‘Ideological’ is a word that’s often flung at UK Energy and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband, a ‘soft left’ Labour MP while he attempts to meet the UK’s climate commitments. These were originally set by Miliband in the 2008 Climate Change Act (CCA), but since amended by Theresa May’s Conservative Government in 2019 to bring in a Net Zero target. Only 5 MPs voted against the original CCA. So how is implementing a cross-party agreement ideological?

Compare and contrast this with Donald Trump’s increasingly desperate attempts to save the US coal industry. Last week he used wartime ‘national emergency’ legislation to bung $700m to the coal, the latest in a line of measures including reducing environmental protections, insisting on public procurement and a $625m hand out last year. The question is: why does such a mature industry need so much help? And then there’s the $1bn he paid TotalEnergies not to build a wind farm…

OK, let’s take a step back and look at this objectively. Are these two sides of the ideological coin? Is it simple enough to say left = low carbon, right = high carbon? Is Miliband a ‘watermelon’, trying to sneak in socialism under a green cover?

Well, no. Because the global effort to decarbonise the economy is based on science. And while science does inevitably have an element of subjectivity, the threat of climate change in 1990 was enough to trigger the poster-girl of the ideological right, Margaret Thatcher, to make the first ever major climate change speech by a national leader.

I grow increasingly frustrated with the Orwellian language, but this is where we are at in our ‘post-truth’ culture war era. At a time when we have more access to information at our fingertips than any time in history, we are deluged with misinformation and doublespeak.

By all means, criticise Miliband if he gets things wrong – I would divert funding from hydrogen and CCS into electrification if I were him and I think Clean Power 2030 would be better re-written for 2040 – but it is a huge chunk of the right of politics which has ideologically moved away from treating climate as a priority, not the left and centre who stand firm. The science hasn’t changed, only the politics have.

BTW: If you haven’t heard my podcast episode The Uxbridge Fallacy on why this has happened in the UK, check it out!