Toward the end of the fourteen years in which Britain’s Conservative party, either alone or in coalition, was in government, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, unnerved by opinion polling, made a few, very tentative moves to dilute the Tories’ longstanding climate fundamentalism. Whatever. Labour swept the Conservatives out of office, winning an enormous parliamentary majority despite a rather modest plurality (34 percent) of the votes, helped by how Britain’s first-past-the-vote electoral system worked against a right divided between the Tories and Nigel Farage’s Reform.
Sunak’s backsliding was consigned to the past. Ed Miliband became Secretary of State for — oxymoron alert — Energy Security and Net Zero, a job he had last held in 2010 (he subsequently failed miserably as Labour’s leader). Miliband is speeding up the pace at which the U.K. is running the pointless, ruinous, and counterproductive “race” to net zero greenhouse gas . . .
