COP flop shows why we need an open debate about net zero and climate change

Voters and protesters are threatening to derail global efforts on decarbonisation

It’s the climate change summit that nobody’s talking about. The United Nations annual Conference of the Parties (COP) is fizzling out in Azerbaijan, but you would be forgiven for not noticing.

COP29 had no shortage of delegates. The UK alone sent a staggering 470 officials to the jamboree in Baku, led by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Net Zero Chief Druid Ed Miliband. Starmer and co are fond of declaring they are “leading the world” in the fight against climate change. But in Baku it became glaringly obvious that, wherever the UK is leading, the rest of the world is not following.

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Most of the people who really matter didn’t even bother to turn up. Lame-duck US President Joe Biden was a no-show, as were President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of hydrocarbon super-emitters China and India. French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen all had better things to do.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Foreign Secretary David Lammy, and Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband arrive in Azerbaijan to attend the COP29 climate conference in BakuPrime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Foreign Secretary David Lammy, and Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband arrive in Azerbaijan to attend the COP29 climate conference in Baku
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Foreign Secretary David Lammy, and Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband arrive in Azerbaijan to attend the COP29 climate conference in Baku | Getty Images

Net zero getting sticky

Even our own First Ministers used to tag along uninvited all the way from Scotland to hang around outside the conference hall. This year, John Swinney was happy to delegate the hanging around to his acting Net Zero Secretary, Gillian Martin.

Despite this display of international indifference, Starmer reverted to our standard COP practice of performatively setting unrealistic targets, committing the UK to cutting 81 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions by 2035 compared with 1990, up from 78 per cent.

The rise of three percentage points may seem small, but we are now into the sticky side of the net-zero project. Most of the reduction so far has been achieved through a combination of replacing dirty coal with cleaner gas, deindustrialisation and the offshoring of much of our manufacturing. According to the government’s Climate Change Committee advisers, reaching the 81 per cent target will not only involve electric vehicles and heat pumps, but also a 20 per cent reduction in meat and dairy consumption by 2030.

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Britain ‘doesn’t need farmers’?

Starmer’s announcement followed an inheritance tax raid in Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s Budget that many farmers fear will force them to sell up, ending family businesses handed down through generations that have helped feed the nation.

It is not difficult to see why thousands have taken to the streets in protest this week. Former Labour adviser John McTernan hardly helped matters when he told GB News that Britain “doesn’t need farmers” and suggested the government do to them “what Margaret Thatcher did to the miners”.

In a sense, Britain’s farmers are catching up with European counterparts who protested across the continent earlier this year against various eco-encroachments on their ability to make ends meet. Sadly for them, they just do not fit into the net-zero project.

They own so much land, which could be used for wind turbines or vast solar farms that destroy plant life beneath the panels in exchange for an unreliable and intermittent energy supply. They breed hundreds of thousands of flatulent cattle and sheep, blithely belching and passing wind as the planet supposedly burns. And, to produce abundant and reliable crop yields to stock supermarket shelves, they use fertilisers derived from fossil fuels.

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UK economy in bad shape

Maybe farmers have good reason for feeling paranoid. And maybe the second-string delegates in Baku, far from following the UK’s lead, are viewing us as they would a kind of morality play, a cautionary tale of what not to do.

Many COP29-ers will have been elected by voters who do not share Miliband’s evangelical zeal. They will note the UK’s exorbitant energy prices, which truly are world-leading at four or five times those in the US.

They will ask why the UK economy is in such bad shape, with record high taxes and debt coupled with stagnant growth. And they will observe the growing civil unrest. They are likely to calculate that their electorates would not thank them for following where the UK would lead them.

The big takeaway from COP29 is that the wheels are starting to come off the net-zero charabanc. Arguably, they were coming a bit loose at the last one and even the one before that, as positions which once seemed unassailable come under greater scrutiny.

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‘Climate colonialism’

Are so-called renewables really cheaper than reliables? If so, then why is it that the more wind and solar we try to use, the higher our energy bills go? And why do wind and solar require billions of pounds of subsidies, or indeed any subsidies at all?

Is it justifiable that under-developed nations should be prevented from developing in the same way as the rest of the world? Some African countries regard efforts to stop them using fossil fuels as “climate colonialism”, with Nigerian vice-president Yemi Osinbajo stating: “No country in the world has been able to industrialise using renewable energy.”

How credible is it that every hurricane that makes the news is a direct result of climate change caused by human activity? How safe, on a scale of one to ten, is the assertion that a rise in anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere is the primary cause of changes in climate? Judging by various protests and election results globally this year, growing numbers of people are starting to ask questions such as these.

In the past, such questions and the people asking them may have been dismissed as impertinent and simply ignored. After all, if the science is settled – which is itself a profoundly unscientific proposition – then there is surely no need to engage in debate.

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But the re-election of climate sceptic Donald Trump, who moves back into the White House in January, and his choice of fracking enthusiast Chris Wright as US Energy Secretary, may mean that politicians and activists around the world will have to start engaging – whether they want to or not.

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