WHEN Tory leadership contender Penny Mordaunt said that Britain’s elusive net-zero carbon emissions plan shouldn’t “clobber people,” she meant it shouldn’t be allowed to diminish energy company profits.

When Liz Truss opined that the government’s still largely imaginary plan shouldn’t be implemented in a way that harms people and businesses she was expressing anxiety that the imminent autumn energy price hike would torpedo Tory election prospects.

We don’t need last weekend’s YouGov poll to tell us that just four out every hundred Tory Party members think that hitting the net-zero emissions target by 2050 was one of their three priorities in choosing their next leader and our prime minister — the way the candidates for Tory leadership position themselves on the issue told us this way in advance.

One Tory with an eye to the future is Ashok Sharma, the Cabinet minister who led on the 2021 Cop26 climate conference and last week said he threatened to quit if the next Tory leader abandons the 2050 target.

The incurable optimist might think that once the contenders to occupy No 10 escape the deadening effect that pandering to the Tory rank-and-file entails that they might listen to the science.

To invest this much trust in the primitive ideas of people who thought that we could acquire protection from the coronavirus through “herd immunity” seems unwise.

It’s clear that we need a multidimensional approach to dealing with the climate emergency.

The government does have net-zero aspirations, is committed to a 68 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, 78 per cent by 2035 and net zero by 2050.

But when even Lord Deben — the recycled former Tory minister John Selwyn Gummer — who chairs Britain’s climate change committee (CCC) thinks there are “serious gaps across the board” in the implementation plan, we need to take note.

Ed Miliband seems to be on the ball. He tweeted that “as Britain faces its worst heatwave warning ever, it beggars belief that leadership candidates are tripping over each other to dump climate commitments.”

That is good political point-scoring but Labour in opposition — on climate change as on almost every other issue — needs to present a policy portfolio that contains real and radical solutions to the whole host of problems that, if at the present moment present themselves as global warming, actually show that we can’t continue with capitalism.

The emphasis in the CCC report on “market-led solutions” to what is an emergency is alarming. We know from the coronavirus pandemic that market-led solutions lead inevitably to profiteering and corruption.

If we take the profit out of energy we create the best conditions for rational planning and science-driven solutions. Taking Britain’s energy production and distribution system out of capitalist ownership and directing its revenues to a massive programme of household insulation and renewable energy is a solution in search of a sponsor.

Perhaps Miliband could emulate Sharma and make it an issue of confidence in the shadow cabinet.

The climate emergency is an issue that directs a laser beam at the inconsistencies and evasions of conventional politics. This is why activists in climate action groups like Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain and a host of organisations like Friends of the Earth are so important and why it is so necessary for the labour movement and the political left to find as many points of united action as possible.

We don’t need a prior agreement on every tactic — we need an intense and continuing conversation.

Working-class politics without climate consciousness will be barren as will environmental politics that cannot envisage system change.