Corporate Knights reached out to conservatives in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. who are hoping to steer their parties toward a more sustainable future. We asked all three the same question: what is your prescription for green conservatives? Read our introduction here.
In 2006, David Cameron, then leader of the Conservative Opposition, travelled to the Arctic to be photographed “hugging a husky.” The image was carried in every U.K. newspaper and was part of the party’s attempt to “detoxify” after years in opposition. There was a growing recognition that a serious party needed to be seen to care about tackling environmental problems, and shortly after Cameron promised voters he would lead the country’s “greenest ever” government.
Seven years later, as prime minister, Cameron was overheard demanding that his ministers “cut the green crap.” The United Kingdom had hit a turbulent economic patch, and despite years of telling the world that it was in the green transition that jobs, growth and opportunities were to be found (a claim borne out since by experience), Cameron had abandoned ship at the first bump.
Although his record in office on the environment wasn’t exactly glowing, his apparent U-turn dashed in an instant the credibility the Conservative Party had steadily rebuilt after years of neglect, and it took years of heavy lifting to regain it.
Theresa May’s stint was brief, but cross-party pressure did result in a world first: a legal commitment to achieving net-zero emissions in the U.K. by 2050.
It was Boris Johnson, whose 2019 manifesto placed “climate leadership” as a top international priority, who turned the U.K. into a recognized world leader on climate and the environment. As his environment minister, I was put in a position where I could do more for the environment than I thought possible in a lifetime.
At the COP26 climate summit, hosted by the U.K. in 2021, we secured commitments from world leaders that if delivered would turn the tide on deforestation. We played a defining role in securing agreement for a new global treaty on plastic pollution, and at the biodiversity summit in Montreal, U.K. leadership led directly to a new global agreement to protect 30% of the world’s land and oceans by the end of this decade. With our international aid, we committed to doubling nature and climate finance spending to £11.6 billion over five years.
Domestically, the government introduced perhaps the toughest environmental legislation in the developed world, not least through the landmark Environment Act, which I had the privilege of taking through Parliament. We saw stronger laws on pollution, more funding for nature, more protected areas, and a radical overhaul of farming subsidies to protect the environment. The U.K. remains one of the only countries in the world with legal targets to reverse biodiversity loss.
But in the months since Johnson left office, all of this has changed. The shift began after a close by-election result in the seat of Uxbridge, where, against the odds, the Conservatives managed to win. This was credited to the party having taken a stand against a London-wide “ultra low emissions zone,” which involved new costs for drivers of polluting vehicles.
Green has been a thread that runs through Conservative history.
Extrapolating from the result, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak calculated that if voters oppose one environmental policy, there might be political mileage in dropping the others. So in his own version of Cameron’s “cut the green crap” moment, Sunak promised to “max out” the remaining North Sea oil fields. His ministers, meanwhile, were sent out on the airwaves to denounce “eco fanatics” and the opposition’s “dangerous plans.”
It was the end of nearly two decades of broad consensus on the need for action (albeit with disagreements over the best ways to deliver it). Sunak had chosen as his election strategy to make the environment into a U.S.-style political wedge issue.
As it happens, the party went on to lose two previously safe seats just a short while later and currently languishes at record lows in the polls. So the strategy hasn’t worked. But the question is why? Who was Sunak trying to appeal to?
The answer offered by the left is that he was throwing “red meat” to right wingers, and that is undoubtedly what he thought he was doing. But the evidence suggests both he and the left have miscalculated.
Sunak was appealing to a certain type of conservative: people convinced the environmental agenda is a Trojan horse for socialism and who therefore latch onto any available theory that debunks any element of climate science. They, like some climate campaigners too, have reduced the “environment” down to mere carbon, and they do not dwell on the damage being done to natural systems like forests that we depend on.
These conservatives exist, of course, but they are by no means the majority – at least in the U.K., where the Conservative Environment Network boasts roughly 150 active members of Parliament.
Nor are they representative. Indeed, no matter how the question is phrased, the answers in every poll are the same: people want more nature and climate leadership. In one recent study, for example, 77% of 2019 Conservative voters in the U.K. agreed that “improving nature in your local area” is very or somewhat important – more than in any other group.
The core of Tory philosophy and the case for protecting the environment are the same.
- Margaret Thatcher in 1988
And this isn’t a new phenomenon. Green has been a thread that runs through Conservative history. It was Conservative administrations that introduced the Clean Air Act (1956), the Landfill Tax (1996), the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981). Conservatives introduced the first disposable plastic levies (2021), legally binding biodiversity recovery targets (2021), a net-zero target (2019) and the most recent Environment Act (2021). Further back, it was Robert Peel who passed the Mines Act and Factory Act (1842/44) and Benjamin Disraeli who passed the Public Health Act (1875).
When today’s conservatives in the U.K., U.S. and Canada dismiss the environment as “wokery,” it is worth considering that it was Margaret Thatcher who not only intervened to strengthen the Montreal Protocol to limit ozone-depleting chemicals; she was also the first leader of a developed nation to sound the alarm on climate. She told her party in 1988: “The core of Tory philosophy and the case for protecting the environment are the same. No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy – with a full repairing lease. This government intends to meet the terms of that lease in full.”
It was President Theodore Roosevelt who used executive orders to establish 150 million acres of protected land in the U.S. “The time has come,” he said, “to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone . . . when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation.”
It wasn’t despite being conservatives that Thatcher and Roosevelt took this approach; it was because they were conservatives. They understood that stewardship, looking out for future generations, living within natural limits, valuing critical natural systems, making the polluter pay – these are core conservative values.
Edmund Burke, often described as the father of conservative philosophy, wrote, “Society is a contract . . . a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” The late conservative intellectual Roger Scruton added that if environmental damage is treated as a mere “externality,” unpayable costs are inevitably heaped upon future generations.
Somewhere along the line, modern-day conservatives confused problems with solutions. They dislike the approach of the left to problem-solving, but rather than develop alternatives, they have chosen simply to ignore the problem.
But the challenges we face today cannot simply be wished away. Whatever the arguments over the precise trajectory of our changing climate, there is no disputing the near-suicidal levels of ecosystem and biodiversity loss we are witnessing today. There is no technological substitute for the great biomes like the Amazon or Congo, which regulate the world’s climate and produce the rainfall that makes agriculture possible.
We face our greatest challenge, and there’s nothing conservative about turning our backs to it. A conservative who is not also an environmentalist is, in fact, no conservative at all.
Zac Goldsmith was the U.K. minister for the international environment, climate, forests, ocean under Boris Johnson.
