The Net Zero nightmare is collapsing. On Monday, Belgian author and commentator Drieu Godefridi posted the news that should have sent shockwaves through Brussels: the IPCC had formally admitted that its most extreme climate scenario, RCP8.5, is “implausible”. The very pathway that underpinned the entire European Green Deal, trillions in spending, farmer-crushing regulations and two decades of energy-suicide policies across the EU, UK, Canada and Australia has been exposed as fantasy. “The house of cards is falling,” Godefridi writes. “Von der Leyen and the entire EU Deep State are cornered.” Science, he says, demands the explicit repudiation of all EU documents, legislation and communications built on this doomsday scenario – and therefore the repeal of the Green Deal in its entirety.
Roger Pielke Jr., the American political scientist who has tracked this issue for years, put it even more starkly in late April: “RCP8.5 is officially dead.” The international committee responsible for the scenarios feeding into the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report has eliminated the high-end pathways – RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0 – that have dominated climate research, headlines and policy for the better part of two decades. As the new van Vuuren et al. framework for CMIP7 makes clear, these extreme scenarios are no longer credible.
One might have expected a moment of reflection in the corridors of power in Brussels, Berlin, Paris and London – and for that matter, in fellow globalist-green counterparts in Ottawa and Canberra. After all, the EU Green Deal’s binding targets, the Fit for 55 package, the carbon border adjustment mechanism, the nitrogen rules that have driven European farmers to the barricades, the heat-pump mandates and, in the UK, the UK Climate Change Act and the deliberate suppression of domestic fossil resources were all sold to the public on the back of RCP8.5’s apocalyptic projections of 4-5°C warming, mass extinctions and civilisational collapse.
Instead, the climate establishment of the ‘collective West’ – of course, minus Trump’s “drill baby drill” America — has chosen to double down. Earlier this month, Amsterdam became the first major city in the world to ban public ads for meat and fossil fuels – replacing chicken nuggets, SUVs and budget flights with promotions for museums and concerts. The EU establishment and its climate allies remain firmly bound to quixotic ‘Net Zero by 2050” Paris Agreement-style delusions.
Two recent events illustrate the posture with almost comic clarity. First came the ‘First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels‘ in Santa Marta, Colombia, co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands at the end of April. Some 50-60 countries – a self-styled ‘coalition of the willing’ representing perhaps a third of global GDP but pointedly excluding the United States under Trump, China, Russia, India and the major Gulf producers – gathered to chart a future beyond hydrocarbons.
The Guardian framed the meeting as a bold attempt to break the “global fossil fuel deadlock”, with delegates frustrated by resistance from major polluters. France seized the platform to unveil what it called a “first of its kind” national roadmap: phasing out coal by 2030, oil by 2045 and gas (for energy purposes) by 2050. French officials positioned the plan as leadership incarnate, invoking the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Hot on its heels was the 84th session of the International Maritime Organisation’s Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC 84) in London. There, efforts resurfaced to resuscitate a global carbon-pricing mechanism for international shipping – an initiative quietly shelved last year after fierce American pushback. Despite mounting evidence that the underlying alarmist assumptions are crumbling, the IMO talks pressed ahead with the Net Zero Framework to make making global trade – which is overwhelmingly seaborne – more expensive, afflicting the world’s population including the most vulnerable in Asia, Latin America and Africa.
The message could hardly be clearer: the real villains remain the ‘petrostates and polluters’ absent from the righteous gathering in Santa Marta – the Americans drilling under Trump, the Chinese and Indians furiously building coal plants and expanding coal mining capacity, the Gulf producers supplying much of the hydrocarbons that still power 80% of the world economy (though now constrained by the Hormuz blockade).
The ‘coalition of the willing’ will not go gently into the good night of energy realism. They will rage, instead, against the dying of the Net Zero dream.
This is not policy continuity; it is ideological entrenchment in the face of empirical contradiction. For two decades the climate industrial complex – multilateral bureaucracies, green NGOs, captured regulators and compliant media – have treated RCP8.5 not as an extreme and implausible outlier but as “business as usual”. European Environment Agency reports, Joint Research Centre PESETA projects on agriculture and coasts, ECB climate stress tests and the entire edifice of adaptation planning rested on its implausible assumptions.
The result has been economic self-harm on a historic scale. Germany’s Energiewende, once the poster child of the transition, has produced Europe’s highest electricity prices, grid instability and deindustrialisation. As noted in these pages last month, even Germany’s Economy and Energy Minister Katherina Reiche has now broken ranks, admitting in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that “an energy transition that ignores system costs will ruin the country it claims to save”.
