DOMINIC LAWSON: On climate change and foreign aid, Rishi Sunak is accused by his critics of...
Can you hear the wailing across the globe at Britain's lost leadership in the battle to prevent ? No, me neither. But apparently we are not listening hard enough. This, at least, seems to be the view of the likes of Lord Deben (formerly the Conservative Environment Secretary John Gummer), who last week intoned that 's decision to continue awarding North Sea oil and gas exploration licences meant that 'we have lost our global climate leadership'. The outgoing chair of the Climate Change Committee continued: 'How can we ask other nations not to expand fossil fuel production if we start doing it ourselves?' Remind me: when we were, on Deben's estimation, 'global climate leader' and hosted the Cop 26 UN Climate Change conference in Glasgow in November 2021, what happened after the British president of the event, , pleaded with the world's biggest producers of coal to sign up for a date any date, really to abandon producing the stuff? , India and the U.S. all said go whistle. You might recall that Sharma blubbed at this debacle. You will also note that this happened even though Britain had all but eliminated our own coal-fired energy (bizarrely replacing much of it with electricity generated by the burning of wood pellets shipped in from the forests of Canada and the U.S.). So, if we did have 'global climate leadership', this was clearly not respected how ungrateful! by the countries which really matter, in terms of CO2 emissions. Therefore, if we were to follow Labour's policy of abandoning all new hydrocarbon exploration and production projects in our own waters, does anyone other than Ed Miliband, Labour's fanatically committed Shadow Climate Change Secretary, seriously imagine that this will cause the leaders of nations much more significant than ours to say: 'Oh, look, Britain leads and we must follow, and not licence any more oil exploration'? Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin: really? Or even our notional friend Joe Biden? It's true that the U.S. President is borrowing colossal sums to subsidise so-called 'green' projects, such as the manufacture of electric cars. But under Biden, there have actually been many more new domestic oil and gas exploration licences handed out than under Donald Trump, who had withdrawn the U.S. from commitments it had entered into under the Paris Climate Agreement signed by President Obama. Somewhat surprisingly, it is none other than Tony Blair who has just injected a note of realism about the UK's real significance in this global matter and of the concerns of much of our own population. In an interview with the New Statesman, the former PM said the issue with British voters on climate change policy was: 'OK, we should do what we can, but don't ask us to do a huge amount when, frankly, whatever we do in Britain is not really going to impact climate change.' Then Blair added his own observation: 'I mean, one year's rise in China's emissions would outscore the whole of Britain's emissions for a year.' Indeed, China is commissioning new coal-fired power stations on a prodigious scale (which explains why Beijing had no intention of signing along Alok Sharma's dotted line). Nonetheless, Sir Keir Starmer supports the policy advocated by the hysterical Just Stop Oil campaigners of blocking all future hydrocarbon projects. Perhaps Labour's policy should be called Just Stop British Oil; since while it has the objective of meeting our 'Net Zero Carbon' targets, it will also have net zero influence in persuading other nations to close down their own oil and gas developments. Starmer insists his policy will make the UK 'a clean energy superpower'. What does this even mean? The term, as commonly understood, describes a nation that projects power on a global scale. Which, nowadays, probably denotes only the U.S. (to Putin's fury and resentment). But even in the narrow sense of energy policy, it's vainglorious to make such a boast. And such geo-political pretensions are still more irritating when our own people are confronted with the costs and inefficiencies of this brave new world of Net Zero. The people in the actual business of meeting this target are now pointing out the gap between grandiose political rhetoric and engineering reality Two examples, from the past few days alone. Jon Butterworth, the chief executive of National Gas, declared that the policy of making all British homes run their heating via electricity, using heat pumps, 'feels like it's only for the privileged... I struggle to see how you electrify a flat in London with an air-source heat pump. I just don't see how that's possible.' And, in the pages of the Daily Mail, Ken McMeikan, the chief executive of Moto Hospitality, revealed how desperately unready the national grid is to meet the enforced demand for electricity mandated by the Government's commitment to ban the manufacture and purchase of new petrol or diesel powered cars by 2030. 'By my calculation, to meet our customers' needs in 2030, Moto will require 25 per cent of the power generated by an entire nuclear power station,' he wrote. 'Whitehall seems oblivious to this onrushing crisis. 'Already I have had to tackle queues at our busiest sites head-on, with marshals to police lines of motorists... and that's the situation when we have only one in 32 cars requiring power now, as opposed to a projected one in three by 2030.' What profiteth a nation if its parliamentarians claim 'global climate leadership' but its people can't drive the electric cars the same politicians told them to buy? But it's not only in the vexed area of energy that Rishi Sunak is being accused of ending the UK's supposed 'global leadership' as some sort of moral 'superpower'. As Chancellor, he broke with the policy of dedicating 0.7 per cent of national income to overseas aid, cutting it to 0.5 per cent. The supporters of the previous policy regularly claimed that we had become a 'development superpower' because of it. Aside from the presumption of this phrase, I wonder what the developing countries themselves thought of such bombast from the previous colonial master, redolent as it is of the imperial era when we were, indeed, responsible for such nations' welfare. Last December, the former International Development Secretary of State, Andrew Mitchell, urged a return to the 0.7 per cent commitment. He told the relevant Commons Committee: 'We were without question a development superpower... Today we are actually spending 0.55 per cent, as you know, and let's not beat around the bush, we are not a development superpower at the moment. And that is something that is bemoaned around the world.' Amazing how a difference of just 0.15 per cent of national income spent on international aid turns Britain from a 'development superpower' to a country whose vanished status (allegedly) is 'bemoaned' across the planet. Again, such language evokes a sort of post-imperial conceit, attributing to Whitehall a global significance in its most marginal decisions that would only have been the case when huge areas of the world's landmass was coloured pink on the maps. Sunak, whose family came to the UK from those former imperial territories, strikes me as much more realistic or modest, if you like in his outlook. And it is a little odd that the politicians who think Britain has some form of 'global leadership' even when, for example, we are responsible for little more than 1 per cent of the world's man-made CO2 emissions tend to be more on the Left of the Conservative Party, or in Labour. Of course, it is pleasant for British politicians to attend international summits and claim planetary moral leadership. But for the vast majority of those who elected them, and whom they represent, what matters more is whether their own homes can be heated reliably, and their cars can get them from home to work and back.