The Observer view: It’s the climate, stupid

Last week was London Climate Action Week. It was also “London climate in your face week” and “heatwave reminds Andy Burnham he can’t dodge the net zero question” week.

For anyone who has spent the past 10 days in an air-conditioned cave, a recap: record temperatures closed schools, delayed trains, caused hospital appointments to be cancelled, gave the London Ambulance Service its busiest day ever in terms of life-threatening emergencies and forced climate conference organisers to cancel a session on extreme heat because of extreme heat.

The cliche holds true. It would be comical if not serious. Yet the coverage largely fails to capture the seriousness. The heat has prompted a national debate about hot housing and scarce air conditioning; about weather, not climate; effects, not causes. If Burnham and his aides only read the news they might think they could allocate money to cooling care homes and that climate as a political problem would be dealt with at least until next summer. A 33-paragraph BBC report on the heatwave on Friday mentioned climate change only in paragraphs 31 and 32, and then coyly.

An important lesson of the heatwave has been the astonishing capacity of the public to look past its root cause, which is not the physics of heat domes. It’s climate change, which touches everyone and every part of the economy. As a medium-term national challenge, it is urgent. As a long-term international one, it’s existential, and Burnham will need a proper strategy to address it.

Ed Miliband and others will urge him to rule out new North Sea oil and gas licenses to stay on track to hit net zero by 2050. The target is right. Britain has led by example on decarbonisation and should go on leading, not least because early commitment to the energy transition means earlier returns on the investment required. But that investment is huge, and with current policies the transition is proving unaffordable.

British energy prices are too high, for consumers and for industry – even before the Iran war they were nearly 90% higher than the median for the EU’s 14 richest countries. This is because the UK power grid relies on imported gas when the wind stops blowing, and liquefied natural gas prices in particular fluctuate wildly in times of war. Last Wednesday night, which was hot and still, grid operators had to pay 15 times normal day-ahead rates for a power top-up from the continent to keep the lights on. As Oxford’s Dieter Helm has argued, limited new North Sea production could help, as long as the terms and conditions included fixed-price long-term gas contracts for British power providers.

Energy is intensely political. Unions and the right are gearing up to challenge Burnham over the North Sea as a source of jobs and tax revenues respectively. It will also become a test of his commitment to the “business” part of “business-friendly socialism”. He could pass this test by approving production in the Jackdaw gas field off Aberdeen – and he could show that he sees the big picture as clearly as Miliband by committing at the same time to the grid upgrades and energy storage needed for full low-carbon electrification. That will require shared public and private investment on a scale not yet seriously contemplated. It would be “Manchesterism” in action on a national scale, and it would position the UK as a true leader in climate mitigation.

Miliband has the misfortune of becoming a political outlier by thinking straight and doing the right thing on net zero while the world shifted around him. Energy price spikes from wars of choice in Ukraine and Iran have not helped. But nor has a decade of climate vandalism led by Donald Trump, based on wilful ignorance, corporate propaganda and contempt for basic science.

Climate science should not be controversial. The greenhouse effect was discovered in the mid-19th century and well understood by the mid-20th. Without the comfort blanket of naturally occurring atmospheric CO2, the world would be 18C cooler than it is. Humans have raised those CO2 levels by 50% and must now deal with the consequences. Pretending otherwise makes the climate crisis more urgent, not less.

Photograph by Brook Mitchell/AFP/Getty Images