The contradictions are glaring. The Santa Marta participants include developing nations that understand energy poverty far better than European elites ever will. Many continue robustly expanding fossil production even as they sign the latest virtue-signalling declaration. Pacific islands demand climate reparations while relying on imported diesel generators.
The Maldives, for instance, has positioned itself as ground zero for climate reparations, with successive governments warning that its low-lying atolls face imminent inundation and demanding billions in ‘loss and damage’ payments from developed nations. Yet while pleading existential crisis, the country is pouring hundreds of millions into tourism infrastructure — most notably the $1 billion expansion of Velana International Airport (completed in phases through 2025) — to accommodate millions more visitors each year.
Meanwhile, rigorous scientific evidence tells a very different story: multiple peer-reviewed studies, including satellite analysis of 221 atolls worldwide, show that Maldivian islands have on balance grown in size, with the archipelago adding some 37.5 km² of land area between 2000 and 2017 through natural sediment accretion, coral growth and deliberate reclamation. This striking contradiction between apocalyptic rhetoric and large-scale investment in airports, hotels and land-building projects reveals the selective deployment of climate alarm for financial and political leverage rather than a reflection of physical reality.
The absence of the United States under President Trump’s second term might prove fatal to the global climate change juggernaut. His “drill baby drill” approach, swift permit reforms and rejection of the Paris framework have already altered the global energy balance. The US now is the world’s largest oil and gas producer with a robust outlook for further capacity growth in all fossil fuels including coal. On the other hand, without American financial and diplomatic heft, the collective West’s Net Zero agenda lacks the resources to subsidise its renewable energy ambitions.
Reports of UN budget shortfalls underscore the point: the emperor’s clothes are wearing thin. The US exit from the UN climate architecture, including the IPCC and Green Climate Fund, removes not merely symbolic leadership but one of the system’s principal financial underwriters. At precisely the moment the climate bureaucracy demands trillions for ‘loss and damage’, adaptation and Net Zero transition schemes, the world’s largest economy is signalling that the bill will not be paid, period. Reports of mounting UN funding strains suggest the emperor’s clothes are beginning to fray.
Yet the EU’s Left-leaning governments – and their ideological fellow-travellers in the UK, Canada, Australia – show no sign of retreat. The IMO’s renewed push for carbon taxes on shipping, despite last year’s retreat, is emblematic: when market realities intrude, the response is not adaptation but intensified calls for international climate regulations. This is policy capture dressed up as moral urgency with ‘luxury beliefs‘ that confer status on metropolitan elites at little personal cost while imposing crushing burdens on working households, pensioners, energy-intensive industry and, most visibly, farmers.
Hauliers face bankruptcy, families choose between heating and eating, and entire industrial sectors relocate to jurisdictions unburdened by such strictures – principally the US and China, the latter’s emissions growth comfortably outpacing any Western reductions. The geopolitical consequences are equally stark: Europe’s self-harm accelerates the relative ascent of the BRICS bloc and undermines the very security interests it claims to defend.
The economic reasoning is not subtle. Cheap, reliable energy remains the foundation of human welfare and industrial civilisation. Historical analogy is instructive: Soviet central planners believed they could command outcomes through ideology and five-year plans, ignoring price signals and resource realities. Today’s climate establishment operates on similar premises. Multilateral conferences, NGOs and captured bureaucracies treat Net Zero targets as articles of faith, impervious to the data on costs, intermittency, the mineral demands of ‘renewables’ or the simple fact that global emissions continue to rise as Asia industrialises.
The realist alternative is straightforward, if politically unpalatable for green elites. Prioritise cheap, reliable energy through a pragmatic mix: revived nuclear power (as Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have belatedly acknowledged that it was a “serious, strategic mistake” to abandon), expanded domestic gas and oil where geology and economics permits, continued use of high efficiency-low emission fourth generation coal plants where necessary for baseload, and market-driven innovation across all low-carbon technologies – not subsidised favourites. Remove barriers to issuing permits, scrap distortive mandates and let price signals guide investment.
Human welfare, not abstract emissions targets, must remain the lodestar. History shows that technological progress and energy abundance, not central planning, have lifted billions from poverty and improved environmental outcomes along the way.
Unless the current crop of Left-liberal governments in Europe and allied capitals is replaced by administrations willing to confront economic and physical reality, they will continue this tremendously destructive course – even at the expense of their citizens’ living standards and the continent’s strategic position. The ‘coalition of the willing’ may rage against petrostates and polluters, but the real obstruction lies in their own refusal to accept the world as it is.
This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/05/24/rage-rage-against-the-dying-of-the-net-zero-dream/
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former (cancelled) contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
