It was just a couple of weeks ago — October 3 to be precise — that I reported that the long-running “net zero” political consensus in the UK was finally “crumbling.” In the intervening two-plus weeks, the slow crumbling has turned into a rapid collapse.
The biggest roadblock for opponents of a green energy transition in the UK has been that the Conservative Party, which should have been the natural home of opposition to net zero, has instead long (and foolishly) allied itself with the net zero cause. In June 2019, the Conservatives (under Prime Minister Theresa May) put through an ambitious amendment to enhance the net zero targets of the 2008 Climate Act, and then proceeded to a general election that December where they won a substantial majority of 365 seats (in a parliament of 650). In subsequent years, a parliamentary faction in the House of Commons called the Net Zero Scrutiny Group struggled to get to about 50 or so Conservative members, who were far outnumbered by the opposing faction of the same party called the Conservative Environment Network. The UK voters had surely demonstrated their climate virtue.
But unfortunately things did not work out quite as they had anticipated. Energy bills accelerated until, as reported in the Telegraph on September 30 and then here on October 3, UK electricity bills have become the highest in the world. De-industrialization has set in and worsened. Britain’s last primary blast furnace steel works at Port Talbot closed in September 2024. A final rolling mill at Scunthorpe, now under Chinese ownership, threatened to close earlier this year until the government intervened. Similar reports of factory closures come regularly from all energy-intensive industries.
On October 6, immediately after my prior post, the Conservatives held a party conference in Manchester. One of the speakers was Claire Coutinho, the Shadow Energy Secretary. Her speech was an incredible breath of fresh air, and marked a dramatic u-turn from prior Conservative energy policy. The title was “Energy Is Prosperity.” Some excerpts:
In the last few decades, we’ve lost sight of a simple truth. Energy is a good thing. Conservatives know that great eras of British growth and prosperity happen when we have an abundance of cheap, reliable energy. . . . [E]nergy is not just part of the economy. It is the economy. It feeds into the costs of every business, every journey, every loaf of bread. . . . That’s why right now, the cost of energy is one of the biggest problems we have. It’s a stealth tax that is making us all poorer. And it’s killing our industry.
The Conservatives have finally figured out that the net zero agenda is a program to make the people poorer in sacrifice to the climate religion. More from Coutinho’s speech:
[H]ere’s the problem with the Left – they’re infected with a poverty mindset. They believe that Britain has a duty to make itself poorer on the altar of Net Zero. And they think that ordinary people should be the servants of their climate targets. So, take air conditioning. In America, nearly every single home has air con. Here in Britain? Just 5%. But Sadiq Khan’s London Plan effectively bans air con in all new homes – why? Because it uses too much energy. Rather than people fitting into the Government’s policy on energy, I believe a Conservative energy policy should serve the needs of the people.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I suspect that opposition to a program of intentional impoverishment of the people ought to be an electoral winner. The Labour Party and its Energy Minister, Ed Miliband, continue even now to claim that building more wind turbines will make electricity cheaper. But that claim is based on pretending that huge costs of intermittency, backup, storage, and transmission don’t exist. It has taken a long time for the reality of those costs to become clear, but the truth is now out.
The change in direction from the Conservative Party has come none too soon. On October 10, Bretibart News reported that the UK’s grid manager, National Energy Systems Operator, was forecasting reduced safety margins for electricity generation this winter, at the same time as the Labour government proceeds with dynamiting coal plants that could still be used for backup. The headline is “‘Tight Days’ For Electricity This Winter Says Network Operator as UK Presses on With Dynamiting Potential Backup Power Stations.” Excerpt:
Most notable was the revelation that the gas supply margin this winter is the lowest in years and down by 34 per cent over last year, a change [National Gas] attributes to the dwindling supply of gas being extracted from the North Sea. . . . 1960s-vintage power plants were brought online on command to cover tight margins several times in recent winters. Yet they have now all powered down for good, cut off from the national grid and are being demolished. Indeed, just days before today’s announcement of potential “tight days”, fresh footage of some of the final coal-powered power stations in the UK being dramatically dynamited was published.
I’m not going to predict that Britain will definitely experience major blackouts this winter. But the risk is far higher than it was just a few years ago, and that risk will continue to increase in coming years, until Britain can get itself to build more dispatchable generation, which in anything less than 15 years means natural gas or coal.
