The UK government has taken the unusual step of scaling back major climate commitments, despite widespread pushback from scientists, businesses, and lawmakers across the political divide. In a speech today, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the UK would push back deadlines for the planned phaseout of gas-powered vehicles, ending fossil-fuel heating in homes not connected to the natural-gas grid, and a proposed ban on the installation of natural-gas-powered boilers in new homes.
“We’ve stumbled into a consensus about the future of our country that nobody seems to be happy with,” Sunak said of policies introduced previously by his own party. It should be up to the individual, not the government, to decide when to make green transitions such as switching to electric vehicles, he added, citing the cost-of-living crisis as a motivation for rolling back the policies.
The dramatic scaleback of green policy commitments will make it even harder for the UK to hit its legally binding target of reducing net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050. The Climate Change Committee, an independent body set up to advise the UK on climate policy, has frequently criticized the UK government for failing to act on its net-zero goals. In June 2023 its chair, Lord Deben, wrote to the prime minister to tell him the UK had “lost its clear global climate leadership,” urging the government to “act urgently to correct the failures of the past year.”
Sunak’s announcement today will not correct the failures of the past year—it will compound them. During a chaotic day of leaks and hastily scheduled announcements, businesses responded to the turmoil with despair at the government’s backsliding. “The UK 2030 target is a vital catalyst to accelerate Ford into a cleaner future,” wrote Ford UK chair Lisa Brankin in a statement to the government, referring to the planned phaseout of fully gas-powered cars that was brought forward to 2030 under a previous Conservative government in 2020. Chris Norbory, CEO of energy firm E.ON, called the proposals “a misstep on so many levels.”
The rollbacks were also roundly denounced by politicians from both the ruling Conservative Party and the opposition Labour Party. “The decision to delay any commitments that have been made will cost the UK future jobs, inward investment, and future economic growth,” wrote Chris Skidmore, a Conservative member of parliament (MP) who chaired an independent review of the UK’s net-zero goal. Ed Miliband, a Labour MP and shadow minister for climate and net zero, was more succinct, calling Sunak “rattled, chaotic, and out of his depth.”
Aside from being terrible news for the climate, the prime minister’s bonfire of green policy is just plain puzzling. Although they can’t seem to agree on much else, UK voters are generally united in their support of net-zero policies. Research from the center-right polling firm Public First found that support for the 2050 net-zero target exceeds opposition among every age group and across every region in the UK. “The government would be mad to water down its stance on the environment, energy security, and net zero,” wrote Adam Hawksbee of the center-right think tank Onward, on X. Voters in the UK are consistently more supportive of and in closer agreement on green policies than people in the US, Germany, or France.
Why jettison the one thing that most UK citizens can agree on? It might be that Rishi Sunak is burning his party’s climate policies to add fuel to the culture wars. In July, the Labour Party was narrowly defeated in a by-election in Uxbridge and South Ruislip—the outer London constituency previously held by Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Although the constituency has never been won by Labour since its creation in 2010, the result was widely perceived as a referendum on the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ)—a flagship policy from London’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, that aims to reduce air pollution by charging the most polluting vehicles a daily fee to be driven within the capital.
One’s stance on the ULEZ—which was introduced by Boris Johnson when he was London mayor—has become a kind of culture war badge of allegiance. Anti-ULEZ activists in the capital have vandalized and stolen ULEZ cameras, while the right-wing press has seized upon the policy to criticize Sadiq Khan. The conservative candidate for the upcoming London mayoral election is a ULEZ critic who has liked tweets praising Enoch Powell—a former MP infamous for his racist views—and described Khan as “our nipple-height mayor of Londonistan.”
After 13 years in power, the Conservative Party is looking beleaguered. Current polling puts the Labour Party comfortably on course for a landslide victory, and UK law means that an election must take place by January 2025 at the absolute latest. Faced with this countdown timer, Sunak seems to be grasping for any policies that signal he is willing to buck climate orthodoxy—even when that orthodoxy was devised by his own party and is broadly supported by the very businesses and voters that the Conservative Party can usually rely on.
The phaseout of gas-powered cars is a perfect example. This was initially slated for 2035, but the date was brought forward to 2030 by Boris Johnson’s government. In response to the ambitious policy, Ford made the UK the “European hub” for its electric vehicle powertrains, and BMW announced it will spend £600 million ($744 million) to upgrade a factory in Oxford so it can produce electric Minis. Tata Group—the owner of Jaguar Land Rover—also committed to making the UK the site of its first battery-producing gigafactory outside of India.
But in recent months the policy has attracted criticism by the right-wing press. Tabloid newspaper The Sun has run a prominent campaign arguing for the delay of the 2030 deadline—a line that the Daily Mail has also pushed in editorials and news coverage. By turning the right-wing tabloids’ talking point into government policy, Sunak is signaling that he cares less about honoring the UK’s commitment to net zero than trying to entice wavering Tory voters back into the fold by whatever means necessary.
After a series of embarrassments—Brexit, Partygate, the blink-and-you’d-miss-it tenure of Liz Truss—the credibility of the Conservative Party is in shreds. The greatest irony is that climate change was the one area where the party still had a little reputation left to nurse. The Conservative Party pushed to strengthen the 2008 Climate Change Bill, and its support ensured it passed through parliament with just five votes in opposition. It was Theresa May who committed the UK to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, and Boris Johnson who followed this with even more ambitious reduction targets. Now they are followed by Rishi Sunak, who with both eyes on an election he will almost certainly lose, is feeding the last of his party’s climate credibility into the culture war shredder.
