Climate will be a battleground in Britain’s next election

Climate change has never been a core issue at a British general election. At the next one it will be. That partly reflects rising salience: since the last ballot in 2019, the environment has risen to become one of voters’ bigger concerns, alongside the economy, the National Health Service and immigration. But there is also an increasingly acrimonious divide between the two big parties over green policy.Take the Conservatives first. Earlier this month, the government announced that Britain had become the first big economy to cut its territorial greenhouse-gas emissions by half since 1990. That sounds impressive, and it is. But celebrating past success masks the fact that Britain has done well on the easier bits of decarbonisation, such as closing down coal-fired power plants, while failing to develop plans for tackling emissions in tougher areas, like home heating and agriculture.