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Tory grandee from the past summed up the new fault lines in his own party and the wider political spectrum on the environment. Speaking at a Conservative Party conference fringe meeting in October, former deputy prime minister and environment secretary Lord Heseltine lambasted present leader Kemi Badenoch’s pledge to scrap landmark climate change legislation.
“The threat from global warming must not be ignored in the hope that it may not happen or because there is a backlash against the cost,” he said. “We should be proud of our role in the battle to halt climate change.
“It was Margaret Thatcher who gave one of the starkest and earliest warnings of the dangers. Today the evidence in storms, coastal erosion, flooding, fire and the spread of desert is all too clear. It would be an act of unforgivable irresponsibility to undo all that Conservatives have done to play a leading role in this world-threatening crisis.”
The Climate Change Act 2008 was introduced by the last Labour government and strengthened under Tory prime minister Theresa May to enshrine the UK’s 2050 net-zero target in law. She described Badenoch’s pledge as a “retrograde step”, upending 17 years of consensus between the main political parties and the scientific community.
“To row back now would be a catastrophic mistake – for while that consensus is being tested, the science remains the same,” May added. Badenoch had previously said that decarbonising the economy at the rate stipulated under the Act “cannot be achieved without a significant drop in our living standards, or worse, by bankrupting us”.
If elected, her party will focus on “maximising extraction” to get “all our oil and gas out of the North Sea”. All net-zero requirements on oil and gas companies drilling in the North Sea will be dropped.
Badenoch’s stance provoked predictable outrage among green groups but also drew fire for ignoring the Act’s economic benefits. CBI Economics research unveiled in February revealed that the UK’s green economy generated £83.1bn in gross value added in 2024, a year-on-year increase of more than 10%.
People in green jobs each generated £105,500 in economic value last year, 38% above the UK average. Energy UK chief executive Dhara Vyas argues that the Climate Change Act is the legal bedrock underpinning international investment and confidence in the country. “The energy sector supports one in every 25 jobs in the UK, and last year alone almost £24bn was invested in the sector. Treating the Climate Change Act as a political football is a sure-fire way to scare off investors.”
Much of the Conservative volte-face is down to Reform UK, and Badenoch’s attempt to shore up her party’s right wing. Reform UK has pledged to scrap net-zero targets if it wins the next election, blaming the policy for high energy bills. The party’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, describes renewable energy as a “massive con”, while promising to tax solar farms and return to fracking.
One thing is obvious. The consensus across the main political parties about tackling climate change has substantially cracked if not crumbled. For decades, UK climate action received cross-party support, says the Institute for Public Policy Research. That consensus meant that policy was different to politically contentious issues like tax, it adds.
"Things are different now,” says associate director for environment, energy security and nature Sam Alvis. “Climate policy is a dividing line, with scepticism bordering on denial from the right, and acceleration from parties on the left.
“Reform is on record as saying they want to make ‘anti-net zero’ the new
Brexit; the Conservatives have called it impossible.”
Steve Westlake, lecturer in environmental psychology at the University of Bath, points out that this has been coming for some time. UK politicians
have increasingly framed slow climate action as “pragmatic” or “common sense”, he says, portraying ambitious targets as extreme.
He singles out Badenoch depicting her plan to “maximise extraction” of oil and gas from the North Sea as a “common-sense” energy policy. “It sounds reasonable, reassuring and grown-up – the opposite of ‘hysterical’ campaigners or ‘unrealistic’ targets,” Westlake says.
His research with Rebecca Willis, energy and climate governance professor at Lancaster University, argues that limiting global warming to well below 2°C requires politicians to introduce contentious legislation to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Creating a political mandate for this is increasingly challenging when policies affect people’s lives through increased costs, new infrastructure or changes to land use, transport or diet choices.
Their study, based on interviews with MPs and a focus group of civil society actors working with parliamentarians, analysed how politicians adapted to the rapidly changing political context between 2018 and 2023. This period included surging global protests, political polarisation, extreme weather events, and increasingly alarming climate science. While climate change went from an “outsider” issue that UK politicians promote by stealth to being mainstream, most MPs now advocate strongly for climate action in general terms, the study says. But such calls are accompanied by concerns about the pace of change and the impact on people’s lives amid increased polarisation and opposition.
“We found that MPs deploy the same language of pragmatism to defend fossil-fuel companies and to insist to their constituents that nothing needs to change too fast,” says Westlake. “The paradox is that more urgent social and economic change is precisely what the world’s climate scientists say is necessary to avert climate breakdown. The calls for pragmatism appeared to stem from MPs’ desire to present a reasoned and rational case for climate action that does not impinge on constituents’ lives.
They also used pragmatism to distance themselves from arguments that they portrayed as ‘extreme’ or ‘shrill’.” Westlake argues that this reveals a “flawed assumption” that the public will not support ambitious, transformative climate policies. Polling by Climate Barometer earlier this year showed that 63% of respondents back the UK’s target of net zero by 2050. This includes overwhelming support among Labour voters, with 91%, and the Liberal Democrats, with 82%. A total of 54% of Conservative supporters back the target.
Politicians are turning to “ideas of pragmatism in an attempt to maintain a fragile political consensus in favour of net zero”, Westlake adds. But that consensus has fractured. “In general, the MPs we spoke to were not using pragmatism in bad faith,” Westlake says. “Rather it was a way of navigating the complexities of climate politics where the huge changes demanded by climate mitigation are deemed too challenging to sell to constituents.”
MPs and the public overestimate the time left to meet a critical deadline for limiting global warming, according to a study published in October.
Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) surveyed a representative sample of the previous House of Commons and the public across four countries on their knowledge of a well-publicised statement from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The UEA study looked at when global greenhouse emissions need to peak to have a realistic chance of limiting the temperature increase to 1.5˚C above pre-industrial levels. The IPCC’s sixth assessment report said that this needed to happen by 2025. The statement was a key communication of the report when published in 2022. Participants in the study were asked to choose from options ranging, in five-yearly intervals, from 2025 to 2050.
However, less than 15% of the 100 MPs surveyed knew the correct answer, while over 30% said 2040 or later. Surveys of more than 7,200 members of the public across the UK, Canada, Chile and Germany revealed similar results. In the UK, 14.2% selected the right answer, falling to 13.9% in Chile, 11.3% in Canada and 9.9% in Germany. In all countries the correct answer, ‘2025’, is either the second or third least chosen response.
John Kenny, a senior research associate at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the School of Environmental Sciences at UEA, says the findings have important implications for communicating about the climate crisis, not just through IPCC progress reports but also the many other studies that policymakers are expected to digest and act upon.
“Institutions such as the IPCC need to consider how they can help policymakers absorb this information, if they are to incentivise appropriate policies. To act on it, individuals need to be aware of it,” he adds. “The partisan divides in Britain also suggest that whether information is perceived or not – and, if so – how, may differ according to political mindsets.
“In a world of increasing information saturation and disinformation campaigns, getting factual information to filter through is no easy task, especially on a complex challenge like climate change. “As time for meaningful action is running out, it is imperative that we further understand how to effectively convey the key scientific messages to policymakers and the public.”
Huw Morris is a freelance journalist
