Towards the end of February, at a dinner hosted by Airlines UK (an industry trade body), the Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander made her attitude to airport expansion clear. “I am not some sort of flight-shaming eco-warrior,” Alexander said, “I love flying. I always have.” The question of the expansion of three of London’s major airports (Heathrow, Gatwick and Luton) has been hanging over the government for weeks. The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has made it clear that she sees increasing the number of flights at these three hubs as a key engine for economic growth. On 3 April, Alexander confirmed Luton’s airport expansion, despite the Planning Inspectorate’s flat refusal.
For Dale Vince, the eco-entrepreneur and Labour donor, these moves are worrying. “I thought that was unfortunate language,” he says of Alexander’s derision of “flight-shaming eco-warriors” when we meet on a balmy afternoon at the New Statesman’s offices in central London. Vince adds: “I didn’t understand why Labour were talking like that. We don’t need to start a culture war. There are plenty of other people that will do that.”
Focusing on airport expansion is a mistake, says Vince. “I was surprised by the support for a third runway at Heathrow… It created a conversation, a kind of false choice between growth and green which is completely false because green is the right option for growth,” he says, pointing to the CBI’s reporting that the UK’s net zero economy has enjoyed the most growth in the past 12 months.
Vince’s concern has material reasoning behind it: ahead of last year’s general election, he donated £1m to the Labour Party’s campaign, bringing his total lifetime contributions to £5m. When we last spoke, the day after Rishi Sunak’s rain-soaked speech on Downing Street, Vince was optimistic and buoyant. Despite his concern around the new government’s pursuit of airport expansion, in many ways, he still is. “I think Labour have done well,” he tells me. “We saw some immediate progress – within 72 hours, Ed Miliband had lifted the ban on onshore wind.”
It’s clear Vince thinks it is Miliband who is doing particularly well. Most Labour members are with him on that – the Energy Secretary was recently crowned the most popular cabinet member in a Survation Poll for Labour List. “He started early and bold,” Vince says. “Apart from the commitment to carbon capture and storage, which I don’t understand… I think he’s done good things.”
Last year, the government pledged almost £22bn over the next 25 years for two carbon capture and storage projects in Merseyside and Teesside. These projects are intended to prevent or remove the carbon dioxide emitted through industrial processes from entering the atmosphere. Much of the technology, however, is still in the early phases of development.
To Vince, these kinds of projects are not the right approach. “I think it’s a waste of our money,” he explains. “We don’t need to spend money on that.” Instead, he thinks government funding and resources would be better used to decarbonise home heating or to expand the grid so it can fully support the UK’s growing renewable energy resources.
A report by the Environmental Audit Committee last May found the queue to connect renewable projects to the grid contained more than twice the amount of generation required to meet the then Conservative government’s target of decarbonising the energy system by 2035. (Miliband’s goal is clean power by 2030.) This congestion is caused, in part, by the fact that the National Grid remains set up to deal with the energy system of the 1950s, when connections were required near coal-fired power stations, the last of which was switched off last year.
“We do need to spend money on the grid so that we can distribute the energy more quickly so that we don’t have to switch projects off in Scotland,” says Vince, referring to the fact that some renewable sites waste energy due to a lack of storage capacity. “Instead of turning them off, we should be making hydrogen with that excess energy, and then we can use that to make energy again when we need it.”
Despite the government’s intention to wean the UK off its reliance on fossil fuels, this is a make-or-break moment for the net zero agenda. The morning I spoke to Vince, the Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch had described the UK’s net zero 2050 target as “impossible” without a “serious drop in our living standards”. Through her speech, Badenoch (who as business secretary once made the economic case for net zero) firmly closed the door on the cross-party environmental consensus that the UK has enjoyed for the past decade. It even sparked criticism from the former Conservative prime minister, Theresa May, under whose government the 2050 target was signed into law.
When I ask Vince about Badenoch, he jokes, “Who is she again?” He tracks the end of consensus back to Sunak’s speech in September 2023 in which the then PM rolled back on several of the UK’s climate targets, including the upcoming ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars. “There was a moment when he pivoted away,” Vince says. “I think it was 2023, the summer of Just Stop Oil.” He is a former backer of Just Stop Oil. The group recently announced the end of its civil resistance. “Sunak weaponised eco protest and eco concerns… I think that was a strategic mistake,” Vince says.
He describes Badenoch as a “politician just looking for attention”, but puts the wider move against environmental policies down to the dawn of a second term for Donald Trump. “He’s come along, and he is ferociously anti-renewable energy,” Vince says of the US president, whose view on the environment could be discerned when he proclaimed, “Drill baby, drill.” “I think he’s enabled a lot of these voices to speak up. People are seeing an opportunity in aping Trump. He’s given credibility to the incredible,” Vince says. It is this desire to imitate Trump, Vince thinks, that is driving the Reform party’s climate distancing under Nigel Farage.
What is Vince’s advice to progressive parties (including the new Labour government) in keeping on with the net zero and clean power agenda?
“The opinion polls show the overwhelming majority of people in our country care about these issues and want to see something done about them,” Vince says. “Don’t be driven by a right-wing agenda.”
He adds: “The green economy works. We’ve got to prove that it works for the people in this country that care about green issues and want to see something done about them.”
This article first appeared in our Spotlight Energy and Climate Change supplement of 24 April 2025.
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