The Conservative Party needs to be serious about net zero - Yorkshire Post Letters

From: Dr Andrew Blewett, Exeter.

Mrs Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party, has just gone into print to explain why she doesn’t believe that we should aim to achieve our Paris climate commitments by 2050, a faint echo of Mr Trump’s proclamations.

She doesn’t say when she thinks they should be met. She says that she accepts the reality of climate breakdown but then seems to want to ignore what this means for us.

Mrs Badenoch says that net zero is political dogma and some sort of choice. No it isn’t. Not if a meaningful choice is a rational question of two courses of action leading to roughly equivalent human good.

Achieving a favourable carbon balance - ie the Earth absorbs more carbon than we emit, through various natural ‘sinks’; soil, peat, forest and ocean etc isn’t a political concept, it’s a physical concept. It’s determined by physics and the way climate works. It’s what needs to happen globally to keep climate risk within tolerable limits compatible with a viable human future.

The additional issue which she ignores is the amount of carbon burnt en route to net zero, so for example if we burn lots and then suddenly transform the system in 2045 we will exceed 2C, let alone 1.5.

Currently, global carbon commitments will see us reach 2.6C which takes us into entirely unchartered, dangerous, and potentially irreversible territory. So a steady and immediate decline in emissions is essential. We are currently not on course, so to deliberately make this worse is beyond reason. Her strategy completely ignores both limits.

I suspect it’s not that she’s deliberately competing with Reform UK denialism ‘climate breakdown is a hoax, a nice hot summer will be great for English Champagne growers’ so much as she hasn’t read the climate reports and advice produced by the IPCC or our own Climate Committee.

Paradoxically when she says that net zero is dogma and she wants to be pragmatic, she is being the precise opposite. Ignoring climate physics makes no more sense than basing national policy on defying gravity - it’s too serious for this kind of amateurism and unless the Conservative Party can start dealing with things as they are, not as they would like them to be, they are entirely unfit to offer themselves to run the country.