And it is not just the Shadow Energy Minister who has caught on. In today’s New York Post there is an op-ed by Kemi Badenoch, the new Conservative Party leader and prospective PM should the Conservatives win the next election. (It is not obvious that they will do so, since the next election could be years away, and another party called Reform UK — also net zero opponents — leads both Labour and the Conservatives in the polls.). Ms. Badenoch’s op-ed covers multiple topics, including immigration and the Middle East as well as energy. Here are some things she has to say on the topic of energy:
[A] place I agree with this White House is on energy. Cheap energy is the foundation of a growing economy. No serious politician can talk about putting money in people’s pockets if they’re also doing things that make energy bills more expensive. . . . [I]n Britain, Labour ministers are so obsessed with chasing net-zero targets that they’re making life harder for ordinary families. . . . We’re sitting on North Sea oil and gas, yet the government refuses to grant new licenses. We’re now in the crazy position of importing gas from our near-neighbors Norway, who are getting stuck into those same oil fields in the North Sea.
The Conservatives came close to destroying the party by joining the Left’s net zero crusade. The current u-turn may or may not be enough to save the party. However, adding the Conservatives’ position in the polls to that of Reform UK would indicate that opposition to net zero is now close to if not an absolute majority electoral position. That represents an enormous swing in a few short years.
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Unfortunately, the next British general election will probably be held in 2029. This means that four more years of Ed Miliband’s mad net zero policies will cause enormous additional damage to Britain’s economy.
I was under the impression that in England’s parliamentary system a vote of no confidence could be forced. Is that not true? Genuinely curious.
Britain, not England.
“opens world atlas, peruses maps, finds England” Oop, there it is. Ever’body cabbage patch!
An United States citizen’s attempt to clarify.
Great Britain is another name for The United Kingdom of which England is one of those old kingdoms that united with others.
As an American, I don’t want the US to be called New York or California.
How’d I do? 😎
I thought Great Britain was England + Wales + Scotland, and the United Kingdom added northern Ireland.
Great Britain is the large island which contains England, Scotland and Wales.
The United Kingdom is those three+ Northern Ireland.
The British Isles includes Ireland.
Thanks. I’d forgotten about Ireland (Northern) being in the mix.
Perhaps I should have said, “As an American, I don’t want the US to be called New England or The Left Coast.”? 😎
Strictly speaking the UK is Great Britain plus Northern Ireland. However the term ‘Great Britain’ is often used to mean the UK. For years, we had to display a GB sticker on our vehicles if we took them abroad. It is only recently that the GB sticker was replaced by a UK sticker.
Exactly my point, Gunga.
England, (Great) Britain, the United Kingdom, and the British Commonwealth. Don’t expect the average American to have a clue as to the differences. To be fair, though, the educational system has made great strides in recent years in teaching students a plethora of new pronouns and genders.
I know the differences in all these names, in the end slapping lipstick on that pig doesn’t change a thing. Your government is openly and gleefully destroying your agriculture, manufacturing and energy production industries and you are not even allowed to complain about it, much less take any action to stop them. Good job. 😉
A vote of no confidence can be forced. also, if any budget is voted down, that counts.
But… the PM is the PM because they lead the largest number of MPs. And if those MPs change their mind they also have to defend their seats at a General Election – probably with a reputation for wobbliness and no support from their central party.
More usually, when the PM proves abjectly incompetent, the MPs vote out the PM but keep the party in power and themselves in a job.
For recent examples see, Truss, Johnson, May and Cameron.
Yes, that’s true. In a sense a vote of confidence takes place every year when the House of Commons is asked to approve the Government’s Finance Bill. But when a government party has a majority of over a hundred seats it is highly unlikely that the government would ever lose a vote of confidence.
It means 4 more years of Labour being in control, unless things get so bad we have some sort of revolution – a possibility I wouldn’t entirely exclude. However, I think the Miliband star has peaked, He is in office, but like the rest of the government, increasingly not in control. Tony Blair (ex Labour PM) has just endorsed a switch to a policy of cheap energy and away from Net Zero:
https://www.cityam.com/tony-blair-calls-on-labour-to-ditch-key-net-zero-target/
Essentially, he is endorsing Coutinho without admitting as much, demonstarting that opposition can be highly effective when it speaks truth. There are other straws in the wind: Starmer refused to endorse the planned hydrogen hub for Teesside preferring instead to go with a major AI project. At an ESNZ Select Committee meeting where senior people (mostly CEOs) from the Big 6 energy retailers gave evidence, they openly questioned the policy of building More Grid in support of more wind farms, and a couple actually pointed out that unlike Miliband’s claims, energy prices are not set by the cost of gas, but rather by the cost of the net zero project. Such open hereticism is a new feature, even if it is still somewhat in its infancy.
A Bright New Energy Dawn In The UK
Very funny, not.
