Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
A recent post by HotAir editor Beege Welborn, “Labour’s Case of Gas Under Attack,” describes the UK government’s decision to open an offshore natural gas field as a “win-win” for both the government and ratepayers. This is true, suppression of the development of their own energy resources has been a serious problem for the UK at large, which has suffered some of the highest electricity costs in the world.
A recent post by HotAir editor Beege Welborn, “Labour’s Case of Gas Under Attack,” describes the UK government’s decision to open an offshore natural gas field as a “win-win” for both the government and ratepayers. This is true, suppression of the development of their own energy resources has been a serious problem for the UK at large, which has suffered some of the highest electricity costs in the world.
Welborn writes that it’s “insane” that government officials took this long in the first place to make the decision to open the Jackdaw North Sea gas field, because “Jackdaw won’t take years to provide relief from both high prices and shortages of natural gas on demand during high usage periods,” gas is predicted to start being produced from Jackdaw “possibly within weeks.”
Tory leadership points out that, had the decision been made sooner, gas would have been available during this coming winter, when they are now facing shortages.
Any shortages mean that ratepayers will be suffering from even higher electricity prices, in a nation which ranks in the top ten with the highest electricity costs in the world.
Long gone are the days where residents can easily use their home fireplace if heating bills become too high. London makes it illegal to heat your home with wood burning stoves or fireplaces unless you have a particular kind of appliance, or are not in a smoke-control area (which most of London is).
This is especially egregious and dangerous given the fact that deaths due to cold weather outnumber those due to heat by a large margin. In the UK alone, between 2000 and 2019, 44,000 citizens died from cold weather, according to a study in The Lancet.
How many died of heat? Just 8000. Five times more people died of cold than heat in the UK.
But, as Welborn points out, these realities do not “matter one whit to the hard-core Labour climate cultists, the Greens, or any of the radical environmental whacko groups in the UK who have held sway over energy policy for so long.”
Indeed the complaint from other Labour members and the Green Party leadership is that opening Jackdaw is “climate vandalism.” Alleged human-caused global warming is their only concern, to the exclusion of all other issues.
The UK needs natural gas, however, and they will get it any way that they can, and up until now that was largely by importing it from other countries, which certainly could not be “greener” than using nearby resources anyway.
This way, they save in both emissions related to shipping (if you are worried about that at all) and reduce their reliance on sources of energy from foreign countries. As Welborn said, “win-win,” it should be a no-brainer.
Climate Realism has explained in a multitude of posts how and why renewables like wind and solar simply cannot be the majority energy source for a country, and in practice are more expensive than traditional energy. This is true for the United Kingdom as much as it is any other country that has suffered from rising electricity costs as they adopt more non-dispatchable wind and solar. The only reason they are so heavily installed at all is because of generous subsidies and mandates for installation provided to no other electricity generators.
In the UK, for instance, the Renewables Obligations (RO), Feed-in-Tariffs (FiT), and Contract for Difference subsidy schemes support wind and solar by awarding special certificates and payments for power generation, which end up costing the public almost £12 billion per year. As with every grid that ends up being over reliant on intermittent resources, extra gas plants are required to balance the unstable power generation from wind and solar, which further adds to the cost.
On top of all that, gas-fired electricity production is slapped with a carbon tax. Who pays for that? The ratepayer, ultimately.
Welborn, and by extension, HotAir where the post was published, are right to gloat about this victory, even if the UK has a long way to go to reduce energy costs. The climate of the planet is not going to be impacted at all by the UK using more of their own gas instead of getting it from foreign sources, hopefully Labour is finally waking up (at least a little bit) to energy reality.
One of the most curious responses to the ongoing controversy around North Sea oil and gas is that permission for developments should not be granted because the wells are drying up.
After a great deal of delay, the Jackdaw field has finally been given consent by the Government, though the Rosebank field looks set to be denied. This has increased the volume of chatter from green quarters, the angry flurrying of which further exposes its departure from reality.
One of the most curious responses to the ongoing controversy around North Sea oil and gas is that permission for developments should not be granted because the wells are drying up. I’ve long argued that the authors of green arguments owe little to their maths teachers, but any sense of logic or proportion is often conspicuously absent. After a great deal of delay, the Jackdaw field has finally been given consent by the Government, though the Rosebank field looks set to be denied. This has increased the volume of chatter from green quarters, the angry flurrying of which further exposes its departure from reality.
Ahead of the Government’s Jackdaw decision, it was the Guardian that claimed that “Heat pumps and insulation would cut UK living costs more than new oilfields, study suggests.” The ‘study’, however, seemed to be merely a blog post published on the website of the influential green think tank E3G a week earlier. Rather than presenting any new research, the post collected some anti-North Sea development talking points, most of which were themselves scraped from other green blob-funded fake civil society organisations.
“North Sea revenues are declining dramatically,” claims E3G. In support of this claim, it produces the following alarming chart, which does indeed look volatile. It shows a precipitous decline in revenues at the start of the preceding decade, spiking again during the post-lockdown era, followed by a projection back to zero. “New licences cannot restore these revenues,” it asserts.
But E3G’s chart is misleading. Yes, revenues are volatile. But the causes of this volatility and its tendency towards zero are not direct representations of geological reality. This is shown by a chart of the same data on an axis that spans the history of North Sea oil and gas.
In 1984, the Treasury made £40 billion from North Sea oil and gas revenues in today’s money. These revenues diminished into the 1990s to levels we have today, before increasing through the 2000s, into the precipitous decline seen in the 2010s. So E3G’s argument is falsified by data of which it shows only a small window.
But what caused that volatility? There is obvious correspondence between oil prices and revenues. Revenue tracks oil prices through the 1980s and 2000s. Yet high prices did not produce big revenues in the 2010s. Another part of this story is the tax policy context. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) provides the data.
The IFS’s chart is slightly outdated – the Labour Government increased and extended the ‘Autumn Statement’ oil and gas tax regime, such that the figure is now 78%. But that’s not important to understanding the historical picture. It also puts the current regime in context: the North Sea has often been subject to quite punitive taxes – above 80% for nearly the entire 1980s. Wells developed after 1993 were taxed at increasing rates – from 30% in the early 2000s to over 60% by the early 2010s – mostly under the Labour government but topped off by Chancellor George Osborne in 2011.
High tax rates didn’t dissuade record levels of investment, driven by rising energy prices. According to a 2017 UK government analysis, between 2010 and 2014, capital expenditure nearly doubled. But very little of this went on exploration and appraisal; most went on developing existing assets. A 2015 analysis by Professor Alexander Kemp at the University of Aberdeen for the Scottish Government suggested that the 2011 tax rises “by reducing full cycle returns to investors could also have played a role in curtailing exploration and appraisal”. The subsequent collapse in energy prices then undermined business plans, and turned revenue net negative for the years 2015 and 2016.
Rising costs and diminishing geological prospects may certainly have played their roles. But with little more than 5% of total expenditure going on exploration at peak prices, the image painted by green organisations of a desperate scrabbling around for the last drops of oil and gas is hardly supported. The viability of North Sea prospects is a much more complex story, and one that is as much affected by politics as by the state of the resources. And it is notable, moreover, that this episode coincided with the shale gas and oil controversy, in which green blob-funded organisations launched high-profile anti-fracking campaigns to sour the public mood against hydrocarbon resources of all kinds.
With fracking and conventional energy production, the green claim is a curious paradox. At the same time as they demand the prohibition of further licensing, they argue that the resources are exhausted, or not economically recoverable. But if they are not viable, then why the panic about their exploitation bringing about ‘Thermogeddon’? They can’t claim that they’re concerned for the poor investors behind Jackdaw and Rosebank, who might lose their shirts.
