Is Boris Johnson’s dream of a carbon-free future realistic?

The prime minister made a heroic effort to change the subject from coronavirus in his speech to the Conservative Party conference this month. He invited viewers – begged them, even – to raise their eyes to the end of the decade, by which time “offshore wind will be powering every home in the country”. 

It was a striking target, one of a series of sub-targets needed to get to the great goal of net zero carbon by the middle of the century. It allowed some typically Johnsonian rhetorical flourishes: “Far out in the deepest waters we will harvest the gusts.” But it is also good crude politics: everyone thinks green is good. 

A large majority of people think it is right to set a target for the UK to cease putting any greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 2050. Especially young people, the voters of the future, who will be needed to replace the older Conservative voters of the past. In fact, many of them want it done sooner, and are attracted by the urgency of the Extinction Rebellion movement, so all parties – and many companies and institutions – are clambering on the net-zero-carbon bandwagon. But how realistic is the net zero target? And is it something that Britain should try to achieve if other countries won’t? 

Until about the year 2000, the idea of net zero carbon seemed incompatible with anything like the lifestyle to which voters have become accustomed in rich countries, and therefore it was hard to see how it could happen in a democracy. That started to change in the first decade of this century, when the Labour government started to put big subsidies into wind power. What happened in the second decade, as the cost of generating electricity from the wind and the sun fell dramatically, transformed everything. 

Now nearly everyone who has studied the subject says that decarbonisation is possible. Some say it is not only compatible with a high standard of living but would be an improvement on it, because we would be fitter and breathe cleaner air. Realistically, though, most admit it will be expensive, which implies that there is still some trade-off between living standards and the environment. 

The key to net zero carbon is electricity. If we can generate enough electricity without burning gas and coal, then everything else follows. Boris Johnson’s plan to expand offshore wind generation over the next 10 years so that it can power all the homes in the country is ambitious. It requires two giant turbines to be built every three days, according to one calculation. But it could be done. No one really knows whether it would actually be cheaper than existing fossil fuel sources of electricity, but the price is close enough to be feasible. 

That would be the easy part. It could produce enough electricity to provide for our existing uses: fan ovens, kettles, lights, TVs and charging electronic gadgets. But we would then need to produce at least as much electricity again to power everything else that is currently run on gas, petrol and diesel. 

Of the two big categories, transport and home heating, transport is well on the way. We have electric cars already, and while they are not yet as convenient as petrol cars it is easy to see how they soon will be. Trains are part of the way there, and lorries and buses will follow. Air travel is further behind. Despite the prime minister’s enthusiasm for “jet zero”, existing technology is not yet practical. That part of Johnson’s speech, where he imagined a visitor to Britain in 2030 arriving in a “zero carbon jet”, is almost certainly not going to happen – I’ll come to the reasons in a moment. 

Then there is home heating. Most people have central heating and hot water provided by gas boilers, and we are some way from knowing how best to convert them to electricity. Heat pumps, which work like fridges in reverse, are big, ugly and expensive. They look like large air conditioning units on the outsides of buildings; or they can be buried, absorbing heat from the ground instead of from the air, but that is even more expensive. 

The main alternative technology is hydrogen. This requires electricity to produce, and it burns like domestic gas, but without producing carbon dioxide. This holds out the possibility of simply replacing gas boilers with hydrogen ones, which might be less disruptive than heat pumps, but I think it is fair to say that the technology has not been proven yet. (As for hydrogen-fuelled planes: at the moment about half the plane would have to be given over to storing the hydrogen, which would have to be liquefied at close to absolute zero, and the water produced by burning it at high altitude would add to the greenhouse effect; as I say: not proven yet.) 

Hydrogen is being sold as a miracle cure at the moment – MPs are besieged by lobbyists for it; the prime minister is said to be Tiggerishly enthusiastic about it, although it earned only passing mentions in his Big Speech. But it must be remembered that it is essentially a way of transmitting energy from electricity that has to be generated from renewable sources in the first place. 

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Generating enough carbon-free electricity is therefore the main challenge. It can be done, although probably not by wind and solar power alone. Unless technology makes really big advances – rather than existing technologies simply getting cheaper – it will need more nuclear power, which will be an important test of the Extinction Rebellion wing of the green movement. Zion Lights, who was XR’s spokesperson, now supports nuclear energy and has set up a campaign called Nuclear for Net Zero, but public opinion is divided. The government’s policy was to pay Chinese companies to build them cheaply for us, but is now turning away from having potential arms of the Chinese state too close to our critical infrastructure. 

