War in the Middle East has made the British public, and especially Labour voters, aware as never before that the government’s Net Zero policy is not just nonsensical but deeply dangerous.
Two-thirds of those who backed Labour at the 2024 General Election now believe the ban on new drilling for North Sea oil should be lifted. This stance is central to Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s dogmatic drive to ditch fossil fuels – but as the conflict in the Gulf starkly proves, the UK cannot cope without oil and gas. The hard fact is hydrocarbons are essential to modern civilisation.
With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, our economy is under more pressure than it was even during the pandemic or the 2008 banking crisis.
Yet Red Ed is immovable in his opposition to extracting more North Sea oil and taking advantage of this country’s natural energy reserves.
Indeed, he is unshakably wedded to the strategy of switching to renewables, even though it’s obvious to everyone that wind and solar can’t keep the lights on and are only pushing up prices.
At the start of the year, Miliband was the darling of the Labour Left, the most popular Cabinet minister with Labour voters and members alike and the man most likely to replace Keir Starmer in No 10.
But then reality erupted in a blizzard of missiles. Miliband’s stubborn refusal to respond to world events and his insistence that, even in the midst of a global energy crisis, there could be no new North Sea extraction licences, was exposed for what it is: ideological madness.
Tapping into Britain’s natural wealth could be done quickly, if only the government would give it the go-ahead.
This week, chief executive Neil McCulloch of oil company Adura, explained: ‘We could technically be ready to start producing gas from the Jackdaw gasfield this October, with gas from Jackdaw going into the grid in time to supply British homes and businesses this winter.’
And Francis Egan, the chief executive of Australian-owned Cuadrilla Resources, predicted fracking for gas in Lancashire and the East Midlands could begin within three months, if only the government would allow it. ‘This is the second wake-up call after the Ukraine invasion,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how many more of these the politicians need.’
Incredibly, the Energy Secretary green lit plans this year to permanently decommission Britain’s fracking sites and plug the only shale gas wells with cement.
Long-standing opponents of the Net Zero pledge have been saying this for more than a decade. It makes no sense, either as an environmental policy or as an economic plan. It’s one of the key reasons why growth is stagnant, trapping millions of families in a cost-of-living nightmare with static wages and high inflation.
Labour, with Miliband as the cheerleader, refuses to accept this. Last month, appropriately enough on Friday 13, a briefing paper was published restating the government’s commitment to achieve Net Zero by 2050.
This arbitrary and pointless target is defined as meaning that: ‘The total greenhouse gas emissions would be equal to the emissions removed from the atmosphere, with the aim of limiting global warming and resultant climate change’.
Net Zero was pushed by small island states and their green allies at the Paris climate conference in 2015. They claimed that climate change would cause them to sink beneath rising sea levels, a claim which has disputed scientific validity.
The Paris Agreement originally specified net zero by the end of the century, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] in 2018 brought it forward half a century, to 2050.
Miliband’s schedule has added another even more urgent target, with his one-man mission to decarbonise the national grid by 2030.
According to a briefing published in January, the aim is to meet Britain’s entire electricity demand with energy from ‘clean sources’ such as wind turbines within four years.
The direct cost of this rush to renewables is tens of billions of pounds. The indirect hit to the economy is much higher, as it renders energy intensive businesses uncompetitive. The UK has some of the most expensive industrial energy costs in the developed world – and the price paid by domestic consumers is among the highest.
Is it time to rethink Britain’s energy strategy – or stay the course on net zero?
Underlying this lunatic policy is an ideological principle that is staggering in its delusion. Dyed-in-the-wool socialists such as Miliband are indoctrinated with the principle that fossil fuels are bad because they powered the Industrial Revolution.
Coal equals capitalism. The miners dug it out of the ground, and the factory owners burned it to make their profits, while the workers toiled for starvation wages. The deepest tenet of environmentalism is that the original sin of modern civilisation is the Industrial Revolution.
This is the politics of comic-strip communism. But it’s the basis of all Marxist thinking.
In the 20th century, anti-coal ideology was expanded to include oil and gas, which led in our own century to the crackpot fanaticism of Just Stop Oil, climate change catastrophism and the Net Zero delusion.
The IPCC, promoted as a scientific body, is intensely ideological, letting the cat out of the bag when it declared: ‘Embedded in the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C is the opportunity for intentional societal transformation.’
Who voted for ‘intentional societal transformation’? There’s a chilling Soviet ring to that phrase.
Miliband’s fanaticism dates back to the previous Labour government when, under Prime Minister Gordon Brown, he steered the 2008 Climate Change Act through the Commons. At the time, Miliband and Brown said its purpose was to show British leadership in cutting global carbon emissions. Over the next 11 years, we cut UK emissions by a third.
But the rest of the world didn’t follow our lead. China and India and the rest of the Global South flatly ignored us. Whether or not our policy was sound is, frankly, irrelevant. The rest of the world increased their emissions so fast that any impact our reductions could have was wiped out, on average, every 140 days.
One of the greatest ironies is that we’ve largely outsourced our emissions – and jobs – to China.
And yet as Miliband ruled last month, power imported from other countries should now be classed as zero-carbon – because the emissions did not occur within our borders.
Even former cheerleaders for Net Zero are now recognising the folly of it all. The Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, in a keynote speech at Davos last year, conceded that the era of United Nations climate change summits, the infamous COPs, was over. And in 2025 Bill Gates also rejected what he called the ‘doomsday view of climate change’ and suggested that fighting disease and poverty was more important that trying to manage global temperatures.
The creed of Net Zero is an obsession comparable to the 1930s Soviet policy of collectivisation, which aimed to abolish private property and, in the process, devastated agriculture in the USSR, leading to terrible famines.
By forcing the UK to adopt unreliable methods of generating power, Labour is putting us in grave peril. The worst case scenario of an energy grid failure is not ‘societal transformation’ but social breakdown.
Thanks in part to this pig-headed insistence on eschewing North Sea oil and gas – and, let’s not forget, the Tories blowing up coal-fired power stations and banning fracking – Britain is now on the brink of a massive energy crisis.
The best thing the PM could do for Britain is to dump his monomaniac Energy Secretary. He should have done it months ago.
The longer he delays, the more obvious it is that the real prime minister is not Starmer… it’s Ed Miliband.
Rupert Darwall is the author of Green Tyranny: Exposing the totalitarian roots of the climate industrial complex.
