The government’s climate plans are still ambitious and on-track, so why is Labour making so much anti-green noise?

With apparent support for airport expansion and fossil fuel exploration, it may look as if the party is abandoning the climate challenge, but it’s just pantomime

There’s no getting away from it: in the last few months we’ve seen leaders and corporations do very real damage to the energy transition. Donald Trump has paused future spending on clean energy infrastructure and he’s cancelled decarbonisation targets. And the new European Commission has loudly promised to cut environmental “red tape”.

If you only read the headlines, you might think we’re facing the same issue here in the UK. But overall, Labour has remained committed to its long-term climate goals. Someone close to No 10 has said the prime minister wants to allow a massive new North Sea fossil fuel development (but they know this would still need to pass a climate assessment). The government has invited Heathrow to apply to expand (knowing it will need to fulfil a myriad of conditions). There are reports that Labour could move funds away from carbon capture and storage (but that’s always been a speculative technology). And there were reports that GB Energy’s funding might be cut (but that might be nonsense, or it might just mean spending being moved around government). More concretely, it is moving fast towards supporting a second runway at Gatwick (knowing that planning conditions, and then long political and legal battles, could scupper the scheme).

It appears that some in Labour are using good old gesture politics to roll the pitch for what they hope will be a genuine slowdown of the energy transition. But Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves themselves appear to have a more prosaic – and reasonable – motivation: they’re waiting for their broader domestic growth strategy to bear fruit. In the meantime, these rather thin pro-fossil fuel policies give them a chance to say “look at how focused we are on increasing GDP” in front of the rightwing press and less strategically minded members of the parliamentary party.

So Reeves very conspicuously slashed the £28bn annual green investment budget of the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, while in opposition. But at the autumn budget, rather less conspicuously, she increased his capital budget more than any other cabinet member’s.

Even in the US, where things are undeniably bad, the picture is still complex. The US needs domestic energy production from any source available, and Joe Biden designed the Inflation Reduction Act, which allocates investment to clean energy security and climate change initiatives, so that Republican members of Congress would have an interest in protecting some, though by no means all, of it.

So there’s a lot of noise; but here’s the signal: last year, the world invested almost twice as much in clean energy as it did in fossil fuels. Downing Street has a long list of reasons not to buck that positive trend. First, it has seen the numbers. Labour knows that anti-net zero feeling hasn’t contributed to its fall in the polls; but disappointment about unambitious environmental policies has.

More importantly for Labour’s long-term strategy, turning away from net zero would hurt its drive for growth. Last month, Confederation of British Industry research, commissioned by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, told us that the net zero sector grew three times faster than the overall UK economy in 2024. In the same week, the Climate Change Committee dramatically revised its estimate for how much investment is necessary for the transition, cutting it by nearly half thanks to its projection of cheaper electric vehicles and more widespread electrification in heating, transport and industry.

In terms of climate strategy, this is crucial: we need it to be profitable to turn fossil fuels into stranded assets (investments that lose value before their expected end of life). And it works politically: it’s an unambiguous good news story for Reeves. She’s not going to sabotage it.

Neither does the government want to turn its back on policies that are helping to shore up Labour’s union support. One well-placed union official is moderately upbeat: “Lots of the right levers have already been put in place,” they say, but more government investment will be needed, and government support must be tied to recipient businesses being better employers.

And what the government really doesn’t want to do is cancel policies that will protect consumers. We’ve spent £140bn on wholesale gas in the past four years, a period that saw Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That’s far more than the net cost to the UK of decarbonising over the much longer period of the next 25 years.

As Ellie Mae O’Hagan of the climate change thinktank E3G put it to me: “The energy transition is unstoppable. The anti-net zero political pantomime we’re seeing right now doesn’t change the fundamental economics.”

Of course, no one thinks the transition is yet going fast enough to prevent catastrophe. And it’s not happening equitably enough to prevent global disorder. So whether or not the surface-level gestures continue, we need Labour to pull together and cooperate on energy policy.

It has done it before. In 2008, New Labour’s climate reforms succeeded because (almost) the whole of the left was on board. It was the innovative campaigning by progressives at Friends of the Earth – plus increasing economic nationalism in the global energy sector – that helped push opposition leader David Cameron into supporting the idea of a climate change bill in 2006. It was someone from Labour’s centrist flank – one David Miliband, then the environment secretary – who at a cabinet meeting demanded his party match the Tories’ policy and, indeed, go further than them. And two years later, it was his leftwing brother Ed Miliband who, as energy secretary, pushed through reforms that were hailed – and attacked – as reversing Nigel Lawson’s laissez-faire restructuring of the sector in the 1980s.

In December last year, the same energy secretary’s clean electricity plans were hailed – and attacked – as the most interventionist shift in energy policy in a generation. So there is every reason to believe Miliband is a politician who can get this done. But in 2025, as in 2008, geopolitics make his reforms an easier sell. And now, as then, he relies on his party’s support. Only this time, it is also doing it under cover of an anti-green pantomime.