By Charlie Wilson
One of the better results of the General Election was that it unseated two thirds of the climate change denying Conservative back bench “Net Zero Scrutiny Group”, so the balance of opinion in Parliament is somewhat more aligned with reality on climate than it was.Nevertheless, opposition to “Net Zero” in defence of fossil fuel profitsis set to become the new orthodoxy in the shrunken Tory rump as they grope to find common ground with Reform UK. This is also part of the agenda of the Far Right, which is why the climate movement should be mobilising against it, not least on October 26th, and finding common ground with the anti-racist movement and deeper roots in black communities.
Two speeches on Sept 17th by David Lammy and Ed Miliband show the strengths and weaknesses of the Starmer government’s approach to climate breakdown.
David Lammy’s speech at Kew Gardens pledging that UK Foreign Policy will have climate change at its heart is strong on identifying the problems but strategically weak in proposing solutions.
He proposes three ways forward.
- to form a Global Clean Power Alliance aimed at scaling up investment in the Global South, which, outside of China, currently accounts for just 15% of clean energy investment; partly because, as he points out, finance capital costs three times as much as it does in the Global North.
- To “unlock global finance to leapfrog fossil fuels” in the Global South.
- To keep 30% of the world’s surface, including the oceans, as nature reserves, without which global ecology will unravel.
The flaws in this are, or should be, obvious.
What is at the heart of UK Foreign Policy?
His problem with the Global Clean Power Alliance is that the UK’s core imperial ally, the United States, can’t be part of it. UK Foreign Policy actually has maintaining its position in the imperial Global North bloc at its heart, so this conflicts with any serious shift to prioritising the climate crisis.
In Ed Miliband’s speech he talks about the risks of the volatility of the global fossil fuel markets, “in the grip of dictators and petrostates, without noting that the world’s biggest petrostate is the United States of America , nor that the US is dictatorial – to use Lammy’s phrase for other countries imperialist -to the rest of the world, alongside its core allies in the Global North, including the UK.
The US is now producing more crude oil than any country ever. And doubling down on fossil fuels is no Trumpish aberration. While the Biden administration has launched the Inflation Reduction Act to draw investment in energy transition into the United States from its competitors (and allies) it issued 20% more oil and gas licences than the last Trump administration. Crude oil and natural gas production increased by 8% from 2022 – 2023 and exports rose 12% in the same period. This is underscored by current International Energy Agency figures , which show that while electricity generated by fossil fuels between June 2023 and June 2024 fell in OECD Europe by 12.9% and OECD Oceania by 3%, in OECD Americas it increased by 3.8% (including a 4.5% increase in the use of coal).
With the Presidential election result coming the week before this year’s COP conference, we will either see the US continuing with this kind of “drill, baby drill” business as usual, or going full rogue state on climate with Trump and Project 2025. If you look at the very useful index to this blueprint for right wing rampage alphabetically collated by Progressive International, you will see that “Climate Change” has almost as many entries as “China”. Read them and you will find that they will undo any and every measure to mitigate climate breakdown in the US and abroad, and defund any bodies that study it or regulate activities that worsen it. It is very comprehensive. The domestic and global damage done by these measures, in pursuit of domestic “energy security”, will be incalculable.
The UK, of course, is no longer a petrostate, with the reserves in the North Sea rapidly declining. So, Ed Miliband poses “energy security” in terms of a rapid transition to renewable energy on the basis that, as the Irish Energy Minister put it “no one has ever weaponised access to the sun or wind”. But he doesn’t recognise that the 2022 “energy shock”– that cost the UK exchequer £94 billion in subsidising bills – was a result of the refusal of NATO to negotiate a mutual security arrangement with Russia in the winter of 2021; which could have avoided the war. Current attempts to continue of the war, with all its terrible human and environmental damage, is driven by a similar refusal from NATO to cut its losses and come to terms. Hubris has been replaced by a fear of loss of face far greater than that which followed the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The price paid by people on the receiving end of this can be seen in Gaza.
