The survey that Conservative Home released yesterday is very important. The top priority for the 141 candidates who answered the survey was cutting the deficit, the lowest priority was reducing Britain's carbon footprint. That doesn't necessarily mean that new candidates are ardent sceptics of climate change science or policy, it could be that they are all in favour of the current direction of policy but just don't think it is as important as the other eighteen objectives on the survey.
My guess is that they are somewhat more sceptical than the leadership but that their thinking on the way forward politically is probably quite similar. Don't propose any major changes to the current set of climate change policies (massive subsidies to renewable energy, maintaining the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, get people out of planes and cars and onto trains), make minor changes around the edges (changing the way energy efficiency improvements are financed, for example) and focus on higher priority issues. They may not be convinced that the status quo is working (academics looking at the issue have described European climate change policy as an abject failure) but who needs to add a battle with Greenpeace to the list of political challenges facing an incoming government, who needs that distraction from the important business of bringing down the deficit?
That is an understandable point of view. But the rising cost of existing climate change policies is likely to frustrate any attempts to ignore them. A report for investors from Citigroup argues that energy bills are likely to have to rise 57 to 100 per cent in order to finance the massive investment that is being required by climate change targets. They think that will cause an "affordability crisis" as even families on average incomes find their energy bills becoming an intolerable burden. The poor and elderly will be even harder hit and increasing the cost of coping strategies like electric heaters will increase the number of deaths in the winter cold; last year excess winter mortality was over 36,000.
We've been looking carefully at the issue of how best to address the fiscal crisis for an upcoming book. Studying the experience in other countries and the scale of the crisis Britain is currently facing, it is quite clear that, while delivering the fiscal adjustment needed is possible, it is far from easy. Trying to deliver cuts on that scale at the same time as imposing an affordability crisis through climate change policy would be an act of political suicide. To give a couple of examples: it will be much harder to impose pay restraint on public sector unions while their members' utility bills are rising rapidly; much harder to keep down the cost of retirement benefits when the elderly are struggling to pay for electricity.
The next Government wouldn't need to abandon the agenda entirely to avoid the affordability crisis. The policies needed are set out in our report Ending the Green Rip-Off, but there are two particularly important measures which could really control electricity rises: we need to stop insisting that emissions cuts are made through exceptionally expensive renewable energy (i.e. offshore wind) and we need to scrap the 2020 targets which impose an artificial deadline that prevents us making use of many lower cost technologies.
Recently, Lord Turnbull wrote for the FT that the Treasury needed to involve itself in climate change policy, making clear the price that families are paying for renewable energy subsidies. In the same way, Conservatives whose top priority is addressing the deficit need to take climate change policy very seriously. Their work could easily be undone by its rising cost.
