British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak
Photo:
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Rishi Sunak
began his tenure as British Prime Minister this week with a move that will warm
Vladimir Putin’s
heart: reversing predecessor
Liz Truss’s
tentative push for more fracking for domestic natural gas.
In his first appearance in Parliament as PM on Wednesday, Mr. Sunak said he’s going to stick with his Conservative Party’s 2019 campaign promise to maintain a ban on hydraulic fracturing technology to drill for gas under the English countryside. The world has changed since 2019, not least with Russia’s energy blackmail and soaring costs, and Ms. Truss wanted to lift the fracking ban if local communities agreed.
Fracking divides the Tory coalition because so many of the party’s rank and file hail from the genteel countryside. Former Prime Minister
David Cameron
tried but failed to permit fracking, and
Boris Johnson
eventually banned it. For all her mistakes, Ms. Truss recognized this made the country vulnerable as global gas-price spikes feed through to calamitous increases in household and commercial energy costs.
Mr. Sunak also supported fracking during his failed leadership bid against Ms. Truss over the summer. But now that he’s succeeded her as PM, he is hanging on the fantasy that renewables and nuclear power can meet all of Britain’s energy needs. Mr. Johnson deserves credit for trying to jump-start nuclear, but those projects are years from completion and many households and businesses are set up to burn gas anyway. The battery technology doesn’t currently exist to power an advanced industrial economy on wind and solar.
Without natural gas, or a credible plan to produce more of it, Mr. Sunak’s energy strategy is no strategy at all. His agenda of tax increases and European-style regulation already foretells a low-growth Britain. Under his energy policies, Britain could be colder and darker, too.
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