Kemi Badenoch’s climate gamble doesn’t add up

Good morning. Kemi Badenoch will announce a flurry of policies at Conservative party conference. The first, that a Conservative government would repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act, has triggered fierce opposition from inside and outside the Tory party. Some thoughts on that below:

It’s not easy being green

Badenoch’s arguments for repealing the 2008 Climate Change Act are that the legislation has meant higher energy costs for Britons, and that the UK’s impact on global temperatures is not big enough for it to be worth the candle.

This is something she has always believed. And while there is internal Tory resistance to the measure, she does not fear an internal fight. Badenoch’s political strategy, such as it is, is essentially “wish fulfilment tempered by fear of where the Conservative party’s power brokers are”.

On the policy argument, here’s what energy prices have done since 1996, courtesy of the House of Commons Library:

Tackling climate change comes with costs, but so too does not tackling it. The big hole in Badenoch’s approach is that she seems to envisage a world in which Britain stops spending money on decarbonisation, but does not have to spend any cash on mitigation and adaptation. This world does not exist.

Here are some of the components of a typical energy bill:

• 20 per cent network costs

• 15 per cent operating, debt and industry costs

• 11 per cent policy costs (levies to support low-carbon generation, energy efficiency and vulnerable customers)

• 5 per cent VAT

• 4 per cent assumed suppliers’ profit margin

• 1 per cent other costs

If you want to remove policy costs, you are also talking about various bits of “energy policy as social policy”. As readers know, I dislike the trend of getting businesses to indirectly support social aims, as it creates unhelpful distortions. But neither that nor our climate legislation are the big culprits here.

Now try this

Returning home after conference yesterday, I made this simple but delicious Meera Sodha recipe, which is very easy and incredibly reliable.

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