In this context, Lammy makes a peculiar statement. “Look around the world. Countries are scrambling to secure critical minerals, just as great powers once raced to control oil – we cannot let this become a source of conflict”. Great powers once raced to control oil. As if Iraq was in the olden days; and as if NATO is not currently planning military and diplomatic measures to seize control of the hydrocarbons being opened up by the thawing of the Arctic permafrost and keep the Russians out. The US military produced a report in 2019 that simultaneously predicted the collapse of US society at some point this century as a result of climate change- and the army itself through having to be deployed to hold together a collapsing state in extremis – with a determination that it would play its part in seizing and exploiting oil uncovered by the Arctic thaw that, if developed, would accelerate its own collapse. It should also be noted that, while the main aim of NATO in Ukraine is regime change in Russia – to open up Russian hydrocarbon reserves to control from “the West” while making China strategically more vulnerable to US pressure – Ukraine has $12 Trillion worth of critical minerals essential for energy transition; much of it under the soil in the Donbass region. Restoration of the 1991 borders under NATO control would be a resource bonanza for them. Any partition which recognised the national rights of the Russian speakers who live there, would not.
More widely, Lammy is concerned that China’s dominance of mining and production of rare Earths and other critical minerals will inhibit the capacity of the West to pursue the projected conflict with China that is a common stance in the US – and therefore British – Foreign Policy Establishments. Diversification of supply would allow that conflict to be pursued. So, it is the complete reverse of the way Lammy puts it.
In fact, with China this year investing more in renewable energy than the US and EU combined, cutting coal investment by 83% over last year and now investing solely in electric arc furnaces for their gigantic steel industry, generating as much electricity from renewables as from coal and projected to generate as much from solar alone than from coal by 2026, if Lammy were serious about a Global Clean Power alliance he would be seeking a bloc with them against the United States.
Money, money, money
His stance is even weaker when it comes to finance for the Global South. He is quite right to say that the problem here is “systemic”, but then he proposes no changes to the system. He lauds the “spirit in which developed countries committed in 2009 to 100 billion dollars a year in international climate finance” and the “agreement on loss and damage at the last COP” as “an inspiring example of what the world can achieve by working together” but skids quickly on before anyone can notice that the $100 billion pledge has never been fulfilled, and that the sums committed to the loss and damage fund are miniscule in comparison with what is needed. In fact, from 2009 to now just the increase in military spending by the United States alone (from $772 billion then to $860 billion now) would be enough to cover this pledge on an annual basis. The failure of the US and its allies, currently sharply increasing their military spending, to match this pledge shows what their priorities actually are. And that includes the UK.
He talks grandly of an “ambitious new climate finance goal focused on developing countries at COP29 in November” without spelling out what that is. A concept of a plan perhaps. In the meantime, the figures he cites are tiny. £76 million here, £1.2 billion there. Better than nothing, and every little helps, but nowhere near the levels needed to “leapfrog fossil fuels”. As long ago as 2021 developing countries put forward the figure of $1.3 Trillion needed every year from 2025 onwards to both slow down the rate of climate breakdown and alleviate the impacts that are already happening. That is equivalent to NATOs arms budget. Its quite apparent that it is impossible to combat climate change while maintaining an arms build up and war drive. As part of moving the arms of the doomsday clock away from midnight the world needs the military carbon boot print to be included in the Paris process – at the moment it isn’t – with mutually agreed targets for reductions in expenditure hypothecated to investing in global security from climate change. This is the level of systemic shift that we need.
Supporting Azerbaijan’s call for a Truce in all conflicts during the COP would signal serious intent for the hand break turn we need in this respect. The Peace Day scheduled for Nov 15th at the COP should be a point that the peace and climate movements make these demands.
Lammy makes another strange statement. “Countries of the Global South suffered great injustices in the past“ (my emphasis) as if the 700 million people with no access to electricity, the 400 million African impacted by “natural disasters” this century, African countries receiving just 3% of climate finance – at a cost triple that of the Global North and having to pay 10% of their incomes on debt servicing as a result – are not great injustices that are happening now. He talks about the need for a “new development model” so that developing countries get “fair rewards” for their resources with high environmental standards and working conditions in extractive industries but doesn’t spell out what that would be, nor how it would be financed. He is, however, very clear that any direct state support from the UK for this is subject to “times of fiscal constraint”; meaning that “we need to become more creative in unlocking private sector flows for the green transition, and especially adaptation, across the Global South” with the City of London at the core of “commercialisation of the tech with the greatest potential.” This looks more like a search for business opportunities on the margins than any serious attempt at “systemic” change.
