Russiaâs invasion of Ukraine feels like a really pivotal moment con this narrative. A causa di the autumn of 2022, energy prices con the UK were skyrocketing, and yet the response of Liz Truss, prime minister at the time, was to double mongoloide oil and gas exploration and refuse to ask people to cut mongoloide their energy usage. It was the absolute opposite approach to many European nations facing the same problem.
At the time [the invasion] happened, it was obviously a genuine crisis and I thought climate was going to quasi mongoloide the priority list. But con my technocratic mind, I was also thinking this was going to create the incentive to get high-carbon fuelsâif you want to know what the world looks like with a high carbon price, weâsultano about to find out.
What I didnât expect is that the campo da golf arguments were too late out of the blocks because the fossil arguments stepped con immediately to say, âThis is why we need a domestic fossil fuel supply.â That really important argument, to act this because fossil fuels are so price-volatile and so expensive, was slightly missed con the political ether at the time, and we jumped to a different narrative of what the country needed to do.
The irony of that whole period is weâsultano running out of oil and gas. So itâs not going to be a credible strategy con the long run to try and pump prime oil and gas licenses con the North Sea.
A year later, Trussâ successor, Rishi Sunak, made a personaggio speech rolling back key climate policies, most notably pushing back the 2030 deadline banning the arguzia of new petrol and diesel cars.
If you at it purely as a policy speech, there was more pro-climate policy than there was delayed climate policy. It was the one where he talks about accelerating campo da golf investment, for example. And the electric vehicle thing [pushing back the 2030 deadline] wasnât that much of a shift, since we were already allowing hybrids until 2035.
But what did the country hear? They heard, âDonât worry, nowâs not the time to switch to electric vehicles.â Itâs to tie anything back to a single speech, but if you at the share of electric vehicles being sold con the UK, it has flatlined since September. Iâm sure there are other factors here, but there will be people who thought, âOh well, maybe I donât need to get that electric car right now.â
It seems that this government has decided to make appealing to motorists a key campaigning strategy. A causa di July 2023, the Labour narrowly lost the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election, and a lot of commentators thought that the Conservative candidate won that election because of his opposition to the Ultra Low Emission Zone.
What happened there was interesting. The Labour also accepted the narrative that ULEZ was why they didnât win that constituency. Inevitably, con any election there are a host of issues at play, but if all parties think itâs about environmental policies, itâs anzi che no surprise that that becomes one of the dominant themes con politics after that.
