Sir Patrick Vallance—who, as former chief scientific adviser under then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was one of the architects of Britain’s destructive lockdowns—believes the race to net zero should be treated with the same urgency as the 2020 drive for COVID vaccines.
Vallance has publicly backed Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s pledge to decarbonise Britain’s electricity supply by 2030 (five years earlier than the Conservative government’s target), which even green activists don’t believe to be possible.
Toby Young, editor-in-chief of the Daily (lockdown and net zero) Sceptic website, told The European Conservative that Vallance’s “endorsement of this hare-brained plan doesn’t surprise me.”
After all, he has form when it comes to ruining the British economy to mitigate some wildly exaggerated risk.
GB News host Ben Leo added online that if net zero is to be treated with the same urgency as the search for COVID vaccines, it will be done “with total disregard of the consequences and making corporations and lobbyists vastly richer.”
Vallance, who has long advocated for officials to take a more radical approach to net zero, this week wrote in The Times that the need to “end the era of excessive carbon emissions” is “an overriding mission for Britain and something that every country on earth will need to do if we are to avoid further damage to our environment.”
Treat this as a mission, just as the vaccine challenge was. It will need prime ministerial support and single-point empowered and accountable leadership to drive delivery.
The former government adviser admitted that under Starmer’s plan, “risks will need to be taken and not everything will work.”
A Labour government would spend tens of billions of pounds on the net zero drive (a goal which the Conservatives have signed up to, albeit far less enthusiastically). Even Starmer’s alleged plans to boost British businesses are based on the proviso that these are green-focussed.
Vallance’s political interjection comes just three months after the former scientific adviser joined the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
