Just Stop

Net-zero has become a politically toxic cause, and it's the fault of its most passionate supporters.

If it were up to me, our national pursuit of net-zero would be much, much more aggressive. 

Not because of the moral case - though ensuring our grandkids have a habitable planet is a pretty compelling one - but because of the economic case. 

It’s an argument that isn’t made nearly enough. If we use government regulation and taxpayer money to push harder for net-zero, we’ll create tons of new jobs and new industries. We’ll need people to install wind turbines, design more efficient batteries, and market electric heating solutions. Transitioning to a low-carbon economy will create 24 million new jobs globally and, if we took the first mover advantage, many of those could be in the UK. 

If we got serious about net-zero, there would be a surge of investment into R&D that’d be good for our universities and our status as a research superpower. We could reduce our economic dependency on financial services (which is our largest export, and worth more than double any physical goods we export) and become an exporter of batteries, nuclear energy and solar panels built in British factories. 

Plus, we’d get better stuff. The push to electric is driving innovation in a whole range of sectors. Induction hobs are better than conventional hobs: they heat up in minutes, rapidly cool down, wipe clean and use far less energy than conventional hobs. They’re safe, they look slick and they work better - and they came about because of the move away from gas. 

We’d get nicer, quieter cars that are cheaper to run. A new electric vehicle is registered every sixty seconds in the UK, and they make up about 1 in 5 of monthly car registrations. Tesla is the most valuable car company and an aspirational car for many, many people.

Not to mention the fact that all of this investment will, in the medium-term, cut our energy bills. 

The argument against this investment is that it won’t make a difference if we’re the only country moving towards net-zero. But, again, if you make an economic case rather than a moral one: you can see why that’s actually an argument for the net-zero transition. It’s estimated that we’ll run out of oil in about 30 years. If countries like China want to continue building economies on a resource that will run dry in three decades, their hopes of being global superpowers will be dashed in my lifetime. A smart country – which I hope we are – would not cry about which countries are pulling their weight, and instead see an opportunity for Britain to push ahead of the pack.

Others say the transition would be too painful and too costly on individual households. But again, there’s no reason to believe that: we’ve become a country that’s powered almost 50% by renewable energy over the last decades, and it’s been relatively painless. 

For a national government, investing in net-zero today is like buying Apple shares in 1999 or Bitcoin in 2010. It’s going to pay itself off over and over again: in tons of jobs, rejuvenated towns, innovation, exports, science.

So why won’t the government invest more? Why did both contenders for Prime Minister scrap their eco policies in the run-up to the election campaign? 

It’s because the pursuit of net-zero has become a politically toxic endeavour: and it’s the fault of its biggest supporters. 

Just Stop Oil have spent two years now vandalising paintings and government buildings, blocking traffic, and glueing themselves to anything they can find. They have become a huge irritant to the police and the public, and many have even seen the inside of a prison cell when their methods go too far. The public can’t stand them. 

The argument for their methods goes that it doesn’t matter whether people like them or not; every time the media reports on their protests they use the phrase ‘Just Stop Oil’, and the importance of it as a cause is lodged in people’s minds. 

It is absolute nonsense. Nobody has done more damage to the cause of net-zero in my entire lifetime than the Just Stop Oil loons and their predecessors in Extinction Rebellion. 

Far from making the cause seem vital, they have made it politically toxic. If any political leader now were to make a big, serious investment in net-zero - they would be labelled as appeasing the people that stopped football games and threw soup on paintings.

I get the strong sense they don’t really care all that much about actually changing policy, instead being seen to do something meaningful. You can tell that it’s protest for protests-sake by the way they switch to protesting their own arrests as soon as they get into trouble, a sort of meta-protest. None of this is about oil, it’s all about them.

I wrote before that terrorists have never changed public opinion, and frankly - while they’re inciting irritation more than terror - Just Stop Oil should have realised the same thing by now. They are turning the public against their message and making it completely politically impossible to do anything in net-zero.

They need to Just Stop. Let the grown-ups make the case for stopping oil, because of course we should. And that case needs to focus, not on the eco-warriors and the weather, but on the real upside. Better lives, more jobs, nice cars, and being a country at the front of innovation – just like we were in the Industrial Revolution. 

If you want to advance a cause you must give people something to get behind, not a reason to get away.