We have no choice but to tackle climate change — our word is our bond

Has the changing climate changed your summer? Perhaps the shift from July’s inferno to soggy August has you wondering whether it’s time to eat less meat or fly less. Or maybe Greta Thunberg has caught your imagination. Whatever people think of her and her low-carbon yacht to New York — opinions range from admiring to acidic — the point is that they are thinking: climate change and the aim of net-zero carbon emissions are on the agenda to stay.

It’s sometimes suggested that politicians struggle to really engage with environmental challenges because they’re just too big. MPs spend much of their time worrying about this week’s headlines and an election that is never more than a few years away. Can they really grasp a “climate emergency” that spans the whole world and maybe the fate of human civilisation?

In fact, the reasons politicians don’t rush to engage with the hard decisions of the climate agenda are not big and exotic but small and familiar: who’s going to pay? Who’s going to be made unhappy?

Boris Johnson has said he will stick to Theresa May’s goal of net-zero carbon by 2050. Making that promise is the easy bit, because the journey to net zero will pass through many places where politicians — of all parties — will face temptation to change course. Sooner or later, green promises will take environmental politics away from air travel, electric cars and menu choices and into our homes.

Politicians are wary of messing with voters’ houses: your council tax bill is calculated on the value of your home in 1991, because successive governments have shied away from updating the valuations for fear of angering residents with changes in their tax bill.

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Residential property contributes around 15 per cent of the UK’s carbon emissions, most of it through heating. The gas your boiler burns to heat your water and your radiators is making a bigger difference to the climate than whether you eat beefburgers or beetroot. Getting to net zero is likely to mean eliminating those residential emissions altogether.

According to the independent Committee on Climate Change (CCC), that means a lot more than turning down the thermostat and lagging your boiler properly. It will, in due course, mean removing that old gas-fired boiler and replacing it with something else: hydrogen boilers, heat-pumps and — in major cities — the sort of municipal heating systems used in Scandinavian towns are all options.

If you think that sounds disruptive and expensive, you’re right. The CCC reckons the UK will need to spend £15 billion a year switching our homes to low-carbon heating: that’s about double what we spend on policing in England. And guess how much the Government actually spent on the project last year? Slightly less than £100 million.

How can a government conjure up £15 billion a year? One option would be to find the money from the existing budget, but it’s impossible to think of an area of existing spending where that sort of cut could be made without huge controversy.

Another route would be to extract the money from the people who live in those homes, through their heating bills. That’s been the approach of recent years, but “green levies” have become deeply unpopular among many voters, and not without reason: the poorer you are, the bigger the slice of your income such levies absorb. Making people on low incomes foot the bill for new boilers in the name of the net-zero target would be unfair and lead us back to political controversy. What about general taxation? Consider that £15 billion in context: that’s equal to almost 3p on the basic rate of income tax, or raising VAT by two percentage points.

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Cuts, charges or taxes: all would be a gift to populist politicians keen to hammer “the elite” foisting painful policies on “the people”. Many of Nigel Farage’s fellow populist-nationalists across Europe win votes from people angry at fuel and energy prices. Despite Mr Johnson’s embrace of net zero, a lot of Tory members aren’t keen on politicians harping on about the climate. And strategists who conduct focus groups with Leave-backing voters in the towns the Tories will target at the next election say they understand the need for change, but think someone else should pay for it. Persuading the men who drive Britain’s four million small delivery vehicles to go electric will be another serious challenge: there’s a reason political strategists still talk about “white van man”.

If cutting, charging and taxing are all too painful for politicians, what’s left is borrowing. Here the prospects are rosier. Pension funds and other big investors are falling over themselves to lend to governments to fund greenery. That’s partly because their ultimate investors — you and me, via pensions and other savings — are keen. And partly because decarbonisation can deliver real returns as energy costs fall.

Several European countries have started selling green bonds, borrowing specifically for low-carbon transition work. A coalition of City fund managers is urging Britain to follow suit.

When the City is practically begging to lend HMG cash to use to meet environmental goals, a Treasury move to issue “green gilts” would be no surprise. Sooner or later, the politics of net zero are coming home, and the populists will be waiting: their nasty attacks on Greta Thunberg are a sign of nastier things to come. But for all the attention paid to the girl in the boat, it might just be boilermakers and bond traders who really save the world.

James Kirkup is director of the Social Market Foundation and a former executive editor (politics) of The Telegraph

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