The former Prime Minister accused the Energy Secretary on Wednesday of pushing a “quixotic fantasy” and said that China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, did not care about his beliefs.
Sir Tony made the remarks a day after launching an unprecedented attack on Sir Keir Starmer, claiming in a 5,700-word essay that the Prime Minister had no plan to fix Britain. …
The intervention has piled further pressure on Sir Keir, who is expected to face a leadership challenge in the coming weeks after leading Labour to a historic local election loss.
In an interview on Wednesday, Sir Tony singled out Mr Miliband as he urged Sir Keir to abandon his flagship proposals to achieve 95% clean power by 2030 and Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050.
He told the News Agents podcast: “Xi Jinping is not sitting there in Beijing saying: ‘I wonder what that Ed Miliband thinks.’ In the end, of course, renewable energy is going to be the future, long-term…
“Right now, our energy costs are really high; they’re imposing costs on business, we’ve got this artificial intelligence revolution that’s going to use more and more energy. We need more electricity if we’re going to go for electric cars, which again we should do.”
He added: “Therefore, all I’m saying is the lens through which you judge policy should be cheap energy and electrification, because that’s the way the rest of the world’s doing it.
“And it’s a sort of quixotic fantasy to think that because Britain’s decided – with, by the way, under 1% of global emissions – it is going to go down a different path at huge expense… It’s quixotic to think that the rest of the world is going to follow that. It’s not, and it isn’t.” …
Sir Tony warned Britain would continue to rely on carbon beyond the Net Zero deadline of 2050, adding: “I don’t understand why you’d shut your own fossil fuel industry and import someone else’s.” ...<<<Read More>>>....
