Is Burnham's pragmatism on climate change really that pragmatic?

With extreme heatwaves killing thousands in the UK this year, climate change has inserted itself back into the media, sparking debates across the political spectrum on how to tackle the crisis most effectively. As Conservative peer David Willetts pointed out, 86% of Britons now see “climate change as at least partially responsible for the heatwave”, with a similar poll finding that 45% of Reform voters admit that these heatwaves are not only making them more anxious about climate change, but overall “more fearful for the future”. 

Even with this sense of urgency, Burnham has taken a more “pragmatic” approach: facilitating job creation through the rollback of electric vehicles and oil drilling in the North Sea. 

The move to zero-emission vehicles (ZEV) by 2030 was first announced under the Conservative government. This ZEV mandate included a phased target implementation for electric vehicle sales, where 80% of all new cars sold in the UK must be electric vehicles by 2030, phasing out all new non-ZEV sales by 2035. Indeed, the Climate Change Committee posited that electric vehicles are the “single biggest contributor to cutting UK carbon pollution in the next decade”. 

On the same day as the recent emergency alert advising against the use of disposable barbeques, Burnham’s government launched a consultation that proposed cutting back the target on electric vehicle sales from 80% by 2030 to just 50%. This move will further weaken the already fragile mandate, which Starmer’s government had impacted by adding “flexibilities”, allowing car manufacturers to make more cars with petrol engines. 

This decision followed carmakers' lobbyists emphasising the decreasing demand for new British vehicles, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic and the introduction of the ZEV mandate. These existing changes, however, have already led experts to forecast an extra 17 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere by 2030. As such, it is not implausible to argue that if Burnham does continue to prioritise this existing industry over climate policy, it will not only negatively impact greenhouse gas mitigation, but also potentially undermine the broader transition to greener energy. 

Whilst the opportunity of North Sea drilling was ruled out in Labour’s 2024 manifesto, which got his predecessor elected, Burnham has since floated the idea, namely when talking to President Trump. As the conflict in Iran continues to create fuel price volatility, arguments in favour of domestic oil production in Rosebank and Jackdaw have resurfaced, namely those that claim Britain has control over the flow of oil and influence over prices. Despite this, energy experts have coined this opportunistic belief a “delusion”, with their research instead finding that the short-term economic boost would be outweighed by long-term economic damage. This is without even acknowledging the catastrophic ways in which North Sea drilling would accelerate the climate crisis through the production of new fossil fuels. 

This is further exemplified by the approval of multiple Artificial intelligence (AI) data centres across the UK, which may undermine Britain’s legally binding climate goals, as stated by the chair of the Commons environmental audit committee. Two planned gas-fired AI data centres in Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire will reportedly produce more than 4.5 million tonnes of carbon emissions every year, half a million more than ExxonMobil’s UK emissions in 2023. These two data centres are among the first to be fast-tracked as part of the government’s nationally significant infrastructure project regime, subsequently bypassing the approval of local planning authorities. In light of the heatwaves and droughts, legal challenges have been raised to the environmental impact of these big tech companies’ polluting data centres, with the government yet to respond to concerns about access to water and power in the regions. 

Not only is it a political mistake for the Labour Party to downplay the scale of the climate crisis, but it has devastating environmental and human consequences. The goal of job creation is not incompatible with greener policy, with recent research concluding that clean energy deployment policies have led to “significant net gains in employment”. Burnham and his government must acknowledge that continuing to take steps to mitigate the climate crisis is perhaps the true pragmatic approach after all.