UK Tories Dismissed "Green Crap" 10 Years Ago - Why Trust Them With Energy Policy Now?

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n the grip of the energy crisis, gas prices are already due to increase by 50% in April, and will spike higher later in the year, while the chancellor’s modest mitigations do little for unaffordable bills. Boris Johnson is about to produce an energy strategy to cut reliance on Russian imports and speed UK generation. He wobbles on fracking. But before he boasts some “world-beating” plan, hold on to this salient fact. If the Tories had not blocked progress on renewables and insulation over the last decade, Britain would already be generating more clean energy than the amount provided by the fuels imported from Russia.

Tories may recall those sunlit days leading up to the 2010 election when David Cameron, as the green man of folklore, posed in the Arctic cheerily driving a husky team, as he rebranded his party with an oak tree and a Vote Blue, Go Green slogan. His greenery was environmental gauze to signify an end to the nasty party: he did the job pretty well.

He did preserve Labour’s green policies initially, but in 2013 Cameron panicked when Labour’s Ed Miliband pledged a price freeze, after energy prices had risen by 37% in three years. Cut the “green crap” Cameron ordered, which was duly splashed across the Sun’s front page. The consequences were far-reaching. Stripping out green subsidies caused the number of homes getting loft or cavity wall insulation to plummet immediately by 92% and 74% respectively: those figures never recovered. He scrapped zero carbon building regulations, so a million homes have been built since 2016 with poor energy standards: our energy bills are £2.5bn higher as a direct result, says Simon Evans of Carbon Brief.

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Labour pledges a £28bn green recovery, with Ed Miliband laying out his plans for a “clean energy sprint” for a huge expansion in renewables and insulation. That’s the challenge for Johnson to meet: he is yet to spell out the politically difficult staging posts to net zero. His green homes grant scheme failed abysmally through incompetence, a £1.5bn fiasco that the National Audit Office found had insulated fewer than 10% of homes promised. Keeping his Cop26 pledges means rejecting the frackers: Jacob Rees-Mogg in this cabinet, Steve Baker and loud noises off from Nigel Farage. The right’s fracking fascination is a mystery when it would take years for the gas to flow, if it works at all without damage, amid ferocious local opposition. Why aren’t mighty turbines just as excitingly macho? The Renewable Energy Association’s CEO, Nina Skorupska, tells me that the companies she represents, “could construct more than the terawatt-hours imported from Russia within 18 months if the obstacles were unblocked”.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/15/tories-green-crap-david-cameron-boris-johnson