Rupert Darwall’s new book brilliantly dissects the climate juggernaut and its enablers – yet on Russia and NATO expansion, he swallows the Western consensus almost whole. Dr Tilak Doshi finds a glaring blind spot.
By Tilak Doshi
The Age of Error and The West’s Undoing by Rupert Darwall (Encounter Books, 2026)
Rupert Darwall, previously special adviser to the UK’s then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont and currently Senior Fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics (NCEA), has spent the better part of two decades doing what few writers on climate policy dare to do: following the money, the meetings and the memoranda behind the West’s great green crusade. The Age of Error, newly published, is his most ambitious book (out of three) yet. It attempts nothing less than an explanation of why the West – with the significant exception of Trump’s America – chose to disarm itself economically, energetically and militarily at the very moment big-power geopolitics returned with a vengeance. The book is sweeping in its coverage of world events, learned in its focus on key issues, often brilliant in untangling the machinations that occur in the corridors of power. Yet, in one crucial respect, it is curiously conventional.
From Lehman to L’Aquila
Darwall’s age of error begins with the 2008 financial crisis. Elected politicians lost the authority to govern on their own account. Drawing on Bertrand de Jouvenel, Darwall argues that they recovered it by borrowing the prestige of experts: central bankers, climate scientists and public health officials. The result was what he calls “the co-dependency of politicians and experts with its command to ‘follow the science’”. Decisions migrated from parliaments to unelected committees (quangos in British parlance), and dissent became heresy.
The central bankers went first. Deficit financing and near-zero interest rates were supposed to restore growth; the Bank of England alone bought close to £900 billion of assets. Growth never properly resumed. What came instead were zombie firms, inflated asset prices, stalled productivity and, eventually, the inflation of 2021–22 that the monetary mandarins failed to see coming. Darwall reads this as a Keynesian conceit, the opposite of Schumpeter’s creative destruction of a vibrant capitalism. The real supply-side miracle of the period came not from Threadneedle Street or the Federal Reserve but from the shale fields of Texas and North Dakota, despite the Obama administration’s hostility to fracking.
Easy money had a further consequence. “Easy money begat ESG,” Darwall writes. Cheap capital disguised the true cost of capital-intensive wind and solar, while Wall Street embraced environmental, social and governance investing to buy itself a social licence after the crash. Mark Carney’s campaign to turn central banks into climate regulators, which I criticised at the time, and the fatal combination of central banking and ESG that followed, belong to the same story. Markets killed ESG in 2022, as Darwall wryly observes, although the regulators in the EU have not got the message, as I noted recently.
The intellectual spine of the book is the West’s abandonment of energy realism. Darwall contrasts the St Petersburg G8 of 2006 with the L’Aquila G8 summit of 2009. The 2006 G8 was the last occasion on which Western leaders spoke collectively as members of a fossil-fuelled civilisation focused on energy security. In 2009, the G8 inaugurated “an era of green Keynesianism”, promising emissions cuts of 80% or more by 2050 while claiming that green stimulus would deliver “sustainable growth”. “It was a jumble of policy incoherence,” Darwall writes. It was also a programme to replace efficient energy with inefficient energy, reversing the trajectory of progress since the industrial revolution.
The climate juggernaut, dissected
Darwall is unrivalled in explaining the anatomy of the UN climate process. His account of the small island states as climate ‘martyrs’ is a gem. The poster-child image of the Maldives vanishing beneath the waves served NGOs and island diplomats well. It helped win both the 1.5°C target and the $100 billion climate finance pledge. Yet a 2015 study of a central Pacific atoll that Darwall cites found that “no islands have been lost, the majority have enlarged”. Politics, as he says, “led the science”.
His account of the Paris agreement is equally penetrating. “NGOs turned out to be the most powerful players at the Paris COP.” The formula of Net Zero by 2050 had first been pitched to Obama’s climate envoy, Todd Stern, over an “eye-wateringly expensive tea in London”. “Adopting the goal of Net Zero would be the self-inflicted price the West paid for obtaining a climate agreement at Paris,” Darwall writes. China, meanwhile, kept building coal plants and captured the supply chains of the very ‘green’ industries the West subsidised. Far from liberalising China, WTO membership meant that “America and the West had invited a tiger to eat their lunch”. The belief that climate change poses an existential threat, Darwall concludes, “is an artefact of the Western mind in thrall to an ideology – environmentalism”.
The British chapters will be painful reading for anyone who still believes Westminster governs in the national interest. In June 2019, a lame-duck Theresa May made Net Zero law by statutory instrument, approved after an 88-minute Commons debate without a vote. Her Chancellor Philip Hammond had warned that the cost would be “well in excess of a trillion pounds”. Darwall’s data show a 20.7% increase in British generating capacity producing 24.2% less electricity. “Producing less with more is the essential fact of the energy transition,” he writes. Britain now pays the highest electricity prices in the industrialised world. The folly of ‘climate leadership’ by a country with less than 1% of global emissions is a theme I have covered in these pages.