The decision about nuclear power is symbolic of the hard choices that will have to be made at the next stage. If we have to build our own nuclear power stations, not only will we have to overcome our doubts about the risks of radioactivity, but it will cost more. Everything is going to cost more. We cannot rely on the remarkable declines in the price of wind and solar energy – the windfall, if you like – being repeated on the same scale for every technology. Generating more electricity will require a big upgrade of the national grid, and if hydrogen can work for home heating it will mean replacing a lot of metal pipes (which hydrogen corrodes) with plastic ones. Refitting every home in the UK is a huge job, so you can see why companies are lobbying to be given first-mover advantage in a market that size. 

So we know we can do it – except for air travel, which is a small part of the total, even if it was growing fast before coronavirus. There are other things that can be done beyond energy and transport: methane from livestock contributes more to global warming than air travel, for example; and there are possible technological fixes such as taking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, and reflecting sunlight back from the Earth’s surface. 

But zero-carbon electricity is the most important thing. We don’t know how much it will cost, or how much of that cost is bearable by our democracy. While we enjoy the windfall of falling renewable electricity prices, anything seems possible. But you only have to go back to the middle years of the coalition government to recall David Cameron’s frustration at the “green crap” that was being added to energy bills to pay for the later breakthrough on renewables. And to remember Ed Miliband’s opportunistic politics of a price cap on energy bills, which suggested that Labour was aware of the limits of greenery. If you look back at the long history of the fuel duty escalator for petrol, which was brought in as a revenue raising measure by the Tories in 1993, and dressed up as a green tax – a form of carbon tax on one kind of carbon only. The tax on petrol was supposed to go up by more than inflation every year, but in 1999 this escalation was abandoned, which has provided the chancellor with an easy cheer in every Budget since, when he announces that he is freezing it for a further year. 

When we hit the next, unavoidable point when green policies are going to cost more in cash, this kind of retail politics will reassert itself. And at that point the next hard questions are going to be asked. 

For a long time, as a leader writer for The Independent I argued that international agreements were the key to dealing with the climate emergency. It was important that Britain should set an example, and it was also in our interest to be a leader in green technology, but it was more important to persuade America and China and other growing industrial nations of the need for action. For a long time, such goals seemed remote, and it seemed only prudent to focus some of the policy-making effort on trying to mitigate the effects of climate change, even if parts of the green movement condemned this as a counsel of despair. 

The gains made at the Paris climate conference in 2015 have shifted these assumptions. Donald Trump’s partial repudiation of the agreement was a step backwards, although at state level the US is still going in the right direction. The Chinese government’s announcement last month that it aims for net zero carbon in 2060 may be too good to be believed, but it is nevertheless a big symbolic step forward. 

Some of the next set of problems now seem more manageable. The problem is that some medium-sized countries will be tempted to exploit cheap carbon energy to undercut their rivals. International agreements are never likely to overcome these incentives completely, but global trade rules could do some of the work. The EU, for example, is looking at a “border adjustment tax” on imports to take these emissions into account, so that European greenhouse emissions are not simply transferred elsewhere. 

Some economists are starry-eyed about the ability of capitalism to do a lot of the work towards net zero carbon. Philip Verleger, a former US government adviser, argues that the big energy companies know that they have no future in fossil fuels and are therefore devoting all their efforts to diversifying into green energy. That is true, but there will still be an incentive for rogue companies and rogue states to profit from low oil and gas prices – and the more successful low-carbon technology becomes, the cheaper oil and gas will be.

Even so, the prospect of effective global action on the climate emergency now looks more hopeful, and makes the case for a more ambitious national policy stronger. That in turn means some hard thinking about how to persuade voters that changes are needed. I had an interesting conversation about this with a group of politicians, business people and think tankers at a fringe meeting as part of the virtual Conservative Party conference. Alexander Stafford, the irrepressible new MP for Rother Valley, and the first Tory to represent the seat, argued that net zero could be sold to the people, but only as long as it was not called that. “Far too negative,” he said. He advocated green policies as offering a better life – clean air, healthier lifestyles and the secure jobs of the future. 

I tried to suggest that this might be a hard message to sell in the red wall, but his Johnsonian enthusiasm made me feel like the climate change sceptic in the viral Joel Pett cartoon from 2009. This shows a session of the Copenhagen climate summit, where the advantages of climate action are listed on a big screen – “preserve rainforests, liveable cities, healthy children” – while the heckler angrily demands: “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?”