The paradox doesn’t stop there. “Tax revenues from the North Sea were about £4 billion in 2025–26, but upstream tax relief and support measures amounted to an estimated £3.26 billion,” claims the Guardian. The issue upsetting the newspaper and the green lobbying outfit is that firms are able to write off costs for decommissioning, such as capping well heads. As decommissioning costs rise, the taxpayer may be left as the underwriter if energy companies find themselves underwater at the end of their projects’ lifecycles.
Decommissioning costs are rising. According to Offshore Energies UK, “Decommissioning accounted for 15% of total oil and gas expenditure in the [North Sea] in 2024 and is expected to rise beyond 30% by the end of the decade,” and “decommissioning spend could potentially overtake capital expenditure as early as 2028”. But caution, again, is needed before rushing to the conclusion that this is owed to inherent issues with oil and gas production or with geology.
For a start, all forms of construction (of which decommissioning is a subset) are increasing in cost. This has become a fetter on all forms of development, green or otherwise, and this drag on growth has become the focus of a new wave of civil society organisations (or think tanks), some of which are green blob-funded, but which invariably pin the blame on regulation.
Perhaps the most notorious example of cost explosion has been the Botley Road railway bridge at the edge of Oxford’s city centre. With an initial cost estimate of an already eye-watering £161 million, construction began in 2023 but hit problems. It was completed last month amid global controversy. “Why does it cost £237 million to build a railway bridge?” asked Sam Dumitriu, Head of Policy at Britain Remade, in the Spectator.
But Dumitriu’s question might be better asked of Britain Remade’s major funder, the European Climate Foundation (ECF). ECF and its parent organisation, the Climateworks Foundation, take credit for, among many other things, leading the development of the European Union’s 2050 roadmap – an agenda that was all but explicit in its ambition for the deindustrialisation of the entire continent, including Britain. That agenda required the dismantling of coal-fired power stations, and it required the dismantling of oil and gas production, not merely emissions-reduction.
Deindustrialisation costs, and in turn increases the costs of everything that industrial society depends on, including bog-standard railway bridges. And that takes us to the second point. The decline of the North Sea is a policy decision. It was signalled extremely clearly by the incoming Labour Government that no more licences were to be issued. And that included the fields that had been explored, but had not yet been fully developed. Most notably, this held up the Jackdaw and Rosebank fields, which were discovered in 2005 and 2004 respectively, and had not yet received full consent by the time of the change of government. That is to say that it was government policy to prevent the fruits of two decades of oil and gas exploration coming onstream. Moreover, those two decades have been years in which governments of all parties have made clear their intention to ultimately destroy the hydrocarbon sector. And that is almost certainly reflected in the economic data pertaining to North Sea capital expenditure, including the relative proportions of exploration of new fields vs expanding existing concerns, and vs decommissioning costs.
But perhaps simple greed motivates this irrational environmentalism. The Guardian offers no evidence but claims that “The Government’s £15 billion warm homes plan […] would slash £1 billion a year from household energy bills across the UK” and “would draw in a further £15 billion in private investment”. But private investment in the North Sea – and indeed in fracking – would easily rival that annually, and would moreover create the possibility of returning prices to their 2003 lows – and lowering domestic energy prices accordingly, by far more than taxpayer-funded subsidies. Even if it were free money, £30 billion would buy only something like two million heat pumps – a far cry from the 28 million homes and countless commercial and public buildings that need heating too. Deindustrialisation costs, and there’s a lot of money needed to meet green policy objectives.
If green policy, advanced on bullshit spun by fake charities like E3G and pumped into the public sphere by the Guardian, forces homes into spending £tens of thousands each, then £trillions of finance will be required from financial institutions. It can only be a coincidence, then, that the funders of the green blob, including the ECF’s and the Guardian’s ‘philanthropic’ grantors, are typically hedge funds and their proprietors with interests in ‘low carbon finance’ and suchlike. And if it wasn’t merely a coincidence – which it certainly was – that would make the green movement in toto nothing more than an extremely cost-effective financial services marketing and lobbying operation.
Both the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields have had a chequered history. Both were discovered in the mid-2000s and were initially approved for development in 2023 and 2022, respectively.
Previous Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has described the decision to issue a development licence to Rosebank as “climate vandalism.” But now new Prime Minister Andy Burnham and new Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh have vowed to take a more “pragmatic” approach to the North Sea.
Both the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields have had a chequered history. Both were discovered in the mid-2000s and were initially approved for development in 2023 and 2022, respectively. But the approvals were overturned in 2025 because the Government had not taken into account the Scope 3 emissions arising from burning the hydrocarbons once they had been extracted.
Previous Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has described the decision to issue a development licence to Rosebank as “climate vandalism.” But now new Prime Minister Andy Burnham and new Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh have vowed to take a more “pragmatic” approach to the North Sea. The decision to approve both fields has allegedly been pushed back to this month because of the “optics” of approving new oil and gas licences during a heatwave. Stop press: the decision might now be postponed beyond the Holborn and St Pancras by-election because of pressure from the Greens.
Sensing weakness in the Government, the green industrial complex has ramped up the rhetoric with the Guardian claiming a new analysis calculated that £119 billion to £336 billion of economic damage would be caused by burning the hydrocarbons produced by Rosebank and Jackdaw, or £170–483 billion under a high production scenario. This article looks at the source of those claims and tests their veracity.
Source of Jackdaw and Rosebank damage claims
The Guardian made reference to a research article produced by Luke Hatton under the auspices of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. The reason the alleged damages are so high is they use a social cost of carbon of $754/t to $1,538/t or £572/t to £1,167/t at a GBP: USD exchange rate of 1.381. These are simply astronomical numbers and compare to the current UK carbon price of about £60/t. To make the damage numbers even bigger, they then escalate the cost of carbon by 2% for each year of the life of the field.
The research article claims that the total emissions from burning the production of both fields may reach almost 300 million tonnes under a high production scenario and the maximum damages reach £483 billion. This equates to £1,610/t, or almost 27 times the current cost of carbon. These alleged damages are compared to the estimated economic benefits of the projects of £28.7 billion. The article claims the damages from Jackdaw and Rosebank are up to 16.8 times higher than the economic benefits.
The paper concludes by contrasting Miliband’s “climate vandalism” quote and the latest “pragmatic” noises from Burnham and Fahnbulleh. Hatton says his article aims to inform the policy choice by quantifying the economic trade-offs and climate damages.
Flaws in the Jackdaw and Rosebank article
There are several problems with Hatton’s Jackdaw and Rosebank article. First, it assumes that extracting and burning oil and gas from Jackdaw and Rosebank will create an additional pulse of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – in effect, greater supply will lead to greater demand. It is more likely that Jackdaw and Rosebank will displace supply that is marginally more expensive and make no difference to global demand. Moreover, the gas from Jackdaw will likely displace expensive LNG with higher emissions than using domestically produced gas. Strike one against the article.
Second, Hatton compares the alleged global climate damages with UK-only benefits, which is not a like-for-like test. The relevant comparison would be to compare the global costs to the global benefits. There is global value in the energy those hydrocarbons provide such as heat, transport and feedstock. Hatton misses out these benefits and uses only the receipts booked in Aberdeen and Whitehall. On any such basis the £28.7 billion is a lower bound on benefits, not the full credit side. Strike two against the article.
Third, Hatton writes that holding damages fixed in 2025 pounds “does not account for the non-linear relationship between emissions and warming,” and therefore raises the social cost of carbon by 2% a year. However, the relationship between temperature changes and increased carbon dioxide concentration is logarithmic in nature:
This means that each extra molecule has less impact on temperature. The non-linearity that would justify a rising cost of carbon is not in the physics of forcing. However, the alleged damage function that does have a non-linear relationship in the way Hatton means – in the Burke paper he references – is a hypothesis, not a hard physical relationship. Readers should also note how fragile these damage functions are, since the Kotz paper was withdrawn late last year, calling into question the damage functions used by a consortium of central banks worldwide. Strike three against Hatton’s article.
