Pursuing net zero needn’t be ruinously expensive, can bring savings, and we are not alone if we do

She praised Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron for their exercises in policy renewal.

And she took a good example of a key policy area – energy. She set out her critique of current policy: “We’re falling between two stools – too high costs and too little progress.” The cost of electricity is indeed too high though overall progress is not too bad.

Britain under the Conservatives did successfully lower our carbon dioxide emissions – one estimate is now down to their lowest level for 150 years.

But she missed an opportunity to take some pride in that Tory achievement.

Her argument started going awry with her reference to “Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act”. That legislation, passed in 2008 is one of the most significant examples of an Opposition shaping policy.

It set a target of reducing carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 and a mechanism for proposing how to do this and monitoring progress – the Climate Change Committee (CCC). It began with an exercise led by Tim Yeo and David Cameron to show that the Conservative Party was serious about tackling Climate Change.

It was part of our route back to office.

And it was in the Conservative tradition going right back to Margaret Thatcher, the first world leader to put the issue centre stage.

Kemi rightly hates empty rhetoric with no plan behind it but the CCC certainly produces plans – sometimes in extraordinary detail. You don’t have to agree with them but they are serious attempts to show what needs to change to get down to net zero and what the costs and benefits are. There are legitimate arguments about the role of the public versus private sector.

There is a purist free market case for simply a Carbon Tax which recognises the wider costs of carbon dioxide emissions and ensures users of fossil energy pay the real price. That alone would then deliver massive change. But in the absence of such a tax we have more complex mechanisms.

Theresa May then legislated to make the target more ambitious – full net zero by 2050. Some critics think that somehow, we in Britain are taking this seriously whilst everyone else is laughing at us. But there is a host of activity around the world. Indeed China’s rise to dominance of key net zero technologies such as solar panels and increasingly electric vehicles is evidence how seriously they take it.

Britain has done better than some.

Germany’s dependence on Russian gas and abandonment of nuclear power has been a catastrophically bad strategy. But we are not alone. French nuclear power, pre-dating the recognition of the danger of climate change, is a very effective strategy. Even during President Trump’s first term America reduced their emissions a lot. Most major countries are trying to do something about this.

Kemi worries tackling climate change will “bankrupt us”. She rightly asks, “How we can deliver cheap and clean energy, without bankrupting businesses”. The costs of tackling climate change are very substantial but economists estimate they are going down. They now talk of investment of £700b over the next 25 years as against earlier estimates of over £1trillion.  And these costs are offset by very substantial operational savings from electrification – £600b. A net cost of £100b is far from bankruptcy.

Our work at Resolution Foundation shows that the gains are not neatly aligned with the costs.

So for example more affluent families with electric vehicles charging them off street do very well. People who can afford it gain a lot from insulating their houses. But there needs to be some mechanism for sharing the costs and benefits around – the kind of tricky issue which Tories worry about. But overall there are big potential gains in household costs: the CCC said in February that shifting towards net-zero would help cut household energy bills and motoring costs by £1,800 per year by 2050. The current mechanism of loading all the costs onto electricity, our cleanest source of power, make no sense. There is an opportunity for a bold Tory plan to tackle this.

We also need to escape our dependence on gas.

As the OBR rightly points out “There is a risk that the UK economy remains relatively highly dependent on imported gas…Continued dependence on gas could be as expensive fiscally as completing the transition to net-zero”. Kemi says rather surprisingly that “Net zero makes us dangerously dependent on countries who don’t share our values,” Actually it is a great way of achieving energy independence and security.

Importing gas is the real dangerous dependence.

There are economic opportunities here which Conservatives as a pro-growth party should be focussing on. We are a global centre for offshore wind – and could and should have done more to promote it as a British business opportunity. With the strength of Rolls Royce we could be a world leader in small modular reactors. Now we are a key leader in nuclear fusion – partly because we have got the regulatory regime right by not treating it as if it is nuclear fission.

All this serious stuff is very different from Reform whose energy plan was absurd.

They were actually trying to penalise the development of batteries when energy storage is one of the key challenges. And they want to bury electric cables instead of pylons which would be fine if it were not ruinously expensive. There could be a real contrast here between them and a new Conservative approach.

There is room for a better Conservative plan. I hope that is what the Policy Review comes up with.