The anti-green turn of the British Conservatives suggests they are ready to lose

Karl Mathiesen is Senior Climate Correspondent at POLITICO Europe.

Rishi Sunak’s anti-green turn is the clearest sign yet that his Conservative party is preparing for opposition.

It has been coming. Sunak began his tenure needing to be bullied to attend the 2022 UN climate talks in Sharm El-Sheikh. But, buoyed by the Uxbridge result by-election and campaign tabloids, the famous weather-tedium the prime minister is now openly abandoning the green conservatism of his predecessor, Boris Johnson.

With Sunak vowing this week to campaign for motorists, reduce the cost of pollution and launch a series of new North Sea oil licences, the years of broad climate consensus in the UK appear to be over.

For now, much of the government’s existing climate agenda, largely developed under Johnson, remains intact. Long-term targets to get to net zero by 2050 are very popular and therefore safe.

But the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), an official advisory board for UK climate policy, has been raising the alarm for more than a year that current policies are not enough to achieve future goals. The government must do more, not less. However, Sunak is hitting the brakes and calling it pragmatism.

Reinventing the economy to end centuries of dependence on fossil fuels is a devilish problem. But, due to the UK Climate Change Act, it is something that governments cannot ignore or postpone.

The law establishes carbon reduction budgets, which the government is legally required to meet every five years.

The next hurdle looms in 2027. Then there’s the UK’s ambitious Paris Agreement promise to cut emissions to 68 percent by 2030. Then there’s the 2032 carbon budget, for which the CCC says “credible” funded plans exist to make only a quarter of the necessary cuts.

If those targets are to be met, whoever takes over parliament after the next election will need to send a clear political signal to the markets and call for large private investment in clean technology.

Judging by their actions, the Tories don’t anticipate this to be their problem. Rather than governing, they seem to be defining themselves in opposition.

Sunak has deployed Energy Secretary Grant Shapps to attack Labor leader Keir Starmer on the false accusation that he is in cahoots with the radical activist group Just Stop Oil. On Wednesday, Sunak praised her young children for being, in her words, “sensitive” rather than “eco-freaks.”

It’s a vision of what’s to come, and not just for next year’s election campaign.

With the Tories trailing stubbornly in the polls, a Labor government is likely to have to make tough decisions that affect people’s lives. These include the scrapping of gas boilers, the completion of new oil and gas licences, a push for electric transport, and a huge expansion of the electricity grid, meaning a forest of pylons across the countryside.

While these meat and potatoes climate policies are not as popular as the net zero goal, they are the inescapable burden of the next government. For conservatives, that might be too tempting; even if they end up, in the words of Conservative MP Chris Skidmore, who wrote the government’s net-zero review, on the “wrong side of history.”

As Labor tries to project the feeling of a government on hold, the party is clearly not immune to this line of attack or the political vertigo of the climate challenge.

Starmer has softened the timetable for a massive £28bn green spending policy and the Uxbridge by-election result sparked infighting between Starmer and London Mayor Sadiq Khan, with the leader blaming the Khan ultra-low emission zone policy for low performance.

Long in opposition, the Labor Party resented that Johnson stole their breeze by agreeing a broadly ambitious climate agenda. They may feel nostalgic for those more consensual green times in the heated years to come.