Tory row erupts as Rishi Sunak eyes rollback of key green plans

LONDON — Splits in Britain’s governing Conservative Party burst into the open Wednesday morning after a report that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak plans to loosen a host of key environmental policies.

The BBC reported late Tuesday that seven green policies now face a rethink. It prompted a hurried response from No. 10 Downing Street and a statement from Sunak confirming he’ll be making a speech this week — but insisting he remains committed to the U.K.’s headline goal of reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.

“No leak will stop me beginning the process of telling the country how and why we need to change,” Sunak said.

“As a first step, I’ll be giving a speech this week to set out an important long-term decision we need to make so our country becomes the place I know we all want it to be for our children.”

Changes reportedly under consideration include shifting a 2030 ban on new petrol and diesel car sales to 2035; phasing out 80 percent of new gas boilers, rather than all of them, by 2035; delaying a 2026 ban on off-grid oil boilers to 2035; ensuring no new energy efficiency rules are imposed on landlords or homeowners; ruling out taxes to discourage flying; no new policies to encourage carpooling; and a rethink of planned recycling schemes.

Sunak insisted realism about climate plans “doesn’t mean losing our ambition or abandoning our commitments — far from it,” and said the U.K. remains “committed to net zero by 2050 and the agreements we have made internationally — but doing so in a better, more proportionate way.”

But the report has exposed deep rifts in the Tory party, which signed the net-zero pledge into law but includes MPs deeply skeptical of the push to decarbonize the U.K.

Echoing that skeptical tone, Home Secretary Suella Braverman — on the right of the party — told Times Radio Wednesday morning: “We’re not going to save the planet by bankrupting the British people.”

Braverman told BBC’s Radio 4 she would not “pre-empt” Sunak’s speech, but said the cost of “achieving some of these arbitrary targets has to be taken into account.” And she added: “We don’t want to set targets which are totally unrealistic and punitive.”

But Alok Sharma, who served in Boris Johnson’s Cabinet and headed up the COP26 climate summit, warned it would be “incredibly damaging for business confidence, for inward investment, if the political consensus that we have forged in our country on the environment and climate action is fractured.”

He told Radio 4: “Frankly, I really do not believe that it’s going to help any political party electorally which chooses to go down this path.”

Johnson ally and former Environment Minister Zac Goldsmith told BBC Newsnight on Tuesday that Sunak’s “short stint as PM will be remembered as the moment the U.K. turned its back on the world and on future generations. A moment of shame.”