Labour’s green contortions are a foretaste of trouble ahead

Editorial: In purely political terms, Keir Starmer may be right to scale back on his party’s £28bn-a-year green pledge. But now comes the hard bit – creating a workable plan to move Britain closer to net zero carbon emissions that will also be a hit with the electorate

(Dave Brown)

Confirmation that global warming has exceeded 1.5C over the past year will rightly be seen as a flashing red light on the climate crisis dashboard.

As responsible news organisations – including The Independent – have reported, there are short-term factors behind this rise, notably the El Nino natural variation in winds and sea surface temperatures. And while that warning level set by the Paris climate agreement has not yet been breached by long-term average temperatures, the latest figures reinforce the likelihood that the long-term average will breach that 1.5C threshold within the next decade.

So it looks like bad timing for the Labour Party, which is likely to form a government by the end of the year, to announce the same day that it is retreating from its central policy aimed at minimising climate change.