THE Church of England has “an exceptionally difficult goal set by General Synod of achieving net zero by 2030”, the Bishop of Southwark, the Rt Revd Christopher Chessun, has said.
Speaking in within the House of Lords last week, in a debate on the affordability of the goal of net-zero emissions, he explained how “the national Church has ring-fenced £190 million to support its churches and clergy housing towards this goal” and drew attention to diocesan initiatives that were, he said, bringing results.
Investment within the green-energy sector, including jobs, would “mitigate the otherwise fearful future ahead of us”, he said, “if we pursue net zero by 2050 with the spirit, ingenuity, and imagination at our command, and cherish the creation given us”.
He concluded: “The challenges of net zero are hard, but they usually are not unaffordable. The price of hesitation, though, will likely be irreversible. The time is now.”
Lord Offord (Conservative), who introduced the controversy, said: “The stark reality is that the UK cannot grow to be self-reliant with the most costly energy.” For him, the difficulty was about energy independence: “In 2025, we remain stubbornly depending on hydrocarbons for 72 per cent of our energy needs, with 40 per cent imported . . . our 20-year experiment with renewables, mostly windmills and solar, has failed.”
He described Net Zero 2050 as “a straitjacket that’s stopping the UK from resuming our place in this contemporary world as an industrial, technological, and military powerhouse. . . it’s neither practical nor reasonably priced”.
Countering this, a former Energy Secretary and the chairman of COP26, Lord Sharma (Conservative), said that “countries and businesses recognise that the drive to net zero offers enormous economic opportunities for jobs, growth, and inward investment”. Lord Turner (Crossbench) agreed that “the reasonable estimates of the associated fee of attending to net zero have relentlessly come down, not gone up.”
Baroness Jones (Green Party) said: “Climate chaos will hit our economy hard, whether we reach net zero or not. . . Our economy is a component of a worldwide economy, and when parts of that international trade begin to collapse, there will likely be far larger impacts than Donald Trump’s tariffs.” She was keen to see “an end to government by cheque book” with the “vested interests” of donors and lobbyists.
A former Lords Speaker, Baroness Hayman (cross-bench), who chairs Peers for the Planet, commented that “calling a halt to progress just isn’t a neutral or cost-free option”. She said that nobody doubted the aim “to achieve net zero by 2050 will cost plenty of money. . . There is not any denying that there will likely be real technical and capability challenges. . . Nothing has modified the imperative of the transition; it has grow to be only more urgent.”
Responding officially, Lord Hunt (Labour) said: “The response of the Government just isn’t only that we are able to afford our net-zero ambitions, but that we must — and that now we have to drive this as quickly as we possibly can.”
The answer to energy security was, he said, “to hurry up the transition away from fossil fuels and towards home-grown clean energy”. He saw the whole lot “not as a price, but as an investment in the longer term. . . We should surely turn this around and see the transition to net zero because the economic opportunity of the twenty first century for this country. We have huge opportunities here.”
Before commending the motion, which was agreed, Lord Offord said that “2025 is 25 years away from Net Zero 2050; so that is a superb time to reassess the plan in the sunshine of reality and to re-evaluate our energy strategy, with the straightforward objective that we must make it reasonably priced and secure.”
