Net Zero by 2050 Is ‘Impossible,’ UK Tory Leader Badenoch Says

(Bloomberg) -- The UK won’t be able to transform its economy to net zero by 2050, according to Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, in a break with the consensus held by Britain’s main parties.

Britain doesn’t have a workable plan to reach the emissions goal in the next quarter-century, and current policies are serving only to drive up consumer energy costs, Badenoch said on Tuesday in a speech. The only way to regain the trust of voters is to tell the “unvarnished truth,” she said.

“Net zero by 2050 is impossible,” Badenoch said. “Anyone who has done any serious analysis knows it can’t be achieved without a significant drop in our living standards or worse, by bankrupting us.”

Badenoch is trying to win back voters that the party lost on its right flank to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which took 14% of the vote in last year’s general election. Farage has repeatedly railed against the UK’s green goals for 2050, which are enshrined in law and have enjoyed the backing of the governing Labour Party and the Tories, who were in power for 14 years from 2010. Other minor parties, including the Liberal Democrats and Greens also support the aim of eliminating greenhouse gases.

Green and renewable energy groups criticized the reversal on net zero. Sam Hall, director of the Conservative Environment Network, a group for conservatives who support climate action, called it a “mistake” and said it would “undermine private enterprise and capital driving the energy transition and alienate voters worried about their children and grandchildren’s inheritance.” Trevor Hutchings, chief executive of REA, a renewable energy and clean technology association, said net zero was “an economic opportunity and a national security priority.”

Farage accused Badenoch, who has previously supported climate change legislation, of “hypocrisy” and called her speech “a desperate policy from a leader and party floundering in the polls.” 

Last month the Climate Change Committee, the Government’s net zero advisers, laid out a plan for how the UK could reach net zero by 2050, and said it would be much cheaper than previously thought. Polls suggest that most British people support policies to tackle climate change, and even a slight majority of Reform voters said last year they support net zero by 2050. 

Badenoch sought to moderate her tone by saying that trying to reduce the human impact on the environment while keeping energy costs down are “both noble aims” but that the UK’s current policies are in fact leading to “too high costs and too little progress.”

“This is not making a moral judgment on net zero,” she said. “I’m certainly not debating whether climate change exists. It does. I badly want to leave a much better environmental inheritance for my children and for yours. But it doesn’t look like we are going to get remotely close to net zero by 2050.”

(Updates with reaction and context from fifth paragraph)

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