In two recent speeches, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak highlighted the costs of everything from heat pumps to electric vehicles as justification for weakening the country’s climate policy. There is a strategy behind this, but it’s one that risks ending a fragile cross-party consensus on net zero and turning the climate into a highly polarised issue.
The benefits of a decarbonised and more energy-efficient economy outweigh the costs over the long term. However, politics is often about the short term, specifically the next election.
The political difficulty is that the green transition really does entail relatively high investment costs for voters over the short run. Electric vehicles are currently more expensive than their fossil-fuel-powered counterparts. Heat pumps are more expensive than gas boilers. Improving the energy efficiency of homes is expensive.
