The government’s net zero strategy is aspirational but lacks real detail

The government is to be commended for outlining its net zero strategy but there are several reasons for viewing its plans with concern. The aims are admirable, but the ways of achieving those aims are sadly lacking. As The Independent has pointed out, the document “does not provide enough policies or investment to drive the transformation needed to reach net zero”.

First, there are key details still to come. For example, the shift to decarbonise the economy will require a huge increase in electricity supply. That supply will have to be continuous, not subject to weather issues such as the wind over the North Sea. The government promises a decision on nuclear power by the end of this parliament, but its present policies on nuclear are in disarray.

The country generates some 20 per cent of its electricity from this source, but half of its capacity is due to be shut down by 2025. With the exception of Sizewell B and Hinkley Point C, which is being built now, all of its plants will be shut by 2030. It is hard to be confident that the country will have managed to come up with a scheme that could replace that capacity from carbon-free sources on the required timescale.

Second, the plans do not go far enough to achieve the stated aims. The government says that there will be £26bn of government investment in a “green industrial revolution” that will support 190,000 jobs by 2025, and 440,000 jobs by 2030. The plan will, it says, be supported by £90bn of private investment by 2030.

The words are fine, but when you look at the detail of what these jobs might be, which companies or sectors will generate them, and what these people will do, the mists descend. This green industrial revolution, if there is to be one, will be created by commercial companies, not by government fiat.

Third, the record of successive British governments’ implementation of large projects has in the past at best been poor, and at worst, execrable. To take one example, London’s Crossrail, the cost has risen from £14.8bn to more than £20bn, and it will be between three and four years late. It is a railway – something that the UK has some experience in building. The record of this government is, if anything, even more lamentable than that of predecessors. The very idea that it should be able to choreograph something so substantial as a green industrial revolution is absurd.

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So we should see this net-zero strategy as an aspiration, not a detailed blueprint. It is the task of the rest of our society to hold this government, and its successors, to that aspiration. When progress slips, as experience teaches us that it will, its grand sentiments should be exposed.

No one should pretend, as Boris Johnson absurdly claims, that the move to a greener, more sustainable economic structure will be pain free. We cannot, to use his notorious phrase, have our cake and eat it. The task will be to bake better cakes for the generations to come, even if that means being rather more frugal in our present habits and behaviour.