This doesn’t mean that the Government has made a mistake in rowing back on some of the stricter intermediate targets, or erred by giving the go-ahead to another round of North Sea oil and gas licensing. Most people can see that these things make sense.
As Mr Justice Holgate intimated last week in dismissing a High Court challenge from Greenpeace, there are perfectly reasonable economic and energy security grounds that don’t necessarily conflict with climate change targets for further North Sea oil and gas development.
The same goes for pushing back the date for banning petrol and diesel-fuelled vehicle production, which in any case merely brings the UK into line with what the EU has already done.
Do we really want to give away our entire auto industry to the Chinese, which is essentially what would have happened if the earlier ban had been adhered to? Making us feel virtuous would be scant consolidation for the jobs and economic wellbeing thereby lost.
The UK is responsible for less than 1pc of global emissions. It matters not a jot what we do if others refuse to do the same. We merely shoot ourselves in the foot.
Even so, the sort of measured net zero scepticism that the Government now promotes is plainly not shifting the dial in terms of votes. As the by-election results showed, the costs of climate change mitigation are not a frontline political issue.
The Government’s messaging has taken net zero scepticism mainstream, yet the reality of what it has done so far makes little difference one way or the other; it merely tinkers at the edges of the climate change commitment.
All the same, we now have a clear dividing line between the two main parties on saving the planet. Gone is the notion, championed by Boris Johnson as prime minister, that the energy transition is a massive, cost-free economic opportunity in which Britain can lead the world.
Instead, we have the current compromised approach, which sees energy security as best served by having more oil and gas.
Labour, by contrast, believes that only by going hell for leather on renewables can we have both energy security and net zero.
On this issue at least, Labour is Continuity Johnson. On the evidence of last week’s by-elections, you’d conclude that Johnson’s net zero boosterism was rather more on the money in terms of its electoral appeal than Sunak’s net zero scepticism.
Britain has so far been way ahead of the game in meeting its carbon reduction budgets, yet it is now quite widely seen overseas as losing its nerve, and by seeming to go slower, setting a bad example to others.
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