Sunak’s Cop-27 attendance is a facile row that sums up too much of our politics
Little could more perfectly sum up the facile nature of our energy and climate debate – and indeed often our politics – than the confected row about whether or not Rishi Sunak attends Cop-27 in Egypt this month.
Does anyone, honestly, believe that the Prime Minister’s attendance is going to make one iota of difference to the globe’s climate fight? If so, we have a bridge to sell you.
This is a pathetic row. That there is more concern about Sunak hopping on a plane – the irony, by the way, is almost too much – than there is about his walking back vital onshore wind reforms sums up the obsession with style over substance.
It is profoundly unserious, in a country whose politics are becoming more unserious by the day, to generate outrage about the ‘optics’ of the Prime Minister’s attendance.
Just wait until Cop-29, which is expected to be in Australia. Presumably there will then be a row about carbon emissions as a result of Sunak’s – or Starmer’s – flight. Perhaps they can sail.
This morning, Britain’s energy mix is thus: 58 per cent renewable energy, 26 per cent fossil fuels, and the rest from other sources, predominantly nuclear. Ten years ago, more than three quarters of our electricity generation came from fossil fuels. That is an extraordinary achievement.
For the sake of our energy independence – which has come into sharper focus thanks to the actions of an expansionist fascist on the European continent – we must continue to drive up that renewable number as fast as possible, whilst guaranteeing that the lights stay on and we retain our political agility by using fossil fuels where absolutely necessary.
That requires trade-offs. Decisions. Weighing up the relative merits of strengthening our ability to act in foreign policy with a desire to continue what has been an extraordinarily successful effort to reshape how we generate our electricity.
All of that, too, needs to be balanced against the fiscal demands of an aging population and the cost of living concerns mounting across the country.
All of this requires serious discussion, a media and Westminster class that doesn’t see everything through the prism of tomorrow’s opinion polls, and grown-up politics.
Yet precisely none of those do we see. Coal field decisions are delayed until December, so that they don’t clash with the gladhanding at Cop-27. Onshore wind reforms that would have made it easier to build vital energy infrastructure are set to be shelved because they’re too politically difficult. It remains unclear whether we are able to build solar panels on farmland.
That is the substance of Britain’s very challenging, very difficult, and very important transition away from fossil fuels to renewables. These absurd rows about u-turns and who attends what are is unhelpful and distracting as the sixth-form politics of the Just Stop Oil vandals.
It’s a point that Iain Martin made on twitter yesterday, when the news that Matt Hancock was going on an ITV reality show led the BBC’s Six o’clock bulletin.
Britain is slipping into the worst kind of gesture politics – and it matters. Our state of perma-outrage will soon give us something to be really angry about.