On the WHO-declared Covid pandemic, Darwall is unsparing. The cover-up of the virus’s origins “has every claim to be the greatest crime in the history of science”, and even the CIA now judges a laboratory origin more likely. His parallels between ‘The Science’ of climate and of the pandemic, from the censorship of dissent to the freezing out of advisers such as William Happer (on climate) and Scott Atlas (on public health), are insightful and right on the mark.
Darwall reads Donald Trump’s election as the populist revolt against all this. “Trump’s re-election killed climate catastrophism as a political force,” he writes. Trump told the UN General Assembly that climate change was “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”. Eleven months after the election, in Darwall’s phrase, “Bill Gates read the funeral rites for climate change”, an epiphanic retreat from doomsday rhetoric.
The Russian blind spot
It is all the more surprising, then, that a writer so alert to the manufactured consensus on climate and Covid accepts the Western consensus on Russia almost wholesale. “Russia today and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s are both revisionist powers,” he writes. “Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and her band of EU appeasers had cleared the way for Europe’s most destructive war since World War II.” He calls the “Washington-backed coup” narrative of 2014, which John Mearsheimer adopted, “spurious”. Yet Mearsheimer’s broader thesis, that NATO expansion lay at the root of the conflict, echoes the warnings of diplomats such as George Kennan and William Burns.
To his credit, Darwall gives the realists a hearing. He quotes William Burns, then US ambassador in Moscow, warning Condoleezza Rice in February 2008 that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” Burns had already cabled that membership could split Ukraine and “force Russia to decide whether to intervene”. He quotes Sir Roderic Lyne, Britain’s former ambassador to Moscow, who called the push to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO at Bucharest “stupid on every level”. He even concedes that Western governments “were culpable in ignoring the advice of their diplomats and national security experts”. He names George Kennan, “the architect of Cold War containment”, among the critics but does not quote Kennan’s own 1998 verdict that NATO expansion was “a tragic mistake” and “the beginning of a new cold war”.
Darwall nonetheless dismisses the warnings on three grounds, none of which I find persuasive. First, he cites a 1990 memo by Gorbachev’s adviser Anatoly Chernyaev arguing that Moscow’s security rests on the nuclear balance, so NATO’s advance could not really threaten it. By that logic the United States, with overwhelming nuclear superiority in 1962, had nothing to fear from Soviet missiles in Cuba. It risked nuclear war anyway. Second, he notes that Viktor Yanukovych’s declaration of neutrality in 2010 took NATO membership off the table and that it returned only because of Putin’s aggression. But Yanukovych was driven from office in 2014, and the 2008 Bucharest promise that Ukraine “will become” a member was never withdrawn. Third, he cites Britain’s then Defence Secretary Ben Wallace for the claim that ethnonationalism, not NATO expansion, lies at the heart of Putin’s position. A minister who would soon be sending Ukraine made-in-Britain long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles is hardly a disinterested witness.
The Norwegian scholar Glenn Diesen put the realist case in a recent interview. The post-Cold War settlement, he argues, was meant to rest on indivisible security, the principle written into the 1990 Charter of Paris that no state should enhance its security at the expense of another’s. Darwall argues that the “not one inch eastward” assurances given to Gorbachev concerned German reunification only and that NATO expansion beyond Germany “was simply not an issue at the time”. Even if that is so, NATO’s march to Russia’s borders replaced indivisible security with the potential for NATO to base nuclear-capable missiles closer to Russia, down to seven to 10 minutes’ flight time to Moscow. In this view a neutral Ukraine was always in everyone’s interest, Ukraine’s above all, as Henry Kissinger argued in 2014.
Darwall’s account contains an unresolved conundrum. Ukraine’s move to the West, he writes, threatened not Russian security but “Putin’s rule”, and he quotes Ambassador Lyne saying the Kremlin’s leaders “know they are not legitimate”. On this telling, Putin is so weak that he cannot afford a free Ukraine moving towards the EU and NATO to be held up as an example for ordinary Russians to emulate. Yet Darwall himself concedes that Ukraine was “poorer, more corrupt, more oligarch-dominated and less politically stable” than Russia, hardly a model Russians were clamouring to follow. A few pages later Putin is Bismarck, a cold calculator bent on redrawing the map of Europe, a revisionist power akin to interwar Germany with “ambitions to re-establish Russian power in the post-Soviet space”. Darwall also cites Angela Stent’s observation that after 1991 Russia’s presence in Europe “had shrunk to its smallest extent since the 17th Century”. A Russia that could not take Kyiv in 2022 is hardly a Wehrmacht poised on the Rhine.
