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When UK Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch MP appeared on ITV’s Peston show a few months ago, co-presenter Anushka Asthana produced a series of graphs undermining her anti-Net Zero claims. Badenoch flanneled for a while before claiming that solar panels were made using child slave labour in China. Now there is an element of truth in her claim – it has been estimated that slave labour is involved in 20% of global PV production, 20% too much – but I’ve never heard Badenoch campaign against labour conditions in other Chinese supply chains, or indeed similarly dubious employment practices in the petrostates that provide our oil and gas. Why just solar? Hmmm…

In a recent televised session in his Scottish golf club, Donald Trump went off on one of his tangents-within-tangents rants about wind turbines, implying they killed bald eagles, the emblematic bird of the US. Then I read in the New York Times that, just four months ago, Trump “called for gutting the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, calling it a burden on oil and gas producers.” So, it’s OK to harm the eagles to extract more oil and gas, but not for wind. Hmmm…

This selective handwringing is a vintage tactic used against environmental legislation/regulation/change. We have been told that the banning of DDT has led to gazillions of deaths of Africans through malaria (I’m sure they’d much rather die of cancer), or that EVs involve terrible pollution from lithium mines (often using a controversial lithium mine which closed in 1996 as ‘proof’). I’ve seen claims about how we’re going to see a massive rise in waste EV batteries, solar panels and wind turbine blades from people who have never recycled so much as a coke can. Of course we have to tackle these issues – we shouldn’t be blasé about labour conditions, waste or mining pollution – but they are all fixable and shouldn’t be used to hold up the transition.

The phrase ‘predatory delay’ has been coined for all those “yes, we’ve got to make the transition but not just yet” arguments from those with a vested interest in stretching out the status quo for as long as possible. I’ve been trying to find a similar phrase for those expressing highly selective issues that only seem to be important in relation to the low carbon economy. I think ‘predatory concerns’ fits the bill – ‘predatory’ gets across the sheer level of self-interested cynicism behind the claims.

Predatory Concern (n): sudden interest in a perceived downside relating to Net Zero, but *only* when it relates to Net Zero.

What do you think?