In early June, with Australian prime minister Scott Morrison set to arrive for the G7 summit, the Whitehall buzz was of a grand bargain. Australia would get the access to Britain’s beef markets they craved; but in return, the trade deal would bind them into serious new commitments on climate change, a major achievement for Boris Johnson in what he’d called the government’s year of global leadership.
The G7 came and went. Johnson nudged elbows with Morrison on a draft deal the following week with plenty to say on beef, but precious little on climate. And a month later, we subsequently discovered, UK ministers bowed to Australian pressure and removed all references to targets. After this latest act of climate recalcitrance was revealed, Morrison was unapologetic: “In trade agreements, I deal with trade issues.”
The lack of resolve and collapse of ambition from the UK government when it came to tying Australia’s trade access to climate progress came as a disappointment and a shock to many environmental groups. For me, it was neither. I have spent more than a year watching Liz Truss—the previous secretary of state for international trade—throw away every opportunity she had to take action on climate through trade. No surprise at all for someone who hired Tony Abbott as her adviser.
Abbott, one of Morrison’s predecessors, invented the “trade agreements are for trade issues” mantra. In 2017, he boasted that Australia’s success in trade negotiations was down to ensuring “we weren’t side-tracked by peripheral issues such as... environmental standards.” Now that hallmark of Australian policy has consumed the UK’s Department for International Trade.
From 2019 onwards, the department negotiated rollover deals with 67 non-EU countries, designed to maintain preferential trade post-Brexit. In 2020, such was their scramble to secure these deals, the UK signed three quarters of the agreements registered with the WTO.
It was a historic opportunity to update each deal to reflect today’s climate realities and our net zero goals, showing the world how serious and ambitious we were about our leadership role at COP26. Instead, we got trade agreements with 67 countries near identical to the EU deals they replaced, with not one word of new language on the environment, biodiversity or climate, and not a single update to reference the Paris agreement. Rather than establishing a reputation as COP26 pioneers, under Truss the department earned the Whitehall nickname “Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V”—the ministry of copy and paste.
Nor is its record any better on brand new agreements. An enhanced agreement with Japan contained no enhancement on climate. Australia we know about. What progress there may be with New Zealand is down entirely to Jacinda Ardern’s government.
Then we have its flagship goal, membership of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). In April, I asked Truss what objectives she would pursue in her accession negotiations to boost trade in green technology and strengthen the agreement’s climate provisions. Her answer: not a single one.
Joining the CPTPP without demands of our own could seriously damage our climate ambitions. By the government’s own admission, the deal could torpedo attempts to foster our electric car battery industry and instead bolster already dominant producers, like Japan.
It would also increase our exposure to Investor-state Dispute Settlement claims—the mechanism designed to protect corporations from government regulation—at a time when ISDS claims are wreaking havoc on the net zero plans of countries across the world. Take the decades-old energy charter treaty, whose ISDS provisions have recently been used to resist Dutch plans to phase out coal power, as well as Italian proposals to restrict offshore extraction.
Again, Truss had a golden opportunity to lead global efforts to exclude fossil fuel investments from the treaty. Again, she chose to ignore it.
The same is true of carbon border tax proposals, designed to make the goods we import reflect their climate costs as much as those we produce at home. While other governments are wrestling with this complex challenge, Truss and her colleagues refused to engage, despite the UK importing more carbon emissions per head than any other G7 country.
Britain needs a government willing to use trade policy as a force for good. A government that challenges the orthodoxy that commercial interests trump climate action, a government that works with like-minded countries to promote trade in green technology—and says that access to our market goes hand-in-hand with a basic set of environmental responsibilities.
With the right leadership, we could advance these issues on the global stage, both at COP26 and beyond. But to date, that leadership has been missing. The trade department is just for trade issues, and they do not recognise climate change as one of those. Right now, it is misguided for any government agency to think climate change is not their concern, but at the Department of International Trade—with its range of responsibilities—it is downright dangerous.
It is not too late for the government to set out an ambitious green trade agenda for COP26. But a change in personnel is not enough—it will require an equally rapid change in attitudes. Truss has now been replaced as international trade secretary by Anne-Marie Trevelyan, whose past statements before becoming an MP include: “we aren’t getting hotter, global warming isn’t actually happening” in April 2012. I won’t hold those words against her, as long as we now get some action.
