Donald Trump has wasted no time in rolling back Joe Biden’s climate policies. The speed and radicalism of this blitz of executive orders has won plaudits from many conservatives not only in the US, but also in the UK.
We should be careful to draw the right lessons on this side of the Atlantic. Of course, we must not be afraid to challenge climate policies that do not align with our conservative principles and further our own national interest, but we shouldn’t copy and paste Trump’s policies and rhetoric.
We can certainly learn from Trump’s urgent focus on energy security. With rising power demand from artificial intelligence, retiring nuclear capacity, rising usage of interconnectors, and our recent experience of energy blackmail by Russia, we need to expand homegrown energy supply and become more self-reliant. We’ve been too slow to allocate money for new nuclear and too wary of local opposition when it comes to renewables. We should be aiming to become net exporters of surplus power to Europe.
However, Trump’s preference for fossil fuels couldn’t be replicated in the UK, even if we wanted it to. The US is the largest oil and gas producer in the world. We haven’t been self-sufficient in oil and gas since 2004, and even if we hadn’t overtaxed the sector and halted new exploration, production would still be falling steeply each year due to declining North Sea reserves. Long-term British energy security therefore lies in building more renewables, nuclear, storage, and electrification, with an important but diminishing role for gas as indigenous production falls.
We should also be looking at how we can reduce the government’s role in the energy market to help to bring down prices and increase supply. The last government was too slow to bring in pro-market reforms to the energy market, put too many planning blocks in the way of new infrastructure, and too often favoured regulation over incentives. The current Labour government is going even further, putting the statist approach on steroids with ideological projects like GB Energy.
But Trump’s moves on energy policy are arguably no more faithful to free market principles than Labour’s. While he has halted new subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act and removed barriers to more oil and gas drilling, he is guilty of picking winners by excluding wind and solar from his energy emergency declaration and banning new offshore wind leasing. Instead we should be streamlining regulation holding back all clean energy technologies, lowering taxes, and harnessing price signals and competition to further drive down costs.
Trump’s decision to exit the Paris Agreement speaks to a cynicism about UN climate summits that is widespread across the conservative movements in the US and UK. It is easy to point to the limited progress achieved at recent COPs. But however sympathetic we are to this critique, we should not follow Trump’s lead here either. Although deeply imperfect, it remains the only forum we have for discussing this global challenge and holding countries to account on their pledges. As we’re often told, the UK is less than 1% of global emissions. The US is less than 15% of emissions. We need the rest of the world to accelerate action. Our security and prosperity depends on getting them to do so. We can’t sit it out.
Some of Trump’s critiques of the Paris Agreement are a bit wide of the mark. It doesn’t force countries to do anything. It lets nations decide how much they want to cut emissions and how much climate finance they want to contribute. We should be doing much more to utilise the clauses in the agreement to enable a more market-led approach, such as the article six framework for international carbon markets. We should also champion smaller ‘coalitions of the willing’, as the UK did so effectively at COP26 in Glasgow with deals to end deforestation and phase out coal.
Trump’s block on aid spending, including the contributions to developing countries to mitigate and adapt to climate change, is also a mistake. This climate finance is an essential lever to drive climate action beyond our borders, delivering direct benefits to the UK in terms of less flooding, less migration, greater geostrategic influence, and more trading opportunities. Ending climate finance risks forcing more developing countries to take Chinese money to build green infrastructure. We should instead take inspiration from Trump’s campaign around NATO and defence spending, and apply pressure on a greater range of countries, including Gulf states, to stump up cash. We should also demand much better value for taxpayers’ money, with more private finance leveraged for each pound of public money and greater transparency over where the money goes.
Finally, British conservatives must not deploy Trump’s rhetoric on the environment. While his stated aspirations around clean water and clean air are positive, and he made some welcome investments in the US national park network in his first term, it is irresponsible and unconservative to claim climate change is a hoax, as he has done repeatedly. British conservatives should talk more about the environment through the prism of protecting the natural world, but we should not ignore climate change.
Attitudes on climate change are very different in the UK. In particular, there is much less polarisation around the science of climate change. The Conservative Party’s lodestar, Margaret Thatcher, was the first world leader to warn about climate change at the United Nations. Anti-green messaging won’t deliver a Conservative majority in the UK, but will drive more Conservative switchers to Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Green Party. Conservatives need to develop an alternative to the Labour government’s climate agenda that isn’t, and isn’t perceived as, environmentally regressive.
Kemi Badenoch’s refreshing emphasis on telling the truth about complex policy problems offers a better route forward on the environment than a Trump tribute act. We need to accept the reality that climate change is a grave threat and a global challenge, and that our fossil fuel reserves are limited. Instead we should champion a genuinely market-led approach to clean energy and a pragmatic, but active approach on the world stage to tackling climate change.
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