Bright green: the case for eco-optimism

Of all the world leaders at the Cop27 summit today, I suspect Rishi Sunak will be one of the least comfortable with the whole jamboree. How can he justify a £50 billion-a-year net zero programme without anyone having worked out what difference, if any, the proposed extra taxes and regulations would make? How can a PM jet off to a luxury Egyptian resort and pledge this kind of cash – then fly back to London and constrain NHS and school spending, slash aid money, hike taxes, impose deep real-terms cuts in public pay – all to plug a £35 billion hole? No wonder Sunak said, at first, that he would not attend. The whole Cop27 agenda is a festival of fiscal cognitive dissonance: a malady that Sunak believes led Britain to its current economic mess. I looked at this in my latest Daily Telegraph column.

‘Our people know that if something is too good to be true,’ he wrote in his resignation letter to Boris Johnson, ‘then it’s not true.’