It’s official. The Conservative Party leadership has joined the ranks of climate deniers, in a race to the bottom with Nigel Farage and Donald Trump to see whose head can sink deepest into the sand.
Kemi Badenoch’s speech at her party conference last week smashed a decades-long consensus that our climate is changing, and getting to net zero is the only way to arrest that change before it is too late for human life to survive.
This was once uncontroversial. In 2019, when the UK parliament enshrined a net zero by 2050 target into law, MPs simply nodded it through; no vote was even required. Cutting emissions and restoring nature was not a partisan issue. It was widely accepted as a matter of national interest. Whether Labour or Conservative, we understood the stakes were too high to act alone. The public would never forgive inaction, and nor could we forgive ourselves.
There should be no illusions about the source of this breakdown in consensus. It comes from a coordinated, well-funded, international network of political actors who thrive on division and chaos. The beginnings of this fracture in our politics was never clearer than at last year’s election, when Reform launched their anti-science campaign, pledging to ‘scrap net zero to lower energy bills’. In 2024, the same year Reform made this commitment, the UK’s net zero economy expanded by 10%, a rate three times that of the overall UK economy.
It’s not the public that will benefit from ‘cutting net zero’, nor will it help their bills, it’s the vested interests that are funding parties such as Reform, 92% of whose donations came from oil and gas, polluting industries, and climate deniers from 2019-24.
To say that scrapping the Climate Change Act will bring about growth, cheaper energy, and help protect the natural landscapes we all love is more than misleading – it’s an utter fallacy.
Net zero is a proven, powerful tool for investment and certainty. And more than this, we need a rapid transition to net zero to secure energy sovereignty, free ourselves from dependence on dictators – and shield our economies from the soaring prices driven by conflict. If you want lower bills, we need the Climate Change Act intact.
Meanwhile, if we don’t continue to cut emissions at pace, nature will be further destroyed by increasingly erratic and dangerous weather. In turn this diminishes nature’s capacity to store and draw down carbon – and its ability to protect us from the worst impacts of climate change by soaking up flood water, providing shade and diminishing the potency of storms. We know that the climate and nature crisis are deeply interlinked and can only be tackled together. As experts warned us in 2021, ‘we solve both, or we solve neither’.
The UK is a nature-proud nation, celebrating its diverse ecosystems from rare chalk streams to ancient woodlands. Research shows that across society we are fiercely proud of our national parks, nature charities, forests, and footpaths. This makes protecting and restoring our ecosystems, habitats and species a central responsibility of any government.
Make no mistake, this is the fight of our lifetime. A well-funded network may try to tell you otherwise, but the science is unequivocal, and failing to act on the dual climate and nature crisis would be the gravest betrayal of our nation’s future. It will deny our children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews the access to the natural environment and clean air we have taken for granted. It’s time to double down, not run away.
Many of us in parliament continue to drive action on climate change. This is not a party issue; it is putting the country first. To that end, I am chairing a new cross-party Climate and Nature Crisis Caucus to be the voice of citizens who are proud of their environment, want a better future for the next generation, and understand that now is not the time to shy away. We will not be cowed in the battle for our planet’s future.
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