I hate to be rude, but Kemi Badenoch hasn’t a cat in hell’s chance of winning at the next election. She got the Sunak poisoned chalice. The Machiavellians are busy at work behind the scenes, some say favouring Robert Jenrick.
What is the latest polling?
Labour: 15%
Conservative: 17%
Liberal Democrats: 12%
Greens: 15%
Reform UK: 32%
https://www.pollcheck.co.uk/gb-polls
We’ve had the uniparty, or Parliamentary dictatorship – swapping chairs, doing the self same things and making time to display their utter disdain for the ordinary voter – and people have had enough of it. Trouble is, barring a miracle of some sort the next election isn’t until Wednesday 15 August 2029 at the latest.
Wasn’t it Socrates who said it’s always darkest just before the dawn? No, that was Batman.
You are focussing on the people we get to vote for, but they aren’t the ones who run the country. The civil service is more or less rogue these days. It is they who disdain the electorate most. And they disdain the government too, in general.
Labour don’t confront them quite as much as recent previous governments, but that’s doesn’t mean Labour is in charge.
Parliament makes the laws. Blair’s government made the civil service what it is today – wholly unaccountable. That can be reversed…
It’s worse than that sounds. Blair created a large number of QUANGOS Quasi-Autonomous-Non-Goverment-Organisations. These were sold as independent advisory bodies but filled with Blair supporting lefties. Traditionally advisors advise and ministers decide, but now Quangos decide and tell government what to do. Similar to the largest Quango, the EU which we tried to escape from with Brexit, they used to tell our government what to do. Hence Ministers have little real decision making to do. Hence they have evolved into a parliament of incompetents. Nigel Farage and the Reform Party hope to be elected to start changing this but they have a massive job with most of the establishment against them.
I think there is far too many Wets in the Tory party wedded to the green utopia for me to ever consider voting for them . Johnson May and ilk are still green to the core
They haven’t changed.
The Tory party needs to split. Wets can join the Lib Dems. some of the rest could be useful recruits for Reform because they have some practical experience of dealing with the quangocracy and civil service, and also probably have better formed policies in some areas as a result.
I am astouned that almost 2 thirds still kling to the idiotic left green lunacy that fastracks the UK into economic oblivion…well all the best to Farage and Reform, I sincerely hope that they will be the first to pass…otherwise…well goodnight UK, GB or whatever you want to call it.. EUA(ppendix) maybe ? sarc²
I think it’s darkest when the lights go out – which will be very soon.
If it goes like Canada, the conventional party voters will join together and prevent any change.
More likely in the UK, the ultra-woke Civil Service and State Sector will do everything they can to thwart and frustrate any attempt to reverse Net Zero.
Yes, it will be like Brexit. Which is why there needs to be a lot of work in how to thwart them ahead of time.
It’s always darkest before it goes totally black.
Look for in a winter coming to your area soon.
As a proponent of Net-100 and 1000ppm I’d say this sounds good.
But considering the fact that the English have elected one conservative after another and everyone of them did crazy lefty policies all over the place(just like in all other countries where the conservative leader is not called Hitler ),
this sounds more like lipservice and damage control.
From article:”The Conservatives came close to destroying the party by joining the Left’s net zero crusade.”
The underlying sentiment in this is why I am against using the language of the alarmists.
Initial decision might have been made thinking “what if I’m wrong”
Then 30 years went by.
No excuses to be there now, but I can forgive the original soft-liners.
‘The Conservatives came close to destroying the party by joining the Left’s net zero crusade.’
It’s good news that the UK’s Conservative Party is finally coming to its senses, at least on this issue. However, those who favor liberty over government need to remember that ‘conservative’ politicians, whether in the UK or the US, have conserved precious little since the advent of socialism roughly 100 years ago.
“…conservative’ politicians, whether in the UK or the US, have conserved precious little since the advent of socialism roughly 100 years ago….” Maybe true in the UK, but not so in the US. In the USA we seem to put up with the far left for a while then get wise and vote someone in with a spine to get us back on the Constitution track. In my time it has been Reagan and now Trump. Trump would be much more effective if he had the diplomacy and presence of Reagan …. but he doesn’t, won’t ever get it, and we don’t care.
Most of what the Federal government does is un-Constitutional. The problem in the US is that our so-called conservative Republicans have learned that they can win elections by running slightly to the ‘right’ of their Democrat opponents. Unfortunately for Republicans, if the only thing they have to offer us is a slightly lower amount of stolen loot, as opposed to more liberty, they’re going to become irrelevant as a political force.
This just reinforces the strategy of getting rich off bad public energy policy before prices reset and voters wake up. Solar for All and the Green New Deal are good examples of shovel the money to the politically connected and donors before the big reality doors close. But don’t forget to use the select, biased courts to cover the retreat on the way out.
