Now even Ed Miliband backs Heathrow: So much for his green dream

As well as openly admitting to breaking a pre-election promise on energy bills, the climate change secretary threw his weight behind Heathrow’s third runway – proving he should not be in this job, writes John Rentoul

Ed Miliband has failed. His mission was to decarbonise the electricity supply by 2030, and he cannot do it. He couldn’t ever have done it, but it has now become obvious.

Seven months have gone by since the election, and the deadline is now a mere 59 months away. Yet he continues to pretend not only that it will happen, but that it will solve all our problems.

In a few seconds on breakfast TV this morning, the energy secretary set out why he should not be in his job. The presenter reminded him that he had promised at the election to cut people’s gas and electricity bills by £300. “Up to £300,” Miliband interrupted, giving away Labour’s sales trick, by which it promised the British people economic growth of “up to” the fastest in the G7.

The presenter was undeterred and said of the “up to” £300 cut: “That’s not happening, is it?”

“No,” replied Miliband, “and let me tell you why.”

Give him full marks for honesty in admitting a broken election promise. But there was worse to come. He accepted the Bank of England’s forecast that energy bills will increase this year. “I fear that bills will keep rising,” he said.

Then came the pivot. “This is our whole point,” he declared triumphantly. “The only way to bring bills down, the only way to get control back, is to have clean home-grown power that we control.” In other words, our failure vindicates our plan.

The reason you cannot have £300 now, he said, is that “we’re in the grip of markets that we don’t control run by petrostates and dictators”. Only by sticking to our mission can we free ourselves from “global markets”, and – I paraphrase – you can have the £300 later. “Up to” £300. Much later.

But this promise of green jam tomorrow rests on achieving the clean energy mission – which is not happening by 2030, and not for many long years after that. I need not go into the numbers here. Professor Dieter Helm, the foremost authority on energy policy in the UK, has them all on his website.

The 2030 target is now undeniably a fiction. It rests on the fallacy that not just Miliband but other ministers who ought to know better continue to repeat. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, did it in her speech last week announcing the government’s support for a third runway at Heathrow. “There is no trade-off between economic growth and net zero,” she declared.

Of course there is, because otherwise all those countries that have pledged net zero carbon emissions would have achieved their goal by now. Miliband at least had the decency to admit that his is not a consensus view when he said in the Commons on Tuesday: “There’ll be people who have different views on this, but clean energy is the economic opportunity of the 21st century – whether it is small modular reactors, or offshore wind, or hydrogen, or carbon capture ...”

The fallacy is that, because converting to low carbon energy creates work, it must be good for the economy, in the way that John Maynard Keynes argued that burying banknotes and getting people to dig them up again was good for growth. But Keynes was talking about times of high unemployment and deficient demand, not about the wisdom of imposing extra costs on energy.

What was striking about the list of clean energy opportunities that Miliband reeled off in parliament is how expensive they all are. Nuclear power stations, small or large, produce more expensive electricity than gas generators, even when world gas prices are dictated by evil petrostates and dictators. Offshore wind is more expensive than onshore wind. Hydrogen is hugely expensive, and carbon capture is a technology that has not been proven at scale, let alone at an affordable price, despite decades of trying.

Perhaps Miliband is the perfect politician for a hypocritical age. Opinion polls suggest that people want green policies as long as they don’t cost anything. He reflects that faithfully, supporting ambitious green policies up to the point where it becomes clear that they will cost money, when he allows himself to be overruled by his colleagues and starts talking about collective responsibility.

He did it on Heathrow. Although in private he opposed a third runway when serving in Gordon Brown’s government, he publicly backed the initiative at the time so long as it met legal climate obligations. Then, when in opposition, he objected to it. And now, he has backed the plans once more. He will do the same with clean energy.

Maybe that is what the people want. After all, they voted for it. But I can’t help thinking that what the country needs is a serious debate about the trade-offs between growth and greenery, and how much it is prepared to pay to reduce climate-changing activity.