In November 1989, Margaret Thatcher stood at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly and delivered a message to the world: climate change was a shared crisis, and Britain was ready to lead. A chemistry graduate from Oxford, she understood the science of greenhouse gases as well as the geography of pollution: it observed no borders. Human activity, she told the Assembly, was changing the planet in \u201cdamaging and dangerous\u201d ways. She called for science-led international cooperation, endorsed the newly formed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and pledged that Britain would coordinate one of its scientific assessments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Three decades later, Theresa May, in the final weeks of her premiership, did something consequential. She made Britain the first G7 economy to commit, in law, to net zero emissions. In June 2019, the Climate Change Act 2008 was amended to require the United Kingdom to bring its net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050. This was not a slogan. It was written into parliamentary record and turned into a binding government obligation. The party that voted it through was the Conservative Party itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet today’s Conservative Party no longer recognises that inheritance. In March 2025, leader Kemi Badenoch used a \u201cpolicy renewal\u201d speech to declare that the 2050 net zero target was \u201cimpossible\u201d, a piece of \u201cfantasy politics, built on nothing\u201d. Reaching it, she said, would inevitably \u201clower living standards\u201d and \u201cbankrupt the country\u201d. She offered no alternative target. She cited no specific evidence. She simply said the country must \u201cface reality\u201d. But what reality?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Climate Change Committee’s most recent assessment provides the answer. The committee estimates that reaching net zero between 2025 and 2050 will require around \u00a3700 billion in additional investment, but will save roughly \u00a3600 billion in fuel and operating costs over the same period. The net cost is around \u00a3100 billion, spread across 25 years: about \u00a34 billion a year, or just 0.2% of GDP. By 2050, the committee says, a typical household will save around \u00a3700 a year on energy bills and a further \u00a3700 on motoring costs, a combined saving of \u00a31,400 annually. Its supplementary report this March put the point even more bluntly: a single fossil-fuel price shock of the kind seen after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 would cost the country as much as the entire 25-year net cost of the transition. Relying on fossil fuels is not the cheap option. It is the option that leaves households exposed to price swings nobody can control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So where does Badenoch’s \u201ctrillions of pounds\u201d figure come from? The \u00a39 trillion estimate she and her shadow energy secretary, Claire Coutinho, have invoked comes from a report by the free-market think tank Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). It is roughly 90 times the official figure produced by the Climate Change Committee. The independent investigative outlet DeSmog has documented that the IEA has long received funding from oil majors including BP and Shell. A separate report Coutinho endorsed, by the energy consultancy Watt-Logic, claimed that expanding renewables would heighten blackout risk; its author is a long-standing oil and gas industry consultant, and the National Energy System Operator (NESO) has publicly rejected the report’s conclusions. The \u201ctruths\u201d the Conservative leadership presents to the public, in other words, are not the product of independent scientific assessment. They come from lobbying organisations with deep ties to fossil-fuel interests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Coutinho’s other line of attack has the same problem. She argues that Britain’s net zero path deepens its dependence on China, because solar panels and batteries are largely imported from there. The argument sounds plausible, until one remembers who has been in office. The UK’s reliance on Chinese clean-energy supply chains is the direct result of 14 years of Conservative government failing to deliver an industrial policy capable of building domestic capacity. To hand that problem to a Labour government and frame it as Labour’s failure is to call the hole one has dug oneself someone else’s mess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her latest card is the call to \u201cget Britain drilling\u201d in the North Sea. In a Daily Telegraph column, and through the Conservative Party’s \u201cGet Britain Drilling\u201d campaign, Coutinho has claimed that ramping up North Sea extraction would lower household energy bills, raise tax revenue, and protect British jobs. None of these three claims survives serious scrutiny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The price British households pay for oil and gas is set by global markets, not by North Sea output. The North Sea now accounts for roughly 0.7% of global oil and gas production, and that share is shrinking. It is too small to move the global price. Recent analysis by the University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment found that even if Britain maximised North Sea extraction and rebated every penny of tax revenue back to households, the average family would save between \u00a316 and \u00a382 a year. Channel the same resources into accelerating the renewable transition, and households would save between \u00a3105 and \u00a3331 a year, three times more. The Climate Change Committee said as far back as 2022 that increased UK extraction was \u201cnot expected to materially affect global oil or gas prices\u201d. Even Badenoch herself has conceded that the Conservatives’ plan to cut bills does not actually come from new drilling, but from scrapping environmental levies and energy taxes. They know perfectly well that drilling is not the answer to bills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On tax revenue, the reality is closer to the opposite. The North Sea has already produced over 44 billion barrels of oil and gas; roughly nine-tenths of its original reserves have been extracted. It is, by international consensus, a mature basin. Drilling there is no longer a profitable enterprise so much as a subsidised one. National Audit Office data show that 2016 was the first year in which decommissioning tax reliefs exceeded the tax revenues the Treasury collected from the oil and gas sector. From that year on, the industry’s net contribution to the UK’s public finances flipped from positive to negative. HMRC estimates that between 2018 and 2062, oil and gas companies will pass roughly \u00a324 billion of decommissioning costs back to the Treasury through tax reliefs, while total decommissioning expenditure across the basin is estimated at \u00a345 to \u00a377 billion. When operators lack the financial resources to plug their own wells, the ultimate liability falls on the British taxpayer. Approving a new oilfield today is therefore not so much raising future tax revenue as locking in decades of future public expenditure to cap the wells, in exchange for a short-term entry in the books that does not even cover its own decommissioning cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Theresa May herself has not stayed silent. She has publicly criticised Badenoch’s turn, calling net zero \u201cchallenging but achievable\u201d and warning that \u201cdelaying action will only harm the next generation and increase both the economic and social costs of climate change\u201d. Sam Hall, director of the Conservative Environment Network, has separately warned that abandoning science will lead voters to doubt whether the party is still serious about the energy transition at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From Thatcher to Badenoch is 36 years. A chemistry-trained prime minister led the world in taking climate risk seriously. A leader who has produced no specific evidence of her own now declares the whole project a fantasy. The Conservative Party has not been forced into this retreat by reality. It has been pushed by electoral pressure, chased from the right by Reform UK, and has chosen to walk away from one of the most consequential policy legacies it could claim. The cost is not only environmental. It is the spectacle of a party that, for short-term votes, has openly disowned the scientific consensus and the institutional commitment it once built. When a party cannot recognise its own past, how much credibility can it offer when it asks voters to trust its \u201cfuture\u201d?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thatcher made Britain a climate leader. May wrote net zero into law. Today’s Conservative Party calls the same science \u201cfantasy\u201d, leans on oil-lobby figures, and urges more North Sea drilling. What changed is not the science. It is the party itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[81],"tags":[1226,1365,1367,1148,321,1368,1366,1183],"class_list":["post-2999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uk-affairs","tag-climate-policy","tag-conservative-party","tag-kemi-badenoch","tag-margaret-thatcher","tag-net-zero","tag-north-sea-drilling","tag-theresa-may","tag-uk-politics"],"yoast_head":"\n