What Kemi Badenoch didn't say

In her attack on net zero, Badenoch left much unsaid. Listening to her policy renewal launch, I was struck by what she didn’t say about net zero.

For example, she said: “Cheap abundant energy is the foundation of civilisation”, but forgot to say that the energy she is referring to comes from fossil fuels that created another abundance, that of CO2.

She went on to say: “We mess with [cheap abundant energy] at our peril but that’s exactly what’s been happening for 20 years”, apparently forgetting that the Conservative party was in power for the majority of that period. The last government was the elephant in the room throughout Badenoch’s speech; as much as she tried, she could not tiptoe around it. So much so, that it made for unintentionally hilarious moments like this:

That’s why as part of our policy renewal we are going to do something that Labour failed to do in 14 years of opposition. We are going to deal with reality, confront the real problems, answer the real questions and be ready with a plan.

What was Badenoch doing while Labour were in opposition? Well, for half that time she was sitting on the government benches as an MP!

Badenoch also glossed over the climate denialism deeply embedded in the Conservative party:

Conservatives like Margaret Thatcher have always been custodians of our natural environment, cherishing the forests that breathe life into our world, protecting the rivers that nourish our lands and preserving the landscapes that inspire our souls.

This simply ignores the Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG), founded in 2021, which opposes net zero policies and has been criticised for its links to the climate change denying Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). In 2022, when Badenoch made her first run for Tory leadership, she was reported to have received a £1,000 donation from a funder of GWPF.

Badenoch’s stance also ignores the concerted efforts by Conservative MPs and peers to overturn the fracking ban in 2022. Lord Frost led a group of thirty in writing a letter to Boris Johnson, then Prime Minister, calling for a lifting of the moratorium.

And if she believes in protecting rivers, why vote in 2021 against an amendment to the Environment Bill that would have imposed a legal duty on water companies to reduce the harm caused by discharges of untreated sewage?

No plans.

When it came to government plans, Badenoch again couldn’t simply state the obvious:

We’re falling between two stools: too high costs, too little progress. And why? There’s never ever been a detailed plan. Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act 2008, no plan. The carbon budgets, no economic plan. And then in 2019 parliament legislated for net zero by 2050 but no plan.

Remind me again who was Prime Minister in June 2019, when the net zero targets were legislated? Ah yes, it was Theresa May.

And when the fourth, fifth and sixth carbon budgets were set? David “cut the green crap” Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson.

There have been plenty of Conservative Prime Ministers who could be blamed for the lack of plans to reach net zero, but Badenoch failed to mention these.

The claim that the net zero targets were put in place without a plan to reach them is one she’s made before. However, the target was based on recommendations of the Climate Change Committee, the UK’s independent climate advisory body. In a 2019 report, the committee set out that the target was achievable with currently available technology and economically feasible. This hasn’t stopped people like Jacob Rees-Mogg (and Badenoch, later in her speech) claiming that reaching net zero by 2050 will bankrupt the country.

There is other baseless fearmongering in the speech, including claims that families will be forced to replace “perfectly functioning cars, boilers and cookers with more expensive, less reliable versions of the same thing”.

The debate on net zero.

Badenoch claimed that on the day the net zero targets were debated, she was one of only two people that sounded a note of caution, and that she had demanded a plan:

Of the 22 MPS who spoke that day only two sounded notes of caution. I was one of them. I asked for the plan. I asked for it that day. I asked for it many days after, and I waited and waited and waited. Eight hundred and forty days later a plan came and it wasn’t enough.

In case you’re interested to see Kemi Badenoch’s contribution to the debate, here it is in its entirety:

Many of my constituents, especially schoolchildren, will be delighted by this announcement, but others are rightly sceptical about the costs. What steps will the Minister take to ensure that the plan will be achievable and affordable?

That’s it. She spent less time talking about it on the day than she did reflecting on it six years later.

I can’t find any examples in Hansard of Badenoch repeating her demands for a plan ‘many days after’. Indeed, Badenoch appears to have been happy enough with the government’s plans as early as December 2020:

The hon. Gentleman asks an interesting question, and I believe we are getting on with it. The Prime Minister’s 10-point plan, announced just two weeks ago, outlines quite a lot of that. If the hon. Gentleman is talking about the costs, he should look at the announcement we made about the net zero interim review, which will be coming out before the end of the year. That will look at the options for a balance of contributions between households, businesses and the taxpayer, and how to maximise economic growth opportunities from the transition to net zero.

The ‘840 days’ of waiting appears refer to the publication of the final Net Zero Review in October 2021, but the interim review was indeed published in December 2020.

As Treasury Secretary in June 2021, Badenoch still seemed happy with the government’s plans:

The Prime Minister’s 10-point plan for a green industrial revolution set out £12 billion of new investment in green industries and will crowd in three times as much private investment. Budget 2021 built on the 10-point plan by encouraging private investment, using the tax system and continuing with the direct Government support announced at the spending review. It also included announcements on offshore wind, energy innovation and hydrogen.

By September, she was so keen on the government’s plans that she was scolding opposition MPs for not reading them:

As I said, the report will be published in advance of COP26, but we have published other things that the hon. Member does not seem to have heard of or read. We have set out ambitious plans about the net zero target and published the energy White Paper, the industrial decarbonisation strategy, the transport decarbonisation plan, which has not happened anywhere else in the world—we are the first country to do a transport decarbonisation plan—and a hydrogen strategy. We will publish the heat and building strategy in due course. The Government have been busy setting out plans on net zero, and we would appreciate it if Opposition parties took some time to read them.

In a Q&A after today’s speech, Badenoch blamed her public position on collective responsibility. However, if she was so opposed to such a fundamental government policy, she always had the option of resigning. And no one was forcing her to give such full throated support as she did in the Commons.

Who needs targets?

Perhaps the biggest thing unsaid was whether a future Conservative government would have a target to reach net zero at all. When asked by LBC’s Aggie Chambre whether the Conservatives would come out with a target at some stage, Badenoch appeared to leave the question open:

If we do find that all of the subject matter experts, who come together, decide that a target is necessary, then yes we would have one.

As the great Yogi Berra said: “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” This might be great news for the GWPF, who celebrated Badenoch’s speech:

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has welcomed Kemi Badenoch’s speech on her self-declared ‘Net Zero scepticism’ and the need for climate policy reforms. Our outgoing Director, Dr Benny Peiser, said: “Nigel Lawson would have been delighted with Kemi Badenoch’s excellent speech which could have been drafted by himself almost verbatim”.

I’m not sure that it’s great news for anyone else. Or the planet.