Keir Starmer channels JFK for his climate ‘moonshot’

LONDON — In 1962, President John F. Kennedy had a mission: get an American on the moon by the end of the decade.
What JFK didn’t know was that 60 years later he’d inspire the U.K. to create its own “mission control” unit at the heart of government, explicitly taking a leaf out of his book.
It’s tasked with new Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s own hugely ambitious moonshot — getting the country’s antiquated power system off of fossil fuels and on to clean energy by 2030.
It is a vast undertaking. The total cost, in private and public investment, is expected to run to hundreds of billions of pounds. And, whatever the eventual success of the Apollo space program, experts doubt Starmer can easily replicate Kennedy’s success.
Starmer and his Energy Secretary Ed Miliband are promising to transform the energy supply so that people flicking switches in their homes will know their electricity likely comes from a clean power source such as wind or solar.
But to do that, the new government will need to bulk up the U.K.’s creaking grid, overhaul the planning system to get infrastructure up and running, and reduce emissions from the squadron of gas plants using carbon capture, a technology largely unproven in the U.K.
It will be “very difficult,” said John Gummer, former chair of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the watchdog tasked with scrutinizing the government’s progress. “I personally don’t think it is achievable,” Chris Skidmore, a Conservative former energy minister, said last year. 
Neil Golding, head of market intelligence at trade body the Energy Industries Council, expects Labour to miss its goal. Greater ambitions from the party are welcome but “the same issues remain in terms of hitting the targets,” he said. Gary Smith, head of the GMB labor union, one of Labour’s largest donors, has called it “impossible.”
Starmer and Miliband disagree. And that’s where “mission control” comes in. It’s a new delivery unit sitting inside the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), focused squarely on the 2030 goal and headed up by Chris Stark, former CCC boss and a highly respected figure in energy circles. “If it can be done, Chris Stark is the one to do it,” Gummer said. 
“No nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space,” Kennedy said, launching the Apollo program — and it’s exactly this competitive thinking that’s informing Labour’s dash for clean power.
Kennedy’s bid to put a man on the moon is directly invoked by Italian economist Mariana Mazzucato, an influential figure on those in Number 10 Downing Street and the brains behind Starmer’s pursuit of “mission-driven government.” 
Mazzucato points to Kennedy’s “moonshot” Apollo program as a template for Labour’s five missions, a way of linking public sector ambitions with private sector drive to solve the complex problems — from pandemics to global warming — which dog governments.
Starmer’s enthusiasm for the Apollo parallel is hard to miss. Yet beyond a boss and a memorable name, there are precious few details about how the unit, asked to lead the charge to radically transform the U.K. energy system, will actually operate.
Stark has officially been in post since the start of the month. He will run a team of civil servants, while mission control will host regular meetings with industry players and sector experts.
But questions are already being asked about its influence in Whitehall’s corridors of power.
The new outfit is distinct from the government’s five new, cross-departmental “mission boards,” for example. And a powerful Cabinet committee dedicated to energy policy will also remain.
“It’s not quite clear to me, in the first instance, where the Cabinet committee ends and where the mission board for each particular mission starts, and then how mission control feeds into that process,” said Alex Boyd, a former senior Downing Street advisor on business, energy and trade and now a director at consultancy Strand Partners. “There seems to be quite a lot of detail to work out here.”
Miliband has also promised to “adopt the lessons” of Britain’s Covid-19 vaccine task force, which rapidly helped get jabs into people’s arms.
Applying the same approach to clean energy “is a smart idea,” Nadhim Zahawi, the former vaccines minister who oversaw the task force, told POLITICO.
But the government has not outlined exactly what decision-making powers the unit will have. On current plans only civil servants, and not business leaders, will directly sit on mission control — a crucial difference from the vaccine task force which worked to galvanize big pharma at the height of the pandemic.
Emulating the task force means handing the new mission control team the power to actually make decisions, Zahawi argued. “The biggest frustration is they come in, they analyze the problem, they come up with a set of solutions — but then none of them can be delivered, because they’ve got no decision-making power,” the former minister warned.
Boyd, the former Downing Street adviser, agreed that the vaccine comparison only makes sense if mission control breaks Whitehall rules. That task force “was specifically set up outside of the government’s structures,” he said.
A DESNZ spokesperson said: “Creating a laser-focused mission control will turbocharge the government’s mission to provide Britain with clean power by 2030. Mission control will draw from a range of skills from inside and outside government to support its work.”
Some in government have another mission control worry on their minds: What will voters make of the clean power shift if it actually succeeds?
Miliband has approved three vast new solar farms since taking office last month. The government is changing planning rules to help launch more energy projects, while proposals to string hundreds of miles of new electricity pylons across the countryside are deeply unpopular.
“I really do worry what the impact will be as a result of this zealous belief that we need to get to [a] carbon free grid by 2030,” Shadow Energy Minister Andrew Bowie said.
Ministers are acutely aware of the risk.
If JFK is the inspiration, Downing Street wants to avoid the fate of U.S. President Joe Biden, whose huge green subsidies have done little to win over voters.
A report into Biden’s multi-trillion dollar green spending is doing the rounds in Number 10, according to one official familiar with government planning.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which has poured money into green tech, is part of “a sweeping effort to remake the U.S. economy,” the paper says — but Biden reaped almost no electoral reward because the ambitious policies made no emotional connection with voters.
The lesson here, said the same official, is not to get so carried away with moonshots that you miss the impact of the policies here on earth.
“You can deliver stuff,” they said. “But if you deliver stuff and make people feel shit about themselves — because they’re disempowered, they haven’t been involved — then you won’t necessarily get the return that you expect.”