“… that the long-running “net zero” political consensus in the UK was finally “crumbling.”
False dawn. The climate crisis consensus has not crumbled, and Net Zero is still on the cards, just with a rebrand, not just yet, but in a “better” way. Do not be deceived, lulled into a false sense of victory.
Until the political consensus is that there is no climate crisis, that C02 – not even CO2 from fossil fuels – does not control global warming, then some form of Net Zero will lurk in the background like Banquo’s ghost.
People tend to be led by their wallets. As Charles Mackay observed men recover their senses slowly, and one by one. So a key method of encouragement is that they should feel the costs of folly choices directly. You want 100% green energy? Fine – pay for it including all the subsidy costs and extra consequential costs. Suddenly its market starts to evaporate.
Maybe the only way out of the political corner is sharia law that does not recognize the net zero dimension? It’s headed there anyway.
An opposition party leader changing direction is not a salvation.
Possibly the Parliamentary Conservative Party is beginning to understand the idiocy of Net Zero, but is the Constituency Conservative Party in agreement?
It’s probably more the other way around. Out in the constiuencies people live a bit closer to the real world. But the Parliamentary Party boasts the Conservative Environment Network group of MPs that lives on another planet altogether.
https://www.cen.uk.com/our-caucus
Reality denial is in collapse, not just in Britain, globally and on multiple fronts. People can only be lied to for so long before their own eyes see the truth in their immediate vicinity. At that point they begin questioning everything they are being told by media. And media/leftists have lost their lock on information, the wall has been breached.
There seemed to be hope when “conservatives” were elected, then Net Zero 2050 continued implementation – the destruction part, that is. Those folks are very good at blowing up and tearing down, but not at addition. What they have been doing for 40+ years has resulted in losses in every area of the society. The UK is no longer the UK, but a polyglot.
The USA is close behind. Trump is a false hope.
Conservatives did indeed introduce NetZero and also accelerated some of its major goals such as ending of ICE cars by 2030. They built literally thousands of turbines many sourced from Chinese coking factories, & destroyed forests & coastlines. Energy bills went from approx £1000 to £1800 per household property during their term. So in summary the Conservatives should not be believed in their u-turn hallelujah moment. The truth is that all UK Govts have badly failed the public the last 20 years and a complete reversal to focus on a realistic energy portfolio is required, yes including fossils, without which the world would be a much poorer place.
Small, micro and nano nuclear reactors won’t take 15 years to build. These are standardized designs, built at a factory and trucked to the install site. Companies like NuScale, X-Energy and Nano Nuclear are building components now for the initial customers. There are a dozen more companies doing this work.
Don’t underestimate the ability of the British planning system to add 3-5 years onto what you might otherwise think is a pretty straightforward planning process, even in times of national need. In the case of nuclear you can make that nearer 10 years.
No doubt. The NuScale designed SMR already has a U.S. NRC approval. X-Energy is building more portable designs for use at remote Dept. of War installations.
I presume the Labor “government” could require an additional thick layer of administratium and unobtainium shielding. The administratium is the densest material imaginable.
It’s currently very well equipped to add a decade to timescales. But even the Labour government has been forced to try to rein in the Obstruction of Nuclear Redevelopment quango.
Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce Interim Report, 2025
Very nice Francis. I’ll call this a win also, however we can’t let our guard down we must push harder than ever and put an end to this madness sooner rather than later.
I had a bit of an inside view of what was going on in the Conservative Party, because I was invited to contribute my view by Sir John Redwood, at whose blog I have commented for many years. I think he had been impressed by my track record of accurate comments on the consequences of energy policies, and was in any case sympathetic. Perhaps my forecast of the energy crisis some months before it blew up in 2021 was a lynchpin.
As a result, I contributed advice as an independent expert (I have never been a party member of any party), which I did on the basis that I am prepared to assist anyone who is prepared to listen without payment. I was not alone: I know of several others who also contributed who I regard as having high levels of expertise. Coutinho was at the forefront of the efforts within the party, and persuaded Badenoch to take on the CEN wets by abandoning the Net Zero 2050 target and halting the drive to renewables. As those CEN MPs are quite numerous, it was a brave act – they still may try to oust Badenoch and marginalise Coutinho. The list of shame is here:
https://www.cen.uk.com/our-caucus
Coutinho had smelled a rat while she was the DESNZ minister, but needed external evidence to counter the advice she was getting from within the Department and from NESO and the CCC and OFGEM. She had commissioned an external study of the costs of Net Zero when the election intervened: Miliband promptly cancelled the work on taking office. So she sought other external advice in opposition. It is not some new Damscene conversion in the past few months, but rather the result of a determined attempt to learn what officialdom refused to acknowledge: that the Net Zero project is unaffordable, infeasible and highly damaging to the economy and society, and to start to work out how to fix that.
