U.K. prime minister Rishi Sunak is announcing that his country will be loosening some of its green-energy policies and extending some deadlines to meet green goals. The government’s ban on sales of new gas-powered cars will be delayed from 2030 to 2035. The planned ban on gas boilers in 2035 will now allow 20 percent of boilers to be gas-powered in that year. In addition, he is promising that policies that had been debated, such as an extra tax on flights and using policy to change how people eat, are now off the table. Among those is a plan where each home would have six separate recycling bins.
These changes represent a rebuke of the climate consensus that has characterized British politics in recent years. The left-wing parties are, of course, all in with it. But even Boris Johnson, the former Conservative Party prime minister, was, and is, one of its staunchest proponents, and he criticized Sunak for backtracking on promises made during Johnson’s premiership. Sunak still maintains that he is committed to the government’s overall goal of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, just that the U.K. can afford to do so with a less radical approach.
Expect more of this in the years to come as governments around the world realize their green deadlines don’t line up with reality. Moving the deadline while still mouthing the same overall commitment to net-zero will be a common way to try to escape political fallout for hastily made policy promises that never had a chance of coming true in the first place.
Sunak said, “For too many years politicians in governments of all stripes have not been honest about costs and trade-offs. Instead they have taken the easy way out, saying we can have it all.” Indeed, that’s what politicians do. In Thomas Sowell’s formulation, the first rule of economics is that resources are scarce, and the first rule of politics is to disregard the first rule of economics.
The advantage for Sunak is that the green deadlines he is now changing were set by other politicians. In most elected democracies, it is rare for a head of government to be in power for longer than seven or eight years. Most of the green deadlines are set a decade or more in the future, so the politicians who set them won’t have to actually see them through to completion most of the time.
That means a bunch of politicians are going to be stuck with deadlines they didn’t set that will prove unpopular if actually enforced. In most cases, they’ll have just as much power to change them as their predecessors did to set them. And they’ll use that power to avoid the consequences of their predecessors’ actions.
If you’ve taken a plane in the past ten years, you’ll know about the continuous delays in the enforcement of the REAL ID law. Passed in 2005, it standardizes the documentation required to obtain a state-issued ID card, and cards compliant with the law are supposed to be required to board a commercial flight. It has become something of a joke, as state agencies have dragged their feet in complying and people have (understandably) been hesitant to renew their drivers’ licenses before they expire. The deadline has been expanded several times, with enforcement for commercial flights now set to take effect in 2025, a full 20 years after the law was passed.
Many green policies will likely be treated the same way. Politicians will find reasons to make exceptions, loosen definitions, and extend deadlines as what was praised as “aspirational” ten years ago looks like lunacy when it runs into reality. This mechanism is a good example of representative government providing feedback to correct policy errors, but expect many of the left-wing “defenders of democracy” to present it as a huge problem that must be corrected by ignoring the people and forging ahead with the climate agenda regardless of the cost.