Fourth, the scale of the claimed “damages” is nothing short of extraordinary. If these claims are scaled up to the global level, the figures frankly look ridiculous. According to Our World in Data, in 2024 the world emitted 38.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from burning hydrocarbons. If the average £1,610/t social cost of carbon used in the Hatton article is applied to these emissions, we get a value for the alleged climate damage from these emissions of £62.1 trillion (or $85.8 trillion at a 1.381 exchange rate). According to the World Bank, global GDP in 2024 was $111.67 trillion. This means the alleged climate damages from fossil fuels, using Hatton’s sky-high carbon costs, amount to about 76.8% of global GDP – clearly a risible conclusion. Strike four.
Finally, the implication of Hatton’s research article is that the damages from Jackdaw and Rosebank must be avoided by refusing to grant development licences. We have seen the claimed damages from using an astronomical cost of carbon are absurd. But we should also consider the counterfactual of the economic harm if we applied the same logic of such high carbon costs globally and stopped burning coal, oil and gas to avoid the alleged climate damages. According to Our World in Data, the world consumed 175,605TWh of primary energy with coal, oil and gas providing 142,532TWh or 81.2% of the total, see Figure 1.
Figure 1 – Global Primary Energy by Source (TWh)
What would happen if we stopped using this coal, oil and gas (the Just Stop Oil mantra)? It is not only hydrocarbon energy sources that would suffer. Coal is used to make steel and oil is used as a lubricant, so no more wind turbines or solar arrays could be built and no more nuclear or hydro power plants either. It is clear the impact on global energy is likely higher than the raw figures would suggest, but we can ignore that for now.
Our World in Data also shows us that in 2024 the world consumed 20,154kWh per person and GDP was $21,393 per capita. It is important to note there are no rich countries with low energy use, as shown in Figure 2:
Figure 2 – Energy Use per Person vs GDP per Capita
Removing 81.2% of this energy would bring per capita energy consumption down to about 3,789kWh per person. This is around the level of countries like Congo (3,858kWh/person), Mauritania (3,807) and Nicaragua (3,823). The GDP per capita of these countries in 2024 was $6,153, $6,483 and $7,661 respectively – much lower than the world average and far below that of developed countries.
If we scale up Hatton’s article to a global level and consider the impact on the global economy of removing hydrocarbons to avoid the alleged $85.8 trillion of climate damages, then the global economy would collapse. Is Hatton really suggesting Britain and the rest of the world should stop burning hydrocarbons so they regress to poverty-stricken agrarian economies? This level of economic and social damage is far higher than his risible “social cost of carbon.” Hydrocarbons bring untold social and economic benefits. In addition, about half the world’s population is dependent for food on nitrogen fertiliser made from natural gas. Stopping this would lead to half the world going hungry and starving to death. Is this really a better outcome than burning coal, oil and gas? Is Hatton really suggesting that Britain’s “climate leadership” will persuade China and the United States to give up coal, oil and gas? Strike five.
Conclusion
This “research article” is clearly propaganda designed to derail the approval of Jackdaw and Rosebank. Hatton uses astronomical estimates of the social cost of carbon that do not hold up to even cursory scrutiny. The flaws in the report have not stopped the Guardian drawing attention to it. The green industrial complex is clearly rattled that the fields may be approved and thus to some extent break the Net Zero spell, so it has resorted to disinformation to pressure the Government. It would be a travesty if Burnham and Fahnbulleh use this flimsy report as a pretext to refuse approval of these oil and gas fields.
The German “Investitionsbooster” (investment booster) has so far delivered little measurable uplift, private investments remain well below pre-COVID levels (around 11–12%), and the broader economic recovery stays weak.
Germany’s labour productivity growth has slowed sharply to an average of just 0.3% per year over the past six years, a level the Stiftung Familienunternehmen (Foundation for Family Businesses) and the underlying IW Köln study describe as no longer sufficient to sustain prosperity amid demographic decline.
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The German “Investitionsbooster” (investment booster) has so far delivered little measurable uplift, private investments remain well below pre-COVID levels (around 11–12%), and the broader economic recovery stays weak.
These points align with reporting from mid-August 2026 (Handelsblatt, 13 Aug; related coverage including BILD drawing on the same sources) and earlier data/releases from DIHK, Destatis (Federal Statistical Office), and the ifo Institute.
The package (in force since mid-July 2025) centers on temporary accelerated/declining-balance depreciation (up to 30% in the first year, and again on residual value in years 2–3) for movable assets such as machinery and equipment through end-2027, plus later phased corporate-tax cuts. Chancellor Merz had framed it as making Germany “fit for the future.”
After roughly one year, economists (IW’s Tobias Hentze, IWH’s Oliver Holtemöller, Claus Michelsen and others cited in Handelsblatt/BILD coverage) describe the effects as limited or “überschaubar.”
Private equipment investment rose 3.3% in Q1 2026, but the Economics Ministry attributes much of this to stronger exports rather than the tax incentives.
Equipment investment levels early in 2026 were still roughly at 2013 levels.
High uncertainty (US trade tensions, Middle East conflict, energy prices, weak demand outlooks, high energy and regulatory costs) is widely seen as blunting the incentives—research suggests high-risk environments can roughly halve the impact of such measures. Public spending (infrastructure special funds, defense) is providing stronger short-term support than the tax measures.
DIHK surveys and Destatis data consistently show private investments (companies and households) in 2025 around 11% below the 2019 pre-COVID level.
Some summaries round this to ~12%.
Investment intentions remain negative: recent DIHK polls show only ~23% of firms planning higher budgets versus 31–34% planning cuts (balances around –8 to –11 points), with the weakness especially pronounced in industry.
When firms do invest, the dominant motives are replacement and rationalization rather than capacity expansion or innovation.
Germany’s labour productivity growth has slowed sharply to an average of just 0.3% per year over the past six years, a level the Stiftung Familienunternehmen (Foundation for Family Businesses) and the underlying IW Köln study describe as no longer sufficient to sustain prosperity amid demographic decline.
This assessment comes from the Stiftung’s study “Fünf Hebel für mehr Produktivität” (Five Levers for More Productivity), prepared by the Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft (IW) Köln and released on 17 August 2026. It draws on Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) data and long-term trends.
The Productivity Slowdown
In the 1980s and 1990s, German labour productivity (economic output per employed person) typically grew by around 2% annually.
In the 2010s it averaged about 1%.
Over the most recent six years the figure has fallen to just 0.3% per year.
Michael Grömling (IW macroeconomics head) called productivity “the central engine of prosperity,” noting that this engine has been sputtering for years.
With fewer workers available due to demographic change, the study calculates that productivity growth would need to rise to roughly 1.6% annually, about five times the current rate, to offset the shrinking labour force and maintain living standards.
Contributing factors identified include:
Weak capital intensification (companies investing less additional capital per hour worked).
Limited efficiency gains from new technologies and innovation.
Insufficient private and public investment in machinery, infrastructure, and digitalisation.
High bureaucracy and other structural rigidities.
Labour hoarding amid skilled-worker shortages.
Short- term Destatis figures can look better (e.g., GDP per hour worked rose in parts of early/mid-2026 amid modest GDP growth of 0.3% in Q2), but these do not reverse the multi-year trend.
Potential-output estimates from the Federal Ministry of Finance also show very low total- factor- productivity contributions and overall potential growth near 0.3% for 2026.
The study outlines five measurable levers (ICT capital stock, AI adoption share, private R&D spending, bureaucracy index, and public capital stock). Scenario calculations suggest:
Stronger private R&D could deliver a long-term productivity gain of up to 13%.
Broad AI diffusion could add around 9% by 2034.
Bureaucracy reform offers the quickest payoff (up to 1.6% within a year).