We’ve been here before. At COP26 Mark Carney set up a Net Zero Finance Alliance, aiming to get large banks to voluntarily set targets for their own operations and to channel lending to facilitate the transition. The difficulty this has had is that Banks are not socially responsible organisations with the good of humanity at their heart. They are capitalist institutions aiming to maximise profit and several have withdrawn citing fears that if they don’t invest in environmentally and socially catastrophic but , temporarily, highly profitable carbon bombs, they will not be maximising returns for their shareholders. One CEO went so far as to describe any attempt to consider anything above the bottom line as “immoral”.
In practice what this has meant, as Action Aid has researched, is that ” the world’s banks including HSBC, Citigroup and Barclays are channelling, on average, an astounding 20 times more finance into the major causes of climate change than governments in the Global South are receiving as funding for climate solutions”.
Stopping that might be a good place to start. First do no harm.
Instead of acting as a handmaiden to the private sector, supporting, and implementing, Brazil’s call for a global 2% tax on incomes above $1 billion a year would be a start on raising the sort of resources needed. 2% would raise $250 billion a year. More than double the current pledge to the Global South. With the richest 1% having increased their wealth by $42 Trillion in the last ten years, just capping this by taxing their increase would raise $4.2 Trillion a year. Most people in the world would consider that “immoral” would be a good word to describe a failure to do this. This will be put to the G20 meeting ahead of the COP. This, again, would be “systemic” change of the type, and at the scale, that is needed.
Do as we do?
Lammy also notes that “domestic ambition on its own is not enough” without recognising that the government’s current domestic ambition is indeed, “not enough”.
As Miliband notes, the UK only has credible plans in place for a third of its targets, which meant that the last government was taken to court twice and ordered to update them.
Pending an overall review from the new government, there have been very welcome initial moves, unblocking onshore wind, approving 2.5GW of solar farms, presiding over a renewables auction that more than doubled planned installations over the previous year and aiming to use government as “an engine of dynamism”, with the newly nationalised National Energy Systems Operator (NESO) tasked with developing a plan for the fastest, cheapest, infrastructure development and a “Mission Control” delivery team across Whitehall aimed to “bring together the relevant players across government and industry to plan and deliver”.
But there are three fundamental problems.
The “Mission Control” looks like a lightweight and informal structure that is no substitute for the National Climate Service envisaged by PCS and now supported by the TUC, to actually bring departments together on a structured basis. It also envisages working primarily with “government and business”, which will mean that government’s priorities will be shaped primarily by what business is or isn’t willing to do. The scale of social transition we will need will require Just Transition bodies at every level and trade unions and communities working with the “world class universities, skilled scientists and engineers” that Miliband talks up elsewhere, will need to be at the heart of any process that is done with people, not to them.
This will need not simply to be about the generation and distribution of electricity, vast and crucial though that is, but also about transport and housing.
The question of whether the 1.5 million new homes scheduled to be built in this Parliament will be built to a zero emissions standard, in 15 minute communities with good public transport links and green spaces, or whether they will be isolated, leaky, car dependent “Amazon deserts” is crucial. This is explored in detail here. It is this sort of issue that requires more substantial state level coordination and regulation than is currently envisaged.
Fundamentally, the scale of investment needed is far greater than Rachel Reeve’s arbitrary fiscal rules will allow. That’s why Miliband has to talk of unlocking “hundreds of billions” of pounds from the private sector. With the Stern Report noting that the UK needs to invest an additional 1% of GDP in infrastructure just to stop it falling behind the EU and US, Labour’s abandonment of its plan to invest exactly that, £28 billion a year, in the transition creates a huge gap that is wholly dependent on goodwill, or profitability, from the private sector.
This is very clear when it comes to home insulation targets. The funding for this is now a quarter of what was originally envisaged, which means that fewer people will get out of fuel poverty, more houses will leak more carbon emissions for longer and the health benefits (and cost savings to the HHS) of having fewer damp and mouldy houses will be cut accordingly.
While all this is a step up from the perverse, nit picking, backward steps of the Sunak government, reclaiming “global leadership built on the power of example” as Miliband puts it, should be made of sterner stuff’.
Image: Photo by Robert S. Donovan; Picture cropped; Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported CC BY 3.0.