Octopus founder says climate policies must address energy costs
Remarks come ahead of pivotal English by-election
Politicians in the UK and Europe should stop telling people to make “sacrifices” to curb climate change and instead focus on bringing electricity bills down, said British businessman and government adviser Greg Jackson.
Speaking ahead of the Makerfield by-election and the prospect of electoral gains by the Reform UK party, which has promised to abolish climate policies, the Octopus Energy founder and chief executive said governments have failed to make energy more affordable.
“On a bigger scale we could not have gone about the electricity transition in the UK and Europe in a worse way if we wanted to get public opinion to support it,” he told the FT’s Climate & Impact Summit.
“My request to all politicians is to relentlessly try hard now to have all policies that line up people’s immediate self-interest with that of the planet, rather than telling people we have to make sacrifices in order to fend off a threat that a lot of them don’t see,” he added.
The Labour government under Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to bring household bills down by hundreds of pounds and to transition the grid to clean energy by 2030.
Reform, which is contesting the by-election, has said it would cull “all net zero commitments”, rip up renewable energy contracts and “strike down” subsidies for wind farms and solar panels.
But Jackson said Reform’s emphasis on saving taxpayers’ money did not have to run counter to efforts to electrify energy systems.
“Obviously I have no political views,” he said. “A counterintuitive thought, though, is that among Reform’s many areas of focus is saying that energy costs are too high. And, look, to drive down electricity costs is so crucial for electrification.”
As the UK’s largest household energy supplier, Octopus has made the case for years that greening the UK’s electricity grid and introducing local electricity prices could help drive down energy bills in a win-win for the climate and for people.
Bills in the UK had unfortunately become a “dumping ground” for various projects, he said.
The retail electricity price includes the wholesale price of electricity, as well as extra charges to pay for government policies such as supporting vulnerable households, renewable electricity subsidies and upgrading electricity networks.
Catherine McKenna, a lawyer and Canada’s former environment and climate change minister who is now an adviser to Singapore’s Temasek, told the conference that governments could save money by no longer subsidising fossil fuels.
This would help make clean energy relatively cheaper, enabling them to frame climate action as “addressing the affordability crisis”.
She was also critical of the Canadian government’s moves to build a new oil pipeline. Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former UN climate envoy, struck a deal with the oil-rich province of Alberta last month on industrial carbon pricing, laying the groundwork for a new oil pipeline aiming to send up to 1mn barrels a day to Asia.
“Leaders have decided they’re not going to care about this massive existential threat,” she said. “I just wish governments would get their act together.”