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 is due to say on Tuesday in a speech. The only way to regain the trust of voters is to tell the “unvarnished truth”, she’ll say.
“Net zero by 2050 is impossible,” Badenoch will say, according to remarks briefed in advance by her party. “Anyone who has done any serious analysis knows it can’t be achieved without a serious drop in our living standards or 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.
Badenoch will seek 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 will say. “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 the West is going to get remotely close to net zero by 2050.”