I can recognise contributions made by independent advisers in her presentation at the Party Conference. The text of her speech is here:
https://www.conservatives.com/news/energy-is-prosperity
and her presentation (~25 mins which includes a number of slides) starts at 34 mins in the linked video at the bottom. Some of you who regularly read around on UK energy may recognise the origins of some of the slides.
Of course, the Conservatives are currently in a very poor place in electoral polling. Change in policy like this should halt the decline, but the loss of trust after so many elections when they promised one thing and did the complete opposite on issues such as migration, Brexit, taxation… will make it unlikely that they could get back into power at the next election. The most likely outcome is a Reform government, perhaps by a landslide, with a risk that voters being shy could land us with another Lib/Lab pact which would be even more of a disaster than the one in the 1970s.
However, Coutinho is right that Reform do not begin to have workable policies to tackle unwinding Net Zero effectively while keeping the lights on. They have a huge amount of work to do to catch up with Coutinho and her team on that. At the very least, they should pay attention and learn. Better still, they too could seek the kind of independent advice that Coutinho has sought. For reasons best known to themselves they do not seem to do so. When push comes to shove, if the Tories collapse in a split caused by the CEN types, Reform could do a lot worse than luring Coutinho to join them to make sense of their energy policy.
Yes, wise comments. I am afraid that the next four years are going to get worse and worse for the UK.
Agree, ditto for all of Europe their deindustrialization is permanent. If they decide to reverse direction and bring back energy intensive manufacturing or transition to nuclear they won’t have the economic capacity to accomplish it. Wind and solar fraudsters win, everyone else losses.
Lindzen and Happer had a talk on Rogan
Both are world renowned scientists, now retired.
Lindzen said if CO2 doubled to 800 ppm, the world surface temp would increase by about 0.5 C, after taking into account an increase in water vapor ppm
There is not enough fossil fuels left over to double CO2
Lindzen said the CO2 hoax has set back some sciences by 50 years
Lindzen got the number wrong. The correct number is 37 years. On June 23,1988, Jim Hansen of GISS gave testimony before a joint session of the Congress and claimed that increasing release of carbon dioxide would cause global warming and eventually dangerous climate change.
There can be no climate change because most of the earth’s surface is water, rocks, sand, ice and snow. Activities of humans will have no effect on the climate of the vast Pacific ocean, the Andes mountains, or the Sahara desert.
No, Lindzen did not get “the number wrong”. You claim the correct number is 37 years, not 50. We have at least another13 (unlucky) years before we end the nonsense of CO2 being the climate control knob and all the climate alarmist industrial complex Democrat sponsored drivel that goes along with it.
story tip
What effect might invoking Standing Order 43 on British PM Keir Starmer have on their energy policy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVAlFEYIysE
The current Conservative position seems to be somewhat Augustinian: Net Zero but not yet. They haven’t abandoned the idea that climate change demands action. Nor do they seem to have abandined the idea that subsidising weather-dependent sources of electricity is a good idea. They published a number of ways a Conservative Gobvernment would reduce public spending. Cutting subsidies to wind and solar installation wasn’t one of them. The problem for Badenoch and Coutinho is that they realise they cannot antagonise the extrreme Net Zero advocates in the Conservative Party too strongly so they have to adopt a middling position rather than outright opposition to Net Zero.
The Conservative position on Net Zero seems to be somewhat Augustinian: Net Zero but not yet. The Conservatives still hold that climate change is a problem that needs action. Moreover, they still support subsidising weather-dependent sources of electricity. They published a list of ways by which they would cut public spending and ending subsidies for wind and solar installations wasn’t one of them. Moreover, they haven’t shown any support for fracking. The problem for Badenoch and Coutinho is that they can’t afford to antagonise the extreme Net Zero fanatics in the Tory Party too much so they have adopted a middling policy which tries to promise lower energy bills while remaining committed to “climate action” in an attempt to be all things to all men.
In the last few decades, we’ve lost sight of a simple truth. Energy is a good thing. Conservatives know that great eras of British growth and prosperity happen when we have an abundance of cheap, reliable energy
An excellent quote but with one crucial word missing which helps explain their failure namely that they have not carefully and critically examined both the exaggerated/unfounded claims and unintended consequences of climate alarmism:
Conservatives should know that great eras of British growth and prosperity happen when we have an abundance of cheap, reliable energy