There may be some interesting debates amongst the new ministerial team at the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) department following this week’s Cabinet reshuffle.
Environmentalists were aghast at prime minister Liz Truss’s appointment of Brexit hardliner Jacob Rees-Mogg as secretary of state for the department.
Their concerns are sparked by Rees-Mogg’s long standing and very public track record of statements expressing scepticism about efforts to curb emissions.
The Somerset MP has blamed what he has described as “climate alarmism” for fuelling energy price rises and wrote in 2013 that his constituents were more interested in cheap bills than what he dismissed as “windmills”.
More recently he has expressed the desire to see the extraction of “every last drop” of oil and gas out of the UK’s North Sea reserves and branded net zero in a speech as a “huge regulatory burden”.
Doug Parr, head of policy for Greenpeace UK has described Rees Mogg’s appointment as “one of the worst…in living memory”.
However Truss’ first Cabinet also saw the creation of a new dedicated climate ministerial portfolio.
This post has been handed to Graham Stuart, who was previously one of Truss’ junior ministers at the Foreign Office. The views of the Humberside MP, who is a minister of state at BEIS but will have the right to attend Cabinet, are starkly at odds with those of his departmental boss on climate issues.
Stuart’s constituency website states that climate change is “one of the greatest challenges we will face in this lifetime” and describes the recently published UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which showed that global warming is happening much faster than previously anticipated, as “harrowing”. “Immediate global action” is required to tackle the problem, he adds.
One Conservative insider tells Utility Week that in practice Rees-Mogg’s primary focus at BEIS will be on business deregulation rather than energy. This could mean that whoever replaces Greg Hands as minister of state for energy will have a pivotal role.
The cross-cutting nature of the climate change agenda means though that other Whitehall departments have crucial roles to play in the decarbonisation of energy.
Many will be hoping that Kwasi Kwarteng, who has been promoted to chancellor of the exchequer, won’t forget the lessons he has learnt about energy over the last three years at BEIS. Kwarteng enters No 11 Downing Street with more expertise in energy than any predecessor in his role, bar perhaps Margaret Thatcher’s second secretary of state for energy, Nigel Lawson. In particular many hope that the new chancellor will overcome Treasury resistance to increased funding for energy efficiency works.
Kwarteng’s successor as energy minister of state, Anne Marie Trevelyan, has been awarded the role of secretary of state for transport meanwhile.
A further encouraging appointment for net zero champions will be that of Simon Clarke to the role of secretary of state at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC). The long-standing supporter of efforts to promote net zero will be ideally placed to speed up the efforts of his new department, which has been often seen as the biggest environmental laggard in Whitehall, to decarbonise housing.
Set against this though is the more worrying appointment by Truss of Matthew Sinclair, former chief executive of the Tax Payers’ Alliance campaign, as her chief economic adviser. Sinclair’s past works include a book, published in 2011 and entitled Let Them Eat Carbon, in which he made the case that a warming world could have upsides as the Greenland and northern Siberia’s tundra open up to agriculture.
These clashing voices across government mean Truss will have to take a lead if she wants to fulfil her leadership campaign commitment to “double down” on delivering net zero.