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Editor’s Comment
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Jordan O’Brien jordano@sjpbusinessmedia.com
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4 Electrical www.electricalreview.co.uk Review | July / August ???? 2022
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A tale of two pities Who will be the next Prime Minister of the UK? Well, thanks to Conservative MPs, the choice is between Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss, and if you’re hoping for a low carbon future, these two candidates will go down like a lump of coal at Christmas. No matter what you think of Boris Johnson, under his premiership, the UK Government has been bullish on tackling climate change and investing in the ‘Green Revolution’. In fact, Johnson took the UK’s stewardship of COP27 very seriously, pushing for nations to unite and set even more ambitious targets to combat climate change. While there was limited success on that front, you can’t blame them for trying. Now, it was far from perfect. In fact, recently a high court judge ruled that the government’s net zero strategy was inadequate and gave ministers until March 2023 to make the numbers add up. After all, the UK has a legal commitment to reach net zero by 2050. So, surely the two candidates to be Prime Minister must take the subject extremely seriously, right? Unfortunately not. As Chancellor, Rishi Sunak regularly pushed back against spending on projects that would help reduce emissions, while he also presided over the failure that was the Green Homes Grant Scheme. If you thought that was bad, Sunak also promised MPs to rollback Johnson’s plan to relax a ban on onshore wind farms, despite the public being overwhelmingly supportive and the fact that onshore wind farms are the cheapest source of electricity currently available right now. Given the energy crisis we find ourselves in, you’d think the Prime Minister of the UK would be concerned about finding low cost sources of electricity. It can’t get much worse than Sunak, can it? Well, Liz Truss isn’t any better. Set aside the multiple meetings she has had with climate-sceptic think tanks and just look at the period she was Environment Minister. Despite claiming that she believed that climate change was real, something that differed from her predecessor in the role, she still found time to cut subsidies for solar farms calling them a ‘blight on the landscape’. Meanwhile, during her time as Deputy Director of the Reform think tank, Truss said that energy infrastructure in Britain was being damaged by politicians’ obsession with green technology. Neither candidate has given us much to hope for when it comes to tackling climate change, with Truss even going so far as to call for the axing of the green levies to help lower people’s energy bills. This would gut funding from many environmental projects, all to save roughly 8%. It’s a shame that the choice of our next Prime Minister is so woefully inadequate to address the challenges that lay before us, including the climate crisis. Sure, you can deny that the climate crisis is real, for which I would like to refer you to the Netflix film Don’t Look Up. If you can ignore what is painfully obvious in front of you, I’m sure you will enjoy this film. This is an issue that is important to the British people, with 75% of adults in Great Britain saying they were worried about the impact of climate change, according to the Office for National Statistics’ (ONS’) Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN). It seems our politicians no longer reflect the will of the people. Jordan O’Brien, Editor