What the appeasement frame leaves out
Darwall sees appeasement in the West’s insistence on the Minsk agreements. He describes Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond urging Kyiv to honour them as “epitomising the prevailing spirit of appeasement”. Yet Merkel herself later admitted that Minsk was “an attempt to give Ukraine time”. The book is silent on the Istanbul talks of spring 2022, which, as Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko have documented, came close to a settlement built on Ukrainian neutrality. If there was a failure of Western statecraft, it looks less like appeasement than its opposite.
Darwall notes that Volodymyr Zelensky won 73% of the vote in 2019 by offering “the prospect of peace with Russia through dialogue”, and he concludes that Putin’s subsequent choices “defy reason”. The question not asked is why that mandate was never delivered, and why the Istanbul talks of spring 2022 came so close to a settlement only to collapse after Boris Johnson’s visit to Kyiv. According to Ukrainska Pravda’s sources, Johnson’s message was that Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with”; Johnson calls the charge that he sank the talks “total nonsense”. By 2024, Zelensky had instead signed a law to ban religious organisations affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church.
Darwall’s account of the green NGOs in the corridors of power in Western capitals and within the UN and other multilateral agencies is among the most penetrating analyses available in the literature about these amorphous entities. But disappointingly, there is little if any coverage of Washington DC’s ‘democracy promotion’ networks run by the State Department and its grantees and quasi-governmental bodies such as the Congress-funded National Endowment for Democracy.
Darwall notes that Victoria Nuland – the Obama State Department’s point woman on Ukraine – was in Kyiv backing the protesters when she was caught on a leaked call discussing who should form the next government. Darwall casts her – not without reason – as someone who “would acquire an outsize role in the depiction of subsequent events, not least because that’s how she liked to present herself”. In December 2013, three weeks into the Maidan protests, Nuland told a Washington DC audience that since 1991 the United States had “invested over $5 billion” to assist Ukraine’s ‘democratic’ development. Tracking these vast sums through the web of the State Department’s and USAID’s NGO grantees in ‘democracy promotion’ would have been of considerable interest to understanding the events of the Maidan revolution.
At its economic core, Russian-European relations have been based on Soviet and then Russian natural gas, flowing to West Germany since 1973 and a pillar of German industry for half a century. And it was disputes over natural gas trade that created “the first test of wills between the Paper Empire [i.e. the EU] and Vladimir Putin”, as Darwall puts it. Following Thane Gustafson’s account, Darwall casts the EU’s victory over Gazprom on its third energy package as proof that “the Paper Empire had teeth”. An oil and gas industry veteran might see instead gas following oil after the 1986 oil price collapse, from rigid OPEC-based oil-indexed contracts towards liquid spot markets. Darwall charges Gazprom with “softening up” Europe in 2021, while conceding that it “continued to honour its long-term gas contracts”. A supplier that meets its contracts and declines to sell more into a spot market is behaving as the liberalised market Brussels built incentivised it to.
What’s sauce for the goose
Perhaps the deepest omission in many accounts of Russia’s alleged revanchism under President Putin is the Cuban analogy. Darwall’s book offers no mention of the 1962 missile crisis. Glenn Diesen asks us to imagine a Russia helping to topple an elected government in Mexico, installing a hostile regime through ‘democracy promotion’ and arming it to strike the US heartland. No American president would or could accept it. To recognise great powers’ security interests on their borders is not appeasement but the beginning of diplomacy.
Darwall calls the 2014 annexation of Crimea, home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and an overwhelmingly Russian-speaking population, “the first forcible redrawing of borders in Europe since 1945”. He relegates Kosovo to a “partial exception”. Yet the Kosovo precedent was created by NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 without UN authorisation. The ‘rules-based order’ Darwall invokes was frayed by Western interventions from Serbia to Iraq and Libya long before 2014.
There is an irony here. Darwall quotes with approval the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy in rejecting “the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies”. He urges taking “a hammer” to them. But he balks when the same document calls the outsized influence of larger and stronger nations “a timeless truth of international relations”, dismissing realism as “a species of utilitarianism”. He follows Trump on climate, but not on Russia.
None of this makes Russia an innocent. But Darwall, who exposes better than anyone how elites manufactured an existential climate threat, should recognise the pattern when it recurs. Having wrecked their economies with Net Zero, Europe’s leaders now ask their citizens to prepare for war with Russia. I described that descent from green folly to military mobilisation earlier this month.
Realism or dissolution?
Darwall closes with a warning that if the West does not correct its path, “the age of error” will be followed by “an age of dissolution”. It is an ominous warning. On climate, central banking, ESG and Covid, his prescriptions are compelling: smash the Net Zero ideology, re-carbonise and restore democratic choice over expert diktat across the board. But this counter-revolution cannot stop at the water’s edge. It means taking seriously the perceived security concerns of a neighbouring nuclear-armed superpower, as Kennan, Kissinger and Burns did. On that score Darwall’s otherwise formidable book remains a prisoner of the establishment consensus it demolishes so effectively elsewhere. It deserves to be read and argued with.
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.