Rishi Sunak’s net zero u-turn

How time flies when there’s a real crisis. Just six months ago at the Glasgow climate conference, the Chancellor Rishi Sunak was pledging to rewire the entire global financial system for Net Zero. Sunak boasted that he was going to make London the world’s first ‘Net Zero Aligned Financial Centre’. It would mean forcing firms to publish plans showing how they will decarbonise and meet net-zero targets to be overseen by a transition taskforce. There was little fanfare when the transition plan taskforce was launched last week. Even though the taskforce is co-chaired by John Glen, the economic secretary to the treasury minister alongside the chief executive of Aviva, you won’t learn much about the taskforce from the Treasury website, which, however, does tell us which artist is going to design a new £1 coin.

The Treasury’s recently acquired modesty about blazing the net zero finance trail is explained by the energy crisis that threatens to overwhelm the economy and the government with it, just as the first energy crisis did for the Heath government in the early 1970s.