HHail cake, will eat. For years, this has been the standard political response to thorny questions about the climate crisis. Successive governments have insisted that greener policies would create jobs, not destroy them, and that the planet could be saved without slowing growth or making unpleasant sacrifices. Keir Starmer promised just this month not to “tell people how to live their lives” The path to net zero wouldn’t be quite as painful as some people think. And then, this week, he hit a pothole.

Car manufacturer Stellantis, which owns Vauxhall, announced it would close its van factory in Luton, putting 1,100 jobs at risk; its rival Ford is cutting 800 jobs. In Sunderland, Nissan warned of an industry at “crisis point”.

Everyone blames rules introduced by the outgoing Conservative government that fine manufacturers if they fail to meet annual targets for increasing electric car sales even as demand wanes. While it may be true that no one will have a job if the planet burns to an uninhabitable crust, the promise of a better future for your grandchildren is no worse a punch in the gut if you have a P45 before Christmas.

This is the first truly serious test of nerve for a Labor government that is truly committed to net zero emissions but is worried about the human impact of job losses in its old industrial heartlands and is increasingly fearful of a backlash against it Provoking green policies like Nigel Farage’s reform could easily be exploited by Britain. Ministers shouldn’t panic and throw the net zero baby out with the bathwater, but they are right to recognize that the water is becoming increasingly murky.

Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, grew up on Wearside, a town where everyone knows someone who works at Nissan. He wasted no time in announcing an urgent review of the last government’s mandate for zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs), whose ever-increasing annual sales targets should pave the way for an eventual end to sales of petrol and diesel cars in 2035. What it did The key was to recognize that many drivers simply couldn’t afford new cars in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis.

If the ZEV mandate was intended to boost the industry, it worked. Best-selling models like the popular Ford Fiesta and VW Golf have been quietly phased out because the more cheap gas cars you sell, the harder it is to sell enough electric cars to meet the requirement. (Although electric cars are often cheaper to run in the long run, they tend to be more expensive up front.)

Meanwhile, all the fuss over Jaguar’s new rebranding, with outlandishly dressed models and much jubilation about “erasing the ordinary,” obscures a stubborn commercial decision: late to the electric party, Jaguar had to dramatically reinvent itself, ditching gasoline models and relaunching in 2026 as pure electronic boutique brand for the rich in the world. It’s not woke, it’s tailored – and if that doesn’t work, it might be broken.

All this, plus some panicked last-minute discounts and creative use of loopholes (which may be extended by ministers) means this year’s target of converting 22% of car sales to electric vehicles is just about met. But in 2027 that target rises to 38% and by 2030 to 80%. If demand doesn’t rise accordingly, manufacturers could be forced to choose between selling electric cars at unsustainable losses or halting production later in the year by sending workers home so they don’t overproduce gasoline and diesel cars , face fines for selling.

The threat that no one is really making yet is that if it becomes too difficult to sell cars in the UK, there will ultimately be no obvious reason to make them here. Why not just move production abroad, where the rules are more relaxed, and save yourself the post-Brexit hassle of exporting it? Meanwhile, from the planet’s perspective, every lost electronics sale is a missed opportunity for a faster transition.

Reynolds and the (then) Transport Minister Louise Haigh are said to have privately advocated not for watering down the targets, but for more financial incentives for the purchase of electric cars. In Norway, the world leader in the transition to zero-emission cars, generous tax breaks are enticing drivers to make the switch. Joe Biden has introduced tax credits for purchasing electricity (although Donald Trump inevitably threatens to abolish them), and Germany is proposing something similar.

But in Britain, the last government tried to make the transition cheap, ignoring warnings that this would lead to exactly the scenario that is now playing out. Once again it is the new government that is busy cleaning up the mess.

The truth is that, like all major industrial changes, the environmental transition was never going to be without pain. New jobs are being created, but not always in the cities where fossil fuel industry jobs are dying. Not every worker laid off in late middle age will be happy to retrain as a wind farm engineer. Not everything in life will be as it was, and changes always have the potential to be politically explosive. It won’t be cheap to soften the boundaries for the places and people that always seem to end up on the sharp side. But it’s not about picking up the remains of life left behind, as one might think, which we have learned by now.