too late because the fossil arguments immediately jumped in and said, “This is why we need a domestic supply of fossil fuels.” This really important argument to respond to this because fossil fuels are so price volatile and so expensive was easily overlooked in the political debate at the time and we moved on to a different narrative of what the country needed to do.
The irony of this whole time is that we are running out of oil and gas. Therefore, promoting prime oil and gas licenses in the North Sea will not be a credible strategy in the long term.
A year later, Truss’ successor Rishi Sunak gave a major speech in which he reversed key climate policies and, most notably, pushed back the deadline for banning the sale of new petrol and diesel cars until 2030.
If you look at it purely as political speech, there was more climate friendly policy than delayed climate policy. There he talks, for example, about accelerating green investments. And the thing with electric vehicles [pushing back the 2030 deadline] wasn’t that big a change since we already allowed hybrids until 2035.
But what did the country hear? They heard: “Don’t worry, now is not the time to switch to electric vehicles.” It’s hard to attribute anything to a single speech, but if you look at the share of electric vehicles sold in the UK, it has been stagnant since September. I’m sure there are other factors here, but there will be people who think, “Well, maybe I don’t have to get an electric car right now.”
It appears that this government has decided to make targeting motorists a key campaign strategy. In July 2023, the Labor Party narrowly lost the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election, and many commentators felt that the Conservative candidate had won that election because of his opposition to the Ultra Low Emission Zone.
What happened there was interesting. The Labor Party also accepted the narrative that ULEZ was the reason it did not win this constituency. Every election inevitably involves a variety of issues, but when all parties agree that environmental policy is at stake, it is no surprise that it becomes one of the dominant issues in politics thereafter.