Net-zero: by-passing democracy

By Richard North - September 28, 2023

The development of Britain’s largest untapped oil field in the North Sea will generate billions of pounds in tax and boost the UK’s energy security for decades, ministers have said.

“Let’s call out this latest act for what it is”, splutters Caroline Lucas. “Approving this oilfield is morally obscene; it is a climate crime for which the government must be held accountable”.

Bless!

If the reaction of la Lucas wasn’t so funny, it would be serious. But since she is being left harmlessly to vent her spleen in the Guardian about the decision to approve drilling in the Rosebank oil field, nothing much can come of it – unless, of course, she and her mates find a way to take the government to court in a bid to overturn the decision.

Actually, Greenpeace and an outfit called Uplift have already sought leave, by way of a judicial review hearing, to challenge the government’s original decision to endorse North Sea oil and gas licensing.

After the high court in April agreed to a full hearing, the case was heard on 25 July in a full hearing lasting two days.

Back in April, when leave to appeal was granted, Greenpeace was crowing about the “first setback” to the government’s “fossil fuel expansion plans”, and were actively publicising the full hearing in July, things seem to have been gone a bit quiet since then.

At the moment, Greenpeace is relying more on political pressure, calling on its members to vote at the forthcoming general election according to the pledges on climate change given by politicians.

No doubt, should the high court in due course find in favour of Greenpeace and Uplift, it will be all over the media. But, for the moment, the case is unresolved, leaving the government free to continue with its plans for the time being.

The resort to law by campaigning groups, though, is part of an established but nevertheless worrying trend which seeks to by-pass the political process, widely employed by climate change activists.

Greenpeace justifies the resort to law though climate campaigner Philip Evans, who says: “We’ve had warning after warning that there must be no new oil, and now time is running out. Yet the government continues to ignore the experts, approving new oil and gas without even bothering to check the full climate impact. That’s why we’re challenging them in the high court”.

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in March that there must be no new fossil fuel development if the world is to limit global heating to 1.5°C, Evans said that the then energy secretary – Grant Shapps at that time – should explain his rationale if he disagreed with the IPCC assessment.

In a democracy, though, it is not for the experts to define policy, nor is it the role of the courts to enforce the writ of those defined as experts. This is the role of elected politicians, who are accountable to the people who elect them and not to an international body such as the IPCC.

And yet, in the Climate Change Bill debate, Chris Skidmore readily admitted to pursuing amendments which would enshrine the interim 2035 net zero target in law. This, he said, will guarantee practical policy for the next 12 years, then arguing that it would “also provide a new legal mechanism to hold whoever is in government to account for its delivery”.

It says a great deal about how the political process has degraded that Skidmore went on to explain, without so much as a blush, that this was “more essential than ever as we head towards a general election”. We cannot, he said, “afford for net-zero to become a political casualty”.

Whether he realised it or not, here was a Tory MP – of which he makes great play – seeking measures to make net-zero targets “election proof”, beyond the reach of voters in the general election, no matter which party they choose.

By any definition, this is a total negation of the principles on which our democratic system is based, where governments are held to account by voters at general elections, not in courts of law, and where new governments are elected – in theory – according to the policies they offer.

If we get to a situation that Skidmore has been seeking to engineer, where key policy issues are essentially firewalled, to prevent them becoming “a political casualty”, there is not much point in having elections.

We end up with the “uniparty” concept where, no matter which party is elected to government, the policies stay the same – rather like the EU where the Commission’s work programme continues unchanged after European Parliament elections, with newly-elected MEPs picking up the legislative programme where their predecessors left off.

This trend has become so pervasive that we even have downstream intergovernmental organisations such as the International Energy Agency (IEA), established within the framework of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis, taking the line that its policies should be immune from democratic intervention.

Of late, the Agency has taken upon itself the task of providing policy recommendations directed at “helping” the world transition to clean energy. Yesterday, in pursuit of that aim, we saw IEA director Faith Birol launch a new report setting out a “global pathway to keep the 1.5°C goal in reach”.

The report acknowledged that the world was set to invest a record $1.8 trillion in clean energy in 2023, but then grandly declared that this needed to climb to around $4.5 trillion a year by the early 2030s to be in line with its pathway, more than doubling in less than a decade.

But what made this especially sinister was Birol’s commentary at the press conference launching the report, when he declared that the pathway to net zero would require advanced economies to reach net zero sooner than developing economies.

Birol then went on to complain that: “despite this year’s extreme weather, politicians, mindful of the cost-of-living crisis and seeking re-election”, had been “backsliding on climate pledges”.

“Governments”, he cautioned, “need to separate climate from geopolitics, given the scale of the challenge at hand”, an intervention which provoked the headline from Reuters stating: “IEA says route to net zero requires more cash and less politics”.

This, of course, is straight out of the Skidmore playbook, but the worst of it is that so few seem to regard this essentially anti-democratic stance as being at all objectional – despite the recent history of rhetoric about “taking back control” from the EU.

Although we see William Hague, responding to Sunak’s recent action on delaying certain net-zero targets, by agreeing that we need an honest debate about the long term, the sentiment is skin deep.

A few days later, his newspaper platform pontificated that: “No sensible politician doubts the need to reduce Britain’s reliance on fossil fuels over the coming decades”, enjoining the government to seek a “low-carbon”, greener and more secure energy future.

If there is to be anything with the semblance of an “honest debate”, such preconceptions – based as they are on extremely shaky technical grounds – need to be open to challenge, with all policy options returned to the melting pot. Simply to enable discussion on the means of implementing net-zero, without exploring the validity of the policy, is not an honest debate.

But therein lies our problem. If our political masters do actually believe in democracy – a dubious proposition at best – most of them seem to have lost sight of what the concept actually entails.

On this blog, where we have advocated The Harrogate Agenda, we see the essence of democracy as vesting power in the people, with key policies requiring the informed consent of the people to whom they apply. When the first casualty of net-zero is democracy, it is time for these principles to be applied.