Combined effects could raise economic output by up to €21,000 per three-person household over time (the individual levers are not simply additive).
The Stiftung argues that Germany needs a clear growth path rather than merely managing scarcity, and that the current trajectory risks eroding prosperity.
While recent GDP and ifo business-climate data show some stabilisation, improved sentiment), the structural productivity problem remains the binding constraint on longer-term prosperity.
German business associations and major corporations have urged the federal government to implement promised reforms urgently and without dilution.
In a joint letter reported on 21 August 2026, addressed to Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Labor Minister Bärbel Bas, Economy Minister Katherina Reiche, and coalition parliamentary leaders, signatories from Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg stated that high energy costs and changing economic conditions are placing companies under “erheblichem Druck” (considerable pressure).
They emphasized that the concrete design of social and economic policy frameworks will determine whether firms can remain competitive, retain jobs, and continue investing in Germany.
The letter calls for announced reforms and those contained in the coalition agreement to be enacted “schleunigst und ohne irgendwelche Abstriche” (as quickly as possible and without any cuts or compromises).
Prominent corporate signatories include Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Siemens, ZF, and Eberspächer. They are joined by the leadership of the Bavarian metal and electrical employers’ association and Südwestmetall (Baden-Württemberg).
A central concrete demand is the sustainable reduction of the social- insurance contribution burden.
This currently exceeds 42 percent, described as a historic high. The signatories criticize the fact that the effective burden on parts of business and insured persons continues to rise even when contribution rates remain stable, because contribution assessment ceilings (Beitragsbemessungsgrenzen) are being raised.
They call this “inakzeptabel.”
Broader reform themes referenced in related coverage and parallel association statements include lower energy costs, reduced bureaucracy, greater flexibility in working hours, and measures to improve overall competitiveness and investment conditions.
This appeal comes amid ongoing structural challenges for German industry: persistently high energy prices, elevated non- wage labor costs, weak private investment, and subdued productivity growth.
Surveys from bodies such as the DIHK have repeatedly highlighted energy costs as a major location risk, with many firms delaying investments or considering relocation.
Government responses have acknowledged the need for timely decisions on major projects covering energy costs, working times, and related issues, while noting that structural reforms take time to deliver results.
The letter reflects growing impatience in industry that announcements must now translate into concrete legislation, particularly ahead of and during cabinet discussions on economic matters.
This fits the wider pattern of German economic pressures discussed earlier, limited impact so far from the investment booster, productivity growth stuck near 0.3 percent, and demographic headwinds reducing the labor force, where business groups argue that cost reductions and faster structural reforms are essential to safeguard the industrial base.
German energy policy in 2026 remains defined by the long-running Energiewende (energy transition), but with a clear shift under Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU/CSU- SPD coalition toward cost control, industrial competitiveness, and pragmatism while formally retaining climate targets.
Core Goals
Climate neutrality by 2045.
80% renewable share in electricity consumption by 2030.
Coal phase-out by 2038 at the latest (lignite targeted earlier in some scenarios, though under review).
Nuclear power fully phased out since 2023 (no reactivation planned).
Renewables (mainly wind and solar) frequently account for 55–63% in 2025– mid and 2026 periods, with coal and gas still providing backup. Germany has had zero domestic nuclear generation since the final reactors shut down in 2023.
However, the electricity that is actually consumed in different parts of the country includes significant cross-border flows:
Southwestern Germany, including Saarland, is electrically well-connected to France. Germany regularly imports electricity from France, and a large share of French generation is nuclear. Official data and analyses show nuclear power making up a notable portion of Germany’s total electricity imports (often the single largest non-renewable source in the import mix). In some years/periods, France has been one of Germany’s top import partners, and cross-border redispatch measures have explicitly drawn on French nuclear capacity for grid stability.
Eastern German states have stronger interconnections with Poland. Poland’s power mix remains heavily coal-based (both hard coal and lignite). While the direction of flows varies (Germany has often been a net exporter to Poland in recent periods), imports from Poland do occur and carry a higher fossil/coal share than the German domestic average.
These imports mean that the physical electricity mix experienced in Saarland can include French nuclear power, and parts of eastern Germany can include Polish coal-generated electricity, even though neither nuclear nor (in the same volumes) that specific Polish coal is produced on German soil.
Domestic generation statistics look cleaner and more renewable- heavy than the full picture of what is consumed in specific regions once imports are included.
Germany has become more dependent on neighbouring countries’ generation mixes since the nuclear phase-out, which is exactly the nuance you highlighted.
High energy costs still elevated compared to many international competitors remain a core complaint of industry (as seen in the recent joint letter from major corporations and associations).
Wholesale prices have been volatile, recently pushed higher by Middle East tensions affecting oil and gas.
Grid bottlenecks from rapid solar growth force curtailments, and the overall system costs of the transition are substantial. Progress on heat pumps and electric vehicles has lagged, keeping oil and gas dominant in heating and transport.
Germany continues expanding renewables and remains committed to long-term climate goals, but the emphasis has shifted toward making the transition more affordable and industry- friendly.
Success depends on faster grid expansion, successful gas capacity auctions as a bridge, effective use of industrial relief to drive decarbonization and managing the fiscal burden of support schemes.
Critics argue some measures risk slowing the transition or locking in fossil infrastructure; supporters say they are essential to prevent deindustrialization.
The European Green Deal, launched in 2019, remains the EU’s flagship strategy to achieve climate neutrality by 2050 and cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030 (compared with 1990 levels).
The Green Deal has raised costs for energy- intensive industries through higher carbon prices (ETS), renewable support levies, and grid investment needs.
European industrial electricity prices remain roughly twice those in the US or China, contributing to competitiveness challenges, investment hesitancy, and selective deindustrialisation risks in steel, chemicals, and metals, issues frequently raised by German industry.
CBAM (Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism), fully operational in 2026, protects against carbon leakage by pricing the embedded emissions of imports (initially cement, steel, aluminium, fertilisers, electricity, hydrogen).
It raises costs for high- carbon exporters (including China) while creating incentives for greener global production.
A new report, commissioned by the Tories, has found that Ed Miliband’s Clean Power 2030 Plan will cost an extra £320 billion by 2050, compared to their own watered-down proposals which prioritise gas and nuclear, rather than wind and solar.
A new report, commissioned by the Tories, has found that Ed Miliband’s Clean Power 2030 Plan will cost an extra £320 billion by 2050, compared to their own watered-down proposals which prioritise gas and nuclear, rather than wind and solar.
The report by the economic think tank Onward was originally commissioned by Claire Coutinho, when she was Energy Secretary, to calculate the overall system costs of fully decarbonising the UK’s electricity supply. It was conveniently shelved by Ed Miliband when he took office.
The extra costs are made up as follows:
£137 billion in network spending, thanks to a higher utilisation firm power system with supply located closer to demand
£94 billion from lower wholesale prices, thanks to the removal of carbon taxes
£67 billion in lower spend on balancing and ancillary services
£22 billion across generation subsidies and the Capacity Market
Some in the media have claimed that electricity bills will be cut by £540 as a result, but this is a gross misunderstanding. With the exception of scrapping carbon taxes (worth about £5 billion a year), which will have an immediate effect on bills, the ‘savings’ refer to limiting future increases in bills as a result of Labour’s plans.
In short, Miliband’s plans, which remain official Government policy, will massively increase the price of electricity. The Tories say they can mitigate some of this – but not all.
We need to remember that decarbonisation policies have already cost the public well in excess of £200 billion over the last couple of decades. The cost this year alone will amount to over £20 billion, which equates to more than £700 for every household in the country.
Tim Stanley may not have an issue with this, but millions will disagree.
