Hands up: who still supports net zero 2050? This is rapidly becoming a sensible question to ask. Kemi Badenoch for the Tories suggested three weeks ago that it simply couldn’t be done: since then her shadow energy secretary Andrew Bowie has confirmed on GB News, no doubt with her say-so, that the party has indeed dropped any commitment to it at all.
Meanwhile Labour, hitherto solid on carbon emissions, is itself under plenty of attack on that front. It is desperately trying to prevent the steelworks in Scunthorpe, a traditional Labour heartland, from closing down because the highest energy prices in Europe, which it introduced, make it hopelessly uneconomic. It also faces the fury of small fishermen, understandably unhappy at the government’s insistence on their spending large sums on replacing their boats’ reliable diesel engines with untested electric ones.
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