They’ve scarcely finished hanging up the eco-friendly bunting heralding Cop26, but with each passing day, the view from Glasgow looks more and more like a Hieronymous Bosch hellscape. Bins are overflowing, while rats roam the streets – and that’s not just Bonnie the Seal, the summit’s unintentionally terrifying rodentine mascot. As the delegates jet in, they’ll contend with piles of rubbish, Insulate Britain protesters glued to the roads, train chaos and overpriced hotels. Nicola Sturgeon will be frisking about, attempting to greenwash the SNP’s record, so too Greta Thunberg, egging on the bin and rail strikers. The absence of both China and Russia will render much of the exercise pointless.
There is something symbolic about the spectacle of this extravagant eco talking shop in full swing as the city hosting it goes to the dogs. But in an odd way, it mirrors our Government’s technocratic approach to the environment; a curious mixture of Utopianism and top-down diktat, which, in its lofty focus, neglects pressing problems on our doorstep.
In books like Green Philosophy, the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton argued eloquently for a distinctly conservative environmental ethos, rooted in personal responsibility, property rights and stewardship – as he put it “local attachment not global control”. This decidedly small-c mentality already abounds in bodies like the National Trust, the little platoons of volunteers who work tirelessly to beautify their areas, even the WI. Environmentalism, he argued, should harness market forces and attain democratic buy-in, finding incentives that “lead people in general, not just their self-appointed representatives, to advance it”.
Though our Government doesn’t share Extinction Rebellion’s methods or apocalyptic timetable, its playbook often seems more Greta than Roger. Ministers love celebrating capitalism in the abstract. Yet their decarbonisation agenda appears rooted in control; either picking winners or punishing voters into compliance. They show little faith in the power of incremental change on a human scale, as when the PM, in front of a panel of children this week, spoke disparagingly of the role of recycling as an answer to environmental degradation. Above all, they seem incapable of getting out of the way, creating a tax regime with clear incentives and leaving private sector innovators to get on with it.
A top-down approach naturally assumes a certain level of state competence in predicting future events, but recent “green” winners hardly inspire confidence. Drax power station, which burns wood chips shipped in largely from North America, receives more renewable energy subsidies than any other single installation, despite claims that biomass may produce more carbon pollution per megawatt hour than coal. (Advocates say the plant will become carbon neutral with time, yet according to some academic reports it could take many decades to offset the CO2 burned by growing new trees.)
A baffling moratorium on fracking has exacerbated energy insecurity as we continue to import natural gas. They have focused disproportionately on wind, a useful yet volatile top-up, while neglecting a genuinely practical solution – nuclear – for years. In the costly push towards heat pumps, the Government appears to be backing yet another lame horse; imposing a one-size-fits-all solution on millions of households for which it will be unfeasible and ruinous. Proposed new rules could even prevent mortgage lenders from advancing funds on properties with lower efficiency ratings – a scheme which threatens to create a new class of “mortgage prisoners”, trapped in their homes, unable to afford the energy efficiency upgrades needed to sell up.
So the Government’s environmental strategy puts security, even home ownership, at risk – yet it rarely applies in its own backyard. A recent Telegraph investigation found that not one Cabinet minister had bothered to install a heat pump in their own home. Cop26 president Alok Sharma was left blushing after it emerged he was still driving a diesel car. Just as the latest Insulate Britain spokesperson invariably turns out to be a trustafarian who’s racked up more air miles than the Apollo space programme, environmentalism rarely begins at home for our leaders either. “One rule for us, another for them” proved a powerful force during the pandemic; such day-to-day hypocrisies could entrench disenchantment and further derail what was already an ambitious agenda.
MPs recently attracted criticism for rejecting a Lords amendment about restricting sewage discharges into rivers – much of it unfair and overblown. Nevertheless, the lack of capacity in sewage infrastructure has been well-known for decades. Along with pot-holes, litter and flood defences, sewers feel like precisely the kind of vital domestic topic that gets overlooked when our focus shifts away from the local. So Cop26 isn’t just a glitzy eco-jamboree, but a reminder of a missed opportunity. We sorely need a Tory environmentalism that is pragmatic, which prefers the familiar to the untested, the good to the perfect, and above all, begins at home.
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