Claire Coutinho, Conservative shadow energy secretary claims that net zero makes climate change worse. That’s a very bold claim! Her argument is that we’ve reduced UK emissions by exporting industrial activity to other, less efficient, countries so that overall emissions have gone up. However, her evidence for this is extraordinarily weak (see below).
Even if we accept the claim, for argument’s sake, deciding that we’re going to have a policy based upon global emissions rather than national emissions is a non-starter. The Paris agreement on climate change is specifically about the emissions of nation states. Is it now Conservative Party policy to leave the Paris agreement? if so, what are we going to replace it with? The Paris Agreement is imperfect but it’s all we have. It’s far too late to tear it up and start again.
The only evidence Ms Coutinho gives to back up her claim is that UK oil and gas is four times cleaner than imported oil and gas. Let’s do what net-zero critics rarely do, and take a look at some actual data!
There are differences in the emissions associated with extracting, refining and transporting oil and gas — so-called well-to-wheel emissions. These emissions are a small fraction (~5%) of the emissions from burning the fossil fuels but they still matter. A comparison of the well-to-wheel emissions, across countries, can be found in a 2018 paper in Science, the 2nd most prestigious scientific journal in the World (being a Brit, I’d claim Nature is even more prestigious but that’s open to debate).
Using the data in that paper, the UK is marginally better (at 7.9 g per MJ) than average (at 10.3 g/MJ). For comparison, Denmark (at 3.3 g/MJ) is much better than the UK. However, what really matters is where we get our oil from if we’re not extracting it ourselves. The leading import sources in 2024 were the USA (at 11.3 g/MJ) and Norway (at 5.6 g/MJ). The US figure is 43% higher than ours (which is not remotely close to 4-times) whilst Norway’s figure is significantly lower than the UK’s.
As is so often the case with anti-net-zero propaganda, the sound-bites are great but the claims don’t stand up to scrutiny. A political party that wants to be seen as grown-up and serious should do better than this.