Instead of launching a green recovery, the Budget has destroyed Britain’s credibility at Cop26

The climate column: Just as the government refused to listen to the warnings about the need to prepare for a global pandemic, Sunak has stuck his fingers in his ears and ignored the warnings from his advisers

‘We’re left with another fossil-fuelled budget, with some green tinges – and a government refusing to act on the ecological collapse surrounding us’ (Getty Images)

The chancellor’s Budget – instead of launching a green recovery – has destroyed, yet again, the credibility of the UK’s presidency of the UN climate-summit presidency.

Just think of the dire context in which it was presented by Rishi Sunak: we had just heard this warning from the head of the Environment Agency, Sir James Bevan, when addressing the Association of British Insurers on the unfolding climate emergency: “The net effects will collapse ecosystems, slash crop yields, take out the infrastructure that our civilisation depends on, and destroy the basis of the modern economy and modern society.”

Bevan was preceded by a report by Professor Dasgupta on the economics of biodiversity, commissioned by the chancellor’s own Treasury, which opened starkly: “We are facing a global crisis. We are totally dependent upon the natural world. It supplies us with every oxygen-laden breath we take and every mouthful of food we eat. But we are currently damaging it so profoundly that many of its natural systems are now on the verge of breakdown.”

But did the chancellor heed the warnings? In a word – no. On the ecological emergency, Sunak presented only a devastating silence, just like the deafening silence of a rainforest after a wildfire has swept through.

Sunak froze fuel duty again – it has been frozen each year since March 2011 – as he caved yet again into the motor industry’s “Fair Fuel UK” lobby. But this really equates to de-facto cuts in fuel duty – because if you do not increase fuel duties in line with inflation, you actually impose a real-term cut.

This adds to the £110  billion in fuel tax cuts Fair Fuel UK claim to have won since 2010. And it comes at the same time as train fares are increasing above inflation, despite surface transport being the single largest source of UK domestic carbon emissions.

Sunak announced more tranches of the £27 billion road-expansion scheme, but there was nothing for a national protected cycle-network. Likewise, there were cuts on airline passenger duty for short and medium haul flights, and Sunak promoted the expansion of high-carbon aviation freight by creating a “freeport” at East Midlands Airport.

But more than £1 billion of previously announced “green home grants” for home insulation have been clawed back – despite home-heating making up 15 per cent of UK carbon emissions. Thousands of pensioners are already at risk from “excess winter deaths”.

Surely, if we can rightly spend hundreds of billions protecting the elderly from Covid-19, we can spend the few billion a year needed to make pensioners homes warm – and cheap to run?

What’s more, high-carbon meat or consumer goods were not addressed – and neither was there any announcement that the UK would follow the European Investment Bank (EIB) and impose a moratorium on all new unabated fossil fuel investments by the end of the year.

Indeed, the chancellor’s silence, in my view, is tantamount to endorsing the continued – and destructive­ – expansion of new UK coal, oil and gas fields. 

But Sunak did announce a few measures, which, if they deliver, could presage a future reduction in some carbon emissions. The potentially most far-reaching measure is the way that the chancellor changed the remit for the Bank of England to include environmental sustainability and the delivery of a net-zero economy. 

This makes it a top priority for the climate movement to bang on the door of the Bank of England to demand that they follow the EIB and impose an immediate moratorium on the financing of any new fossil fuel infrastructure. Sunak also launched a green-bond scheme to encourage investment in climate change technology. But the proof will be in the pudding.

After all, the government’s previous Green Investment Bank invested billions in high-carbon waste-incinerators! “Energy-from-waste” is the new PR term for incinerators with electricity production as a by-product – and incineration is now an increasingly large source of UK carbon emissions.

A plethora of minor grants were also given to various renewable energy schemes. These included a miniscule £4m competition for innovative energy-storage proposals, when we actually need to be investing billions in actual energy-storage schemes to get us to a 100 per cent green electricity grid – as fast as it is practical.

All of this leaves us with another fossil-fuelled budget, with some green tinges – and a government refusing to act on the ecological collapse surrounding us. Just as the Tory government refused to listen to the warnings about the need to prepare for a global pandemic, Sunak has stuck his fingers in his ears and ignored the warnings from his own government advisers.

This is not only a disaster for the UK but for the whole world – as it again cruelly undermines the UK’s presidency of Cop26. The only way I can see us now pulling an iron out of the fire is if the climate movement succeeds in persuading the Bank of England to implement an immediate moratorium on all new fossil fuel and biodiversity-destroying investments.

Then, Johnson could finally go to the Glasgow climate and the Kunming biodiversity summits as a genuine leader – and persuade the rest of the world to do likewise.