Labour’s response to the new Onward report has been a pitiful attempt to deflect. New Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh made no attempt to rebut any of the technical detail, instead offering this meaningless nonsense:
Labour is investing in more clean energy jobs, cutting tax on electricity bills to give families breathing space this winter and we’re taking action to tackle the climate crisis and bring down bills for good. Kemi Badenoch would put jobs at risk and increase bills. As global fossil fuel prices continue to rise amid conflict overseas and wildfires rage across the UK, we can’t turn our back on clean power. That won’t bring down bills and it won’t address the climate crisis. The Tories don’t have a clue.
A response has, though, come from the unreliable climate lobby outfit Carbon Brief, in what they laughingly call a ‘Factcheck’.
They claim to have identified “flaws” in Onward’s analysis, but most of the points they make are simply frivolous – for instance, that it would increase carbon emissions, to which I would reply: so what?
Other criticisms include:
Gas prices
They complain that Onward have assumed “low gas prices”. In reality, they have actually used the Government’s own assumptions, which are based on international gas prices prevailing last year.
But even at the currently inflated levels, the marginal cost of a CCGT gas power plant is still lower than the contract prices agreed for new offshore wind farms.
While nobody knows what gas prices will be in years to come, replacing existing gas power with wind power will lock in high prices for 20 years.
Cost of building gas plants
Carbon Brief complain that Onward have underestimated the capital cost of building new gas power plants. But again, the latter have in fact used the Government’s own assumptions.
They miss the point that we already have plenty of gas power capacity, which should be used to the full. The cost of building new plants is therefore not relevant in the next decade.
More to the point, the grid will still need new dispatchable capacity in order to supply power when the wind does not blow. Under Net Zero plans, this will eventually have to come from gas and hydrogen plants with carbon capture. The CAPEX issue applies equally in either scenario.
Carbon taxes
Onward’s figures include a saving on energy bills of £94 billion over 20 years from the scrapping of carbon taxes. Carbon Brief claim this is false accounting, because “£94 billion is no longer going into the government coffers, so it’s not saving the country any money”.
Either they don’t understand the energy market or they are deliberately lying. It is true that the money that gas power plants pay into the UK Emissions Trading Scheme ends up in government coffers. But, crucially, the marginal cost of gas power nearly always sets the market wholesale price for all generators, other than those on CfD subsidies.
Currently, carbon taxes are adding about £8 billion a year to electricity bills, of which £3 billion ends up in government revenues. The balance of £5 billion is windfall profit for all those non-gas generators – largely renewables.
Onward’s projection of £94 billion over 20 years is consistent with that figure of £5 billion.
Network costs
Carbon Brief have questioned the £137 billion in transmission network upgrade costs claimed by Onward.
In fact, the potential savings are much greater. Ofgem have already budgeted £73 billion for work in the next four years, while NESO have said another £89 billion will be needed “beyond 2030”. That’s a total of £162 billion.
But worryingly, there is increasing evidence that these costs have been grossly underestimated. EDF have indicated that construction costs could end up tripling – which should surprise nobody who has seen the budget for HS2 balloon over the years.
Nor do Carbon Brief bother to mention the hundreds of billions that will be needed to boost capacity on the low-voltage, local distribution networks – the cables which bring electricity down our streets and the substations and pylons that feed them.
This work will be essential if we are to charge our EVs and run our heat pumps.
Nobody in Government has even attempted to put a figure on the cost of this, because the answer would be truly frightening. Instead, the can is kicked down the road.
System balancing costs
Carbon Brief also maintain that the potential savings of £67 billion have been overstated. But again, they are being economical with the truth.
The National Energy System Operator, NESO, has already forecast that the cost of balancing the grid will reach £7 billion by 2030. This includes the costs of paying wind and solar farms to switch off when they produce too much and paying for standby capacity and battery storage when they don’t produce enough.
This is an increase of £5 billion compared to current costs. As intermittent wind and solar power capacity increases, these costs will continue to grow.
The Tory plan, having said all this, is a curious hybrid.
Although they say they will scrap Net Zero, they still appear to be wedded to its aims – hence the argument that lower electricity prices will encourage everybody to buy EVs and heat pumps.
I suspect it is a way of uniting the Lib Dem wing of the party with the rest.
As a result, they will likely fall between two stools, with a mongrel energy system that satisfies nobody. To optimise costs, the 45 GW of gas capacity demanded in their plan must run 24/7, or as close as demand allows. Running them as standby, as they want, makes them much less efficient and adds to system costs.
Meanwhile, for as long as EVs and heat pumps remain part of the plan, hundreds of billions will need to be spent on the grid.
Just one more factoid to finish with.
According to Carbon Brief, the Tory plan results in an extra 524 MtCO2 being emitted between 2030 and 2050 – a tiny 26 MtCO2 a year.
The UK’s annual emissions are around 700 MtCO2, including those embedded in imported goods.
I find it astonishing that anybody is even thinking of wasting £320 billion in order to reduce UK emissions by less than 4%.
In her UnHerd column last week, Kathleen Stock writes from a “horrifically well-insulated sweatbox”, the fan beside her registering 29°C while the air outside hits 33.
Ms Stock has absorbed the idea of a “new kind of summer” as lived experience.
In her UnHerd column last week, Kathleen Stock writes from a “horrifically well-insulated sweatbox”, the fan beside her registering 29°C while the air outside hits 33. Every day is the same: clear blue, suffocatingly hot, uncannily still. The parks are brown, gardens turning to dust. Stressed trees drop huge boughs. At night, foxes prowl, thirstily searching for water. Brambles appear far too early; the pond at the end of the road is silting up. She feels discombobulated – sweaty, exhausted, her mind as vacant as the cloudless sky.
This opening of her UnHerd essay, ‘Why I’ve got the hots for localism’, is an existential register of fatigue, rendered through direct observation and an aesthetic sensibility rather than charts or organised empirical data. Ms Stock has absorbed the idea of a “new kind of summer” as lived experience. The cider-apple harvest is failing, harebells and wasps are disappearing, parts of the New Forest are blackened, elderly neighbours wilt in oven-like flats and local farmers watch stunted wheat and barley. She asks how we feel about this “new normal” and answers with sadness and “discombobulation” that require no grand theoretical defence – much as grief for people or pets needs none.
Dr Stock OBE, a gender-critical feminist and philosopher, is right about the larger strategic point that follows. Whatever the causes and consequences of global warming, a small country like Britain cannot do anything about it alone. Provisional UK territorial greenhouse-gas emissions for 2025 stand at 367 MtCO₂e, less than 1% of the global total according to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Any meaningful reduction is swamped by emissions growth in China, India and other large developing economies. The coordination and free-rider problems among major emitters in any proposed global deal are near-impossible. Gathering the world’s nations at the UN annual climate summits – the next one, COP31, to be held in Antalya, Türkiye, from November 9th to 20th 2026 – has made little difference to global emissions over the past three decades.
Instead of clashing endlessly over the global warming narrative, she proposes detaching the local from the global. Chasing impossible global solutions hampers useful consensus-building on urgent local and regional problems to save vanishing landscapes and help the elderly in oven-like flats, manage failing harvests and buckling rails and form practical adaptation plans “without any grand theory about carbon dioxide.”
An unprecedented hot summer, raging wildfires, failing agriculture: not by the numbers
Start with the weather itself. Stock treats the current summer as a novel meteorological regime – “the new kind of summer”, a heat so unfamiliar that “no one can remember what rain feels like”. The parks are brown, trees drop boughs, foxes search for water. Yet British summers have been hot and dry before, and worse. The 1976 heatwave and drought produced 16 consecutive days above 30°C at Heathrow, a peak of 35.9°C at Cheltenham and a drought so severe that a Cabinet minister was appointed specifically to manage it; some parts of southern England received under 55% of average rainfall over more than a year. The 1995 drought is now regarded by meteorologists as drier still. Neither event required elevated atmospheric CO₂ to be explained; both were driven by persistent blocking high-pressure systems, the same phenomenon operating today. The insistence that 2026 is meteorologically unprecedented functions less as observation than as mood music for the argument that follows. Note that the UK Met Office itself, relying on junk weather stations and purveying “homogenised” – read massaged – temperature trends, has lost credibility as a reliable organisation, as my colleague Paul Homewood has documented rigorously over the years.
