Andy Sloan: The current climate

As I did the school run last Tuesday, I was explaining to my kids what a pivotal day in history it would prove to be. It was the day of the vote in Germany to release the constitutional brake on borrowing to rearm the Bundeswehr. A cool trillion in extra spending. March 18 2025, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, 80 years after the end of the Second World War, and the re-emergence of German militarism is being cheered on.

Boorah. ‘Believe me,’ I harped, ‘this day will go down in history, remember it.’ Honestly, my kids must love being driven to school by Dad in the mornings.

For their support for this historic splurge, the Greens secured a hundred billion for the Climate Transition Fund, which as a secondary development was no small thing. It was no small thing for climate action and net zero in its own right. But in a twist of ironic timing, the very same day, back in Blighty, Kemi Badenoch shifted the Tory party’s net zero commitment to somewhere vaguely beyond 2050 – apparently in the name of pragmatism, but more likely to appease the increasingly vocal faction that sees climate policy as a luxury item. A few years back I did warn that previous unrealistic, uncosted net zero commitments would come back to bite us and turn the public off the idea, to slip into my bad literary ‘I told you so’ habit.

Here in Guernsey, a few days after this day of history, after four years of gestation, the States finally produced three long-awaited climate policy documents: a strategy for offshore wind, a 200-page treatise on our pathway to net zero, and a proposal for a brand-new renewable energy regulator. These three arrived with a certain grim familiarity, as over the course of two working days, the States dropped over 20 major policy letters ahead of its deadline for the current term. The idea that this Assembly has the time, energy or political legitimacy to meaningfully debate and decide all of it is, frankly ludicrous. And having just voted against sitting for longer to be able to do this, it’s hard not to sigh audibly at the irony.

But, but, but, the upshot is, like buses, we now have three climate policy letters all at once. Now, before we move on, remember that I’m an advocate of climate action. I just consider myself more from the hard-nosed realist wing of the movement. We shouldn’t discount Kemi’s pragmatism, just because it happens to be appeasement to the luxury item faction. Bear with me while I explain. Net zero by 2050 is the target associated with the Paris Agreement ‘stretch’ target of limiting climate change to 1.5 degrees. Given temperature rises already baked in (if you’ll excuse the poor taste pun), we’re never going to make that target, so why load the economy with greater costs than necessary in the name of a ship that’s sailed? What’s wrong with defaulting to the two-degree target we originally signed up for? And anyway, goes this line of argument, given the two most populous countries on the planet, China and India, have only committed to net zero by 2060 and 2070 respectively, why knock ourselves out in the process? Now I paraphrase but that really is the gist of it and I’m not unsympathetic to it. But to be clear before we go on, I have no time for climate change deniers. It’s real and we’re causing it. Milankovitch cycles or no Milankovitch cycles (Google it).

Back to the reports. Let’s start with the more promising of the three. The offshore wind policy letter, while late and overly cautious, is not without merit. It does the groundwork. It sets a two-year target to come back with commercial leasing terms, a developer, and (hopefully) a revenue stream. It outlines the potential – £300m. in value to the States if we get it right – and it establishes a delivery structure, albeit one with all the assertiveness of a beige filing cabinet. Yes, we’re years behind where we should be. Yes, it’s light on firm commitments. But in a climate policy landscape where ‘monitor’ is still treated as a verb of action, this at least puts something on the table.

What it does best is recognise that Guernsey has something to offer. A viable seabed. A route to market. A potential long-term revenue stream. And in an increasingly energy insecure world, that counts for something. The challenge now is to follow through. Because the turbines are still in the PowerPoint, not in the water.

By contrast, the Pathway To Net Zero strategy is not so much a roadmap as a catalogue of polite intentions. The Siemens report is an exercise in projecting forward the future based on a series of assumptions of action. That is – these are projections, not forecasts. And these assumptions are of actions based on expenditures for which there is no funding plan. No capital programme. No delivery body. No budget. Instead, we’re treated to a planning framework that replaces a two-year review cycle with a seven-year one. And we’ll ‘monitor innovation’ in hydrogen, carbon capture and other technologies that someone else, somewhere else, is hopefully developing. Altogether a package that is so inoffensive one wonders if it’s a deliberate move to avoid scrutiny and debate. But it’s a wasted opportunity to debate how to solve the core issues – the big problem areas of heating, transport and waste. Let’s give some credit, we are technically on track to hit our 2030 target. But that success to date has nothing to do with strategy, but the accidental dividend of a good infrastructure decision made two decades ago – the French interconnector. So, it would be an idea to pop the thinking caps on to try and figure out how to do the rest, wherever the date for our net zero lands – it’s still got to land somewhere.

The good news is that real ideas are beginning to emerge. One of them is Green Air – a home-grown initiative with genuine ambition: to electrify short-hop air travel in the Channel Islands. A fully electric inter-island airline, designed to replicate the kind of seamless, bus-like service we once had, with fast turnarounds, clean propulsion, and minimal overhead. Think of it as infrastructure, not just aviation – something that answers climate needs and connectivity problems in the same go. Because as we are all painfully aware we do have connectivity problems. Ask anyone trying to send a child off-island for sport, healthcare or education. Or ask me – this Saturday lunchtime – when I’ll be sweating away on a static bike at Kings, raising money for the Guernsey Rugby Academy to help the kids get over to Jersey for the Junior Siam (https://giving.gg/donate/event/9810 – I’m in the U11 Parents team, any contributions appreciated).

Green Air’s the kind of innovation we should be rallying behind in my opinion – I’ll declare an interest here: I’ve recently joined forces with Mark Harrisson, the man behind it, to help develop the plan and see if we can make it happen. But it’s a project that ties together energy policy, transport decarbonisation, and regional economic resilience – and does so with a commercial model built from the bottom up. No glossy strategy. No white paper. No ‘watching brief’. Just a serious idea trying to get off the ground – literally.

Because if we’re serious about climate action – not just in spreadsheets, but in streets, skies and systems – we need to make room for innovation and ideas like this. We need to create an environment that supports them, perhaps even funds them, and allows them to challenge the inertia of institutional caution. The real test of any climate plan isn’t how it reads – it’s whether it clears a path for the kind of disruption from the private sector that we need.

Of course, none of this is easy. Running meaningful climate policy in a jurisdiction this small, with limited government bandwidth, is no easy task. We need to be reasonable and understanding of these difficulties.

And finally, what of the third climate policy letter? In the week following Sir Keir Starmer moved to abolish a regulator in the UK, Guernsey published proposals to create a new one: the Offshore Renewable Energy Commission. This report is worth a read just to savour the following line: ‘Since 2008, the States has investigated the potential for offshore marine renewables in local waters. The conclusion is that there is a reasonable resource available for commercial developments... The period between the introduction of the Renewable Energy Law and this policy letter has been used to actively monitor the marine renewable energy industry and assess the potential for offshore renewable energy developments in Guernsey.’ That’s 15 years of ‘actively monitoring’. Priceless. Not quite Yes, Minister, but it’s close.