Solar

Westminster heats up as ‘furnace Britain’ swelters

Westminster heats up as ‘furnace Britain’ swelters
(Photo Courtesy: Marcin Nowak/Unsplash)

If you’ve seen Mel Gibson’s classic Apocalypto, you’ll know that the meat of the film focuses on daily politics, the hum-drum frictions that occur in South American village life, and the emerging brutality of an ever-growing society.

Towards the end of the film (spoiler alert!), the action is interrupted by the sudden arrival of white sails on the horizon. This first contact with Europeans is a shocker for both the characters and the audience watching. Everything that has occurred up until this point has just been a diversion – a sleight of hand to distract us from the real ‘Apocalypto’, the arrival of ‘civilization’ and the end of the world as the Amazonian tribes knew it.

I was reminded of this on Monday and Tuesday this week. After weeks of political pressure, Boris Johnson has resigned as prime minister and now our news is filled with tedium and tattle relating to those aiming to fill his shoes. Who went to a party when they shouldn’t have, who has a questionable circle of friends, who maybe cheated on their wife at some point?

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But then Monday and Tuesday came.

Britain, an infamously grey, foggy, and damp isle, experienced the hottest days in its history. 

We watched, as a nation, in horror, as the mercury climbed higher than we ever thought possible. Hotter than any other country in Europe, hotter than the Caribbean, hotter than the Sahara Desert.

Britain hit 104°F and our infrastructure buckled. London’s fire service was busier than it had been at any time since WW2, houses burned down and forest fires consumed vast tracts of the countryside. Our airforce was immobilized by melting runways and the transport system ground to a halt.

Suddenly, our own white sails were on our horizon. All the gossip about which prime ministerial candidate had committed which misdemeanor felt a bit like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic as the ship sank.

Climate change is our Apocalypto, make no mistake.

So with this in mind, let’s focus on which candidates might actually prioritize the acceleration of renewables infrastructure.

The candidacy race has been rumbling away, and happily, at the time of going to press we are only left with two candidates:

Rishi Sunak

I’ve previously praised Sunak for his clear thinking when it comes to tying economic success to an expansion of renewables.

As the UK’s chancellor of the exchequer, Sunak gave us a multi-billion pound boost to the green economy with a package that sought to create jobs, save money and decarbonize the British housing stock.

Such actions turned traditional thinking about conservatives on their head (it was widely thought that the party wouldn’t prioritize green ‘issues’) and turned Sunak into a bit of a poster boy for progressive politics.

However, he has been cautious about net-zero, stating: “If we go too hard and too fast then we will lose people… and that’s no way to get there, and I think we can get there in a way that’s about growth, that’s about jobs, that’s about industries of the future, and that’s the way to do it.”

Additionally, just yesterday, Sunak stated that he would not allow more onshore windfarms. If he sticks to that, that will be a truly damaging position for British renewables.

Liz Truss

If you are part of the renewables industry or you care about the environment in any way, Liz Truss is probably not the PM for you.

According to the BBC, Truss has some of the most prominent net zero skeptics among her supporters and in 2014 she cut subsidies for solar farms, calling them “a blight on the landscape”.

She is trying to row back on these positions now and has publicly committed to Net Zero, but considering she’s in a dogfight for leadership, that’s perhaps unsurprising.

A rock and a hard place so it seems.

Progress 

The figures for the last quarter have just been published and show that renewable generation has increased by 9.3% when compared to the same period last year due to increased capacity and more favorable weather conditions, particularly for wind and solar PV. 

Generation reached 38.2 TWh, second only to the first quarter of 2020 when the UK experienced exceptionally high wind speeds. Renewables’ share of electricity generation was 45.5%, again, the second highest compared to the record in Quarter 1 2020.

Ruth Chapman, MD of Dulas writes: “These figures do serve as a reminder that despite the terror of ‘furnace Britain’ earlier this week, we are making enormous progress and breaking records continually. Whoever takes up the mantle of being the next British Prime Minister must commit to intensifying our approach to green energy. This week’s weather serves as a harbinger that our next leader cannot afford to ignore.”

Chris Skidmore, the minister who signed the net zero legislation into law in 2019 says that it would now be “electoral suicide to dump net zero”. 

I think it’s safe to say that Britain, red and blistered from the searing heats earlier this week, emphatically agrees.

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