The same selective framing appears in Stock’s treatment of local crises. She notes a nearby train derailment that observers speculate was caused by heat-buckled rails. Stock’s catalogue of local issues includes early brambles, a silting pond, New Forest fires, a failing cider-apple harvest, disappearing harebells and wasps and stunted wheat and barley. Some of these can cause real hardships. But the causal story she tells is incomplete, and conveniently so. The “heat buckling” of rail tracks is being investigated by rail officials but, until it is confirmed, the likely culprits are poor maintenance of tracks and other infrastructure.
Wildfire investigators have long found that the overwhelming majority of UK wildfires are started by people, not lightning – the House of Lords Library concludes that almost all UK wildfires result from accidental or deliberate human acts, while Natural Wales estimates roughly 30% are arson and 70% accidental or careless. Ignition, in other words, is a human-behaviour problem before it is a climate problem.
What has changed is fuel load. The fashion for ‘wilding’, and the accompanying retreat from controlled winter burning, has left England’s uplands carrying more combustible vegetation than at any point in living memory. Labour’s extension of restrictions on controlled heather burning across 1.6 million acres of peatland has removed one of the oldest and most effective tools for breaking up continuous fuel and creating firebreaks; gamekeepers, moorland managers and land-owning bodies have warned for years that the policy was building toward exactly the kind of record wildfire season Britain has now had. The fashion for ‘rewilding’ and the abandonment of controlled burns are not neutral acts of nature; they are policy choices, promoted under green banners, made by identifiable people in Whitehall and Cardiff. When Stock attributes the blackened New Forest simply to “the heat” of “a new kind of summer”, she erases the agency of those who decided that traditional land management was environmentally incorrect.
Water stress and agricultural shortfalls raise similar questions. Reservoir capacity, leakage rates and abstraction rules – rules for extracting water from natural resources – are not dictated by atmospheric CO2. They are set by decades of underinvestment and regulatory choices. Fertiliser costs inflated by energy taxes and carbon-pricing on natural gas pass through to farmers agonising over stunted wheat and barley yields.
It is remarkable that Ms Stock agonises over elderly people wilting in poorly insulated flats or sweltering in Britain’s many hospitals without once mentioning the glaring lack of air-conditioning – the one technology already proven, unambiguously, to reduce heat mortality wherever it has been allowed to spread. Yet the Luddite ruling class in the UK and EU would rather have their citizens face the risk of a grisly, painful death from heatstroke than provide cheap electricity and allow them to install a $400 air conditioner. Air conditioning is nearly universal in American and Japanese homes (approximately 90%) but remains the exception rather than the rule across Europe (approximately 23% average) and is especially uncommon in the UK (estimated at low-teens to single-digit percentages).
Dr Stock is absolutely right that politicians can address these problems without first settling the precise role of carbon dioxide in the climate system. But she is wrong to imply that practical, local and national policymaking can proceed while bracketing out the overarching policy choices – Net Zero mandates, land-use dogma and energy-price interventions – that have already made adaptation more expensive and less effective than it needs to be.
A caricature of the sceptical position
Ms Stock’s portrait of the wider climate debate is equally skewed. She sees a sterile symmetry: apocalyptic greens on one side, “stubborn scepticism” on the other offering “little acknowledgment of local social and environmental losses” and “no nuanced plan of action, except to keep buggering on as before”. The renewables discussion, she says, is “absurdly polarised”, with one side talking only of benefits and the other only of harms.
This is a caricature. Serious analysts of renewable energy – David Turver, Kathryn Porter and Dieter Helm among them – have performed the elementary work of cost-benefit analysis that Stock claims is missing. They examine intermittency, system balancing costs, backup requirements, grid reinforcement and the displacement of firm generation. Turver’s own submission to Parliament’s cost-of-energy inquiry laid out, in granular detail, why levelised-cost comparisons that ignore firming and network costs systematically understate the true price of wind and solar. None of these analysts deny that turbines and panels generate electricity when the weather cooperates; they ask whether the full system, backup included, delivers net benefit at the reliability a modern economy actually requires.
Global integrated-assessment models, including the DICE model of Nobel laureate William Nordhaus, abstract from local detail precisely because their purpose is aggregate, long-run quantification of costs and benefits under uncertainty; that is methodological necessity, not indifference. Local and regional studies exist alongside them. To accuse sceptics of ignoring local losses is to ignore a literature that has spent years documenting deindustrialisation, the uglification of the countryside by wind turbines, acres of solar farms, and pylons and the household cost of subsidising intermittency.
The Peterson–Self exchange, and the lean toward Self
Stock briefly referees a skirmish between Jordan Peterson and Will Self. Peterson notes the Medieval Warm Period and the greening effect of elevated CO2; Self dismisses the former as unmeasurable and non-global, and the latter as irrelevant because biodiversity is allegedly still collapsing. Stock leans toward Self. This is misplaced on both counts.
Proxy reconstructions – tree rings, ice cores, sediments, documentary records – have long been used to estimate historical temperatures; the irony is that the same proxy method underpins the “hockey stick” reconstruction that climate campaigners have treated as gospel for a quarter of a century. Evidence of the Medieval Warm Period appears well beyond the North Atlantic, in the Sierra Nevada, the Andes, China, Tasmania and New Zealand, even as researchers continue to debate its precise global synchrony.
On biodiversity, the crude claim of relentless, undifferentiated decline sits awkwardly with the finding that only a small fraction of assessed species – roughly 1.5% of birds and 1.4% of mammals – have actually gone extinct since 1500, well below the figures earlier apocalyptic projections implied. Greening, meanwhile, is not a talking point; it is measured from space. NASA satellite data show that a quarter to half of the planet’s vegetated land has significantly greened over the past four decades, with CO2 fertilisation responsible for roughly 70% of the effect – an area of new leaf growth equivalent to twice the continental United States. One would imagine that the greening of formerly arid and semi-arid areas could only help in enhancing biodiversity.
The deeper error in Stock’s piece is the false equivalence itself. One side has spent decades converting scientific debate and uncertainty into moral certainty and policy absolutism. The other has pointed out that the UK accounts for roughly 0.8% of annual global CO2 emissions, that Chinese and Indian emissions growth swamps any conceivable British reduction many times over and that unilateral “climate leadership” is a luxury belief whose chief practical effect is to export British industry and import the emissions of less efficient overseas producers.
This is not a new argument in these pages: I have set out at length, here and here, how a deindustrialising island contributing under 1% of world emissions convinced itself it could “lead the world” out of fossil fuels. Rupert Darwall has detailed the costs to Britain in its “folly of climate leadership”.
The costs are not abstract
Those costs are not abstract. Analysis commissioned for the Conservative Party under Claire Coutinho has put the potential saving from abandoning the current all-renewables pathway, in favour of a system that retains gas alongside nuclear and renewables, at £320 billion in electricity system costs over two decades. Separate research for the Institute of Economic Affairs has found that official Net Zero cost estimates have fallen sharply in recent years not because decarbonisation has become cheaper, but because the methodology used to calculate it has changed. Energy-intensive industries have already left Britain or scaled back their operations here. The countryside is being littered with solar arrays, wind farms and the pylons and substations needed to move intermittent power around the grid.
Stock mourns changing landscapes and living conditions yet passes over the most visible recent alteration to the British countryside: the subsidised hardware of the energy transition itself. Deindustrialisation undertaken in the name of decarbonisation does not reduce global emissions; it merely relocates them to China and India, typically to less efficient, more coal-intensive producers. Living standards suffer in the process, for no measurable planetary benefit. Cheaper, more reliable electricity and installation of cheap air-conditioners would do more for elderly people in overheated flats and hospital wards than another round of behavioural exhortation about carbon footprints.
Stock’s best sentence, and the one she declines to follow
Stock’s most valuable sentence is also the one she fails to follow through to its logical conclusion: “It is obviously possible to worry about such [local, regional and national] problems, and for politicians to form plans to address them, without espousing any grand theory about the role of carbon dioxide.” Precisely so. Adaptation – better building standards, resilient water infrastructure, intelligent fire and land management, affordable and reliable energy – does not require prior resolution on equilibrium climate sensitivity parameters or the exact social cost of carbon. It requires competence, and a willingness to abandon the specific policies that have already raised costs and reduced resilience: burn bans that let fuel accumulate, planning rules that block reservoirs and a decarbonisation timetable that prices gas and fertiliser out of reach of the farmers she worries about.
She anticipates the rejoinder that local concern without global action is insufficient. Her reply is that the coordination problem among major emitters is practically insoluble, and that Self’s vision of controlled markets, rationing and “particular forms of restraint for which the established political vocabulary has no adequate name” sounds mad. On that last point she is entirely right. Authoritarian climate policies of the green globalist governments are not a solution to the coordination problem; it is a confession that voluntary coordination has failed, and that coercion is the only instrument the true believers have left.
Kathleen Stock’s incomplete localism
Yet Stock’s localism remains incomplete, for a reason she does not examine. She wants us to notice what is vanishing locally and to mitigate the impacts. Fair enough, as far as it goes. But the vanishing she describes is not solely climatic and the mitigation she wants is obstructed by the very policies whose global efficacy she declines to adjudicate. Reservoirs are not built because green-obsessed planning and environmental rules block them; controlled burns are discouraged because peatland regulation prohibits them; fertiliser is taxed and gas is made artificially expensive in service of a decarbonisation theory she says she cannot be bothered to evaluate. The result is that the local suffering she catalogues so movingly is real, and substantially self-inflicted by policy choices made in the name of a global theory that a country responsible for eight-tenths of 1% of world emissions cannot meaningfully affect either way.
Conservatives who merely poke holes in the Left’s preferred theories without offering practical alternatives deserve the criticism Stock levels at them. She is right about that much. But the remedy is not symmetrical disengagement from the underlying facts. It is rigorous attention to costs, benefits and adaptation at every scale, grounded in accurate description rather than atmospheric pathos. Geological time has oscillated between ice ages and inter-glaciation for hundreds of millennia; the choice of 1850–1900 as the sacred pre-industrial baseline is itself a political convention, not a self-evident natural fact. Feeling sad about a hot, dry summer is entirely human, and understandable. Treating that feeling as a reason to suspend scrutiny of the policies that made the summer harder to bear than it needed to be is not.
There is indeed a great deal of work to be done, as Stock says. It begins with accurate description rather than mood music, with cost-benefit accounting rather than moral symmetry between a rigorous empirical literature and its caricature and with the plain recognition that a country responsible for roughly 1% of global emissions cannot save the planet by impoverishing itself first. Localism without data is just another, more comfortable, form of the same exhaustion.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
Recently, it has felt like we had reached a new dawn on energy and climate policy with energy Jedi winning the argument against the Net Zero by 2050 target. Reform fought the election on a policy of abandoning Net Zero.
Recently, it has felt like we had reached a new dawn on energy and climate policy with energy Jedi winning the argument against the Net Zero by 2050 target. Reform fought the election on a policy of abandoning Net Zero. More recently, the Tories have followed suit by abandoning the 2050 target, setting out their own cheap power plan and beginning to purge the party of Net Zero zealots like Gavin Barwell.
But the green empire is striking back with a new article (no paywall version here) in the Telegraph from Tim Stanley and Greg Jackson has also weighed in, cheering on Stanley’s article. Even DV himself has weighed in to support Tim Stanley. The trouble with Tim Stanley’s argument, in common with many Net Zero supporters, is that it is based on vibes and emotion, not analysis of actual data.
Time to dive in to see what Tim Stanley and Greg Jackson got so wrong.
Tim Stanley’s claims
Stanley claimed the wildfires of Europe are “pitiless and persistent” and made “infinitely worse” by the long, hot summer. He also claimed the UK has endured the three worst harvests on record in the past six years and warned that one third of Bangladesh’s agricultural GDP is expected to disappear by 2050. He also stated Pakistan is enjoying a solar boom and said it was ridiculous that Britain was reluctant to follow suit. Stanley also claimed developing countries are more worried about climate change than we are. Finally, he characterised Net Zero sceptics of the online right as “talking itself into corners of angry irrelevance”, as having “misplaced sympathy for the devil” and lacking compassion or charm. However, he became incoherent by claiming he was not arguing for an ideological commitment to decarbonisation and said Kemi Badenoch is correct to abandon the dogma of targets.
Greg Jackson thought Tim Stanley’s article was “superbly written” and that renewables solutions are “increasingly economically better than the fossil fuel alternatives”. According to Jackson, solar is the cheapest power on the planet and onshore wind is “bonkers cheap”. He thinks a freer market in electricity could use renewables to drive down energy costs.
Stanley’s article was illustrated by an apocalyptic image of raging wildfires in Europe (see Figure 1). Whilst fires like these must be terrifying for those affected, policy should be set by reference to facts, not emotive images.
Figure 1 – Tim Stanley claims wildfires have become infinitely worse
This image was used to support Stanley’s claim that wildfires in Europe are pitiless and persistent and made infinitely worse by long hot summers. We can test this claim against data produced by Our World in Data (OWID) as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2 – Cumulative area burnt by wildfires by week
This shows that far from becoming infinitely worse, wildfires in Europe are running at the lowest rate on record. We should note that OWID’s definition of Europe includes the whole of Russia. But even if the geographical scope of the chart is limited to the EU27, 2026 year-to-date is the sixth worst year on record, with area burned running at just 42% of the worst year in 2012. The data undermines the whole premise of Stanley’s article.
Tim Stanley might also note that many of these fires in France are manmade, just not in the way he thinks – because 162 people have been arrested in France on suspicion of wildfire arson.
Worst UK harvests?
Tim Stanley also claimed the UK has endured the three worst harvests on record in the past six years. Although data from OWID only goes to 2024, we can see the claim is false as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3 – UK Index of cereal production yield and land use
Recent levels of production and yield have not been unusual compared to the last 30 years. Peak production came in 1984, with cereal production around 174% higher than the 1961 baseline, but then there was nearly 32% more land dedicated to cereal production. In 2024, there was twice as much cereal production and 106% better yields than in 1961, despite using 3.1% less land. It certainly looks like those evil fossil-fuel derived fertilisers have helped us to feed ourselves. What is more worrying is the land dedicated to cereal crops looks to have begun a downtrend. Maybe carpeting prime farmland with solar panels is not such a good idea after all.
Bangladesh agriculture under threat?
Stanley’s claim that one third of agricultural GDP in Bangladesh is at risk appears to come from a 2022 report by the World Bank. Again, OWID has data to show that fear is at best misplaced, see Figure 4.
Figure 4 – Bangladesh agricultural output dollars
Agricultural GDP in Bangladesh is soaring and the 13.3 million climate migrants expected by the World Bank are probably not going to materialise, because deaths from natural disasters in that country have plummeted from a one-off peak of 1.9 million in 1943, due to drought, to just 28 in 2025 – with 10 of those from earthquakes, which are of course unrelated to climate.
Bangladesh also seems more concerned with economic development than climate change because energy consumption is soaring and almost all of it comes from hydrocarbons – coal, oil and gas – see Figure 5.
Figure 5 – Bangladesh energy consumption by source
This contradicts Stanley’s claim that developing countries are more concerned about climate change than we are.
Pakistan solar boom?
Tim Stanley’s article also claimed:
Contemporary Pakistan is enjoying a solar boom. How? Because millions of peasants, sick of high utility prices inflated by corruption, have bought cheap solar panels from the Chinese and hung them from their roofs and balconies.
He went on to chide Britain for not following suit. It is true that Pakistan now generates nearly 19% of its electricity from solar and the solar share has been growing rapidly. Britain’s solar share is 6.6% of electricity generation. Despite this disparity in solar penetration, the carbon intensity of Pakistan’s energy is higher than the UK’s, see Figure 6.
Figure 6 – UK and Pakistan CO2 per unit of energy
By international standards, Pakistan generates very little electricity, producing just 764kWh per person, compared to the world average of 3,860kWh, the UK’s 4,203kWh and China’s 7,474kWh per person. A big part of the reason remote regions of Pakistan are turning to solar power is because less than 55% of households are connected to the grid. For them, access to some solar is better than no power at all. Another reason Pakistan is more suited to solar power is latitude. Pakistan lies between 23 degrees and 37 degrees north, where it is sunnier than Britain, which is much further north. This is why the World Bank rated Pakistan in roughly the top quartile of countries for practical solar power potential and the UK second bottom, just above Ireland.
Poor countries worried?
As shown above, Bangladesh does not appear to be overly concerned about climate change, in contradiction to Tim Stanley’s claim that poor countries are more worried than we are. OWID also produces data to show carbon dioxide emissions by income group, see Figure 7.
Figure 7 – Annual CO2 emissions by income group
Even though emissions from high-income countries like Britain are falling, emissions from upper-middle and lower-middle income countries are rising sharply. Emissions from low-income countries are low and rising slowly. High-income countries will become poorer and be overtaken by upper-middle income countries who want to become more prosperous.
There is growing demand for oil and gas in Africa. For example, a farmer in Kenya, Jusper Machogu, campaigns for fossil fuels for Africa because he wants to Just Stop Toil. He is getting angry that Greenpeace is acting like a neo-colonialist, blocking a new oil refinery in his country. Another strike against Tim Stanley’s evidence-free tirade.
Renewables increasingly economically better?
Let us turn now to Greg Jackson’s claims that renewables are “increasingly economically better” and a freer market for renewables would bring down energy costs. As we have discussed before and as shown in Figure 8, the UK already has the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world and domestic prices are also among the highest.
Figure 8 – International Industrial Electricity Prices (p per kWh)
The term of contracts for difference (CfDs) has been extended to 20 years and the prices awarded in AR7 for offshore wind and onshore wind rose in AR7. Prices for solar dipped slightly, but on a like-for-like 15-year contract basis prices rose. There is no evidence that the base cost of renewables is falling.
The news gets worse, because the cost of integrating intermittent renewables into the grid is soaring, with balancing, backup and grid expansion costs set to triple from 2024/25 levels by 2030/31, as shown in Figure 9.
Figure 9 – Forecast for grid integration costs (£bn)
Far from becoming “increasingly economically better”, intermittent renewables are getting increasingly expensive. If we were to make the electricity market freer – by, for instance, cutting carbon taxes on gas-fired electricity, eliminating renewables subsidies and making them pay for their grid integration costs – then most renewables projects would fail and there would be little new spending. Greg Jackson is wrong on both his main points.
Who Lacks Compassion?
Tim Stanley’s most emotive line was when he accused Net Zero sceptics of having misplaced sympathy for the devil and lacking compassion. We may ask what is compassionate about making electricity so expensive that families have to choose between heating and eating. Where is the compassion for oil and gas workers in Aberdeen losing 1,000 jobs per month? Is there an ounce of sympathy for Port Talbot steelworkers, Grangemouth refinery workers or the thousands more losing their jobs in other energy-intensive industries such as petrochemicals, chemicals, ceramics and glass? Isn’t it simply unconscionable to deprive the developing world of cheap, abundant hydrocarbons needed to support their economic and social development?
We know the energy Jedi are winning the argument when the green empire has to resort to emotive pictures and mendacious invective to make their point. None of Tim Stanley’s arguments stand up to close scrutiny, and the cheerleading Greg Jackson is reduced to making entirely false claims to stop his Octopus Energy business from collapsing into further losses.
The trouble is that lies travel halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on, so the green empire striking back can be temporarily effective. But be in no doubt: the energy Jedi will return, and economic and physical reality will prevail.
Ed Miliband has spent his career as one of the world’s most committed climate zealots, and he now finds himself installed as Foreign Secretary in Andy Burnham’s new government, personally taking up the United Kingdom’s seat as Governor of the World Bank.
Ed Miliband has spent his career as one of the world’s most committed climate zealots, and he now finds himself installed as Foreign Secretary in Andy Burnham’s new government, personally taking up the United Kingdom’s seat as Governor of the World Bank. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office announced this week that the former Energy Secretary would personally occupy the United Kingdom’s seat as Governor of the World Bank, a job normally left to a junior minister, so that the “climate crisis” and overseas development sit at the very heart of British foreign policy. “International development is not an add-on to British foreign policy – it is central to it,” Miliband declared. “By taking on the role of UK governor to the World Bank, I want to send an unambiguous signal that this Government is serious about its global leadership on development and climate.”
He arrives there determined to push the Bank back toward the climate agenda it has just spent a year being forced to retreat from under the Trumpian energy agenda of “drill baby drill” and “energy dominance”. It sets Miliband, and the Burnham Government behind him, on a collision course with the Trump administration’s deliberate campaign to strip the ‘globalist’ climate agenda out of the very institutions Miliband now intends to use as his platform.
The Trumpian energy counter-revolution
Since Donald Trump’s return to office, his administration has waged a sustained campaign to wrest the great multilateral institutions back from the ‘globalist’ climate agenda that captured them over the past two decades. Washington threatened outright withdrawal from the International Energy Agency unless it abandoned the Net Zero fantasies embedded in its 2021 “Net Zero by 2050” roadmap; the IEA duly reintroduced its Current Policies Scenario, quietly shelving two decades of advocacy dressed up as forecasting.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has led the same campaign more bluntly still with respect to the Bretton Woods twin institutions (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund). The Treasury Secretary told the IMF and World Bank that fossil fuels remain critical for developing nations and, reading between the lines, that the eco-zealots’ stranglehold on global finance had to end. Last October, Bessent told the World Bank directly to refocus on affordable energy, poverty reduction and country self-reliance; by this April he was warning the IMF that “mission creep” into climate, gender and social issues had left it disconnected from its core mandate.
Both institutions seem to have started moves to comply with these marching orders from their most powerful stakeholder. The World Bank formally abandoned its target of directing 45% of lending to climate causes only last month, a retreat which Reuters reported followed months of pressure from Bessent personally. The IMF, for its part, is folding its climate and gender units into a single office focused on core macro-financial work, eliminating what Bessent called “extraneous, non-core issues” from its board work programme.
The actions of key Trump officials such as Scott Bessent and Energy Secretary Chris Wright seek to reverse what amounts to a long march of climate activism through the institutions founded to fight poverty and stabilise the international monetary system, not to remake the global energy mix in the image of Whitehall’s and Brussels’ green priesthood. The same instinct – that Western institutions had been captured from within by a narrow progressive elite indifferent to the people they nominally serve – animated Vice President J.D. Vance’s Munich Security Conference address in February 2025, a speech aimed at European governance broadly but which set the tone for everything that has followed at the IEA, the World Bank and the IMF.
Enter the climate zealot
Miliband declared that his elevation would send “an unambiguous signal” of Britain’s climate leadership, never mind the folly of such an enterprise for a country responsