Last week, I recorded the Year in Sustainability episode of the Net Zero Business Podcast with Lucy Siegle and James Murray. One of our topics was ‘hero of the year’. Knowing I would be answering last, I thought I should swerve the obvious answers and plumped for Michael Liebreich, sustainability podcaster, former Olympic skier and Conservative. My logic was his article for ConservativeHome, The inconvenient choice for Conservatives is to recommit to net zero or get used to opposition, was a dwindlingly rare intervention on climate from the centre-right. The BTL comments make that point all too starkly (abandon all hope ye who enter there).

During Liz Truss’s short and disastrous time as Prime Minister, she asked Chris Skidmore MP to plot a “sensible approach to Net Zero”. Skidmore dutifully went off and did the sums, and concluded the sensible approach to Net Zero was to go further, faster. Truss’s leadership had imploded by this time, but her successor Rishi Sunak ignored Skidmore, started watering down the Government’s Net Zero targets and repeatedly attacked then Opposition leader Keir Starmer for his ‘green growth’ strategy. This had two impacts: the Conservative’s already poor poll ratings took an instant dip from which they never recovered, arguably turning an election loss into a rout, and Chris Skidmore quit as an MP.

Sunak’s successor Kemi Badenoch doesn’t seem to have learnt from his Net Zero misstep, declaring the paradoxical “I’m not a climate sceptic, but I am a Net Zero sceptic.” This has already caused her trouble as Starmer has pointed out that she was Business Secretary under PM Boris Johnson at the time many of the current Net Zero policies were set. However, at least one of Badenoch’s donors also funds the Global Warming Policy Forum disinformation bureau, so I can’t see a Damascene conversion any time soon.

As a Liberal Democrat, why does this bother me? Because if you have a broad political consensus for climate action taking in the left, centre and centre-right, then the climate sceptic voices are banished to the populist right. However, there is now something of a vacuum in the centre-right where Skidmore, Theresa May, Philip Hammond, Alok Sharma, Claire Perry et al once stood firm on climate change. If sensible voices don’t fill that vacuum, then we risk climate becoming a major dividing line between left and right, which will give climate disinformation a bully pulpit and undoubtedly stifle progress. We can’t afford that.

Image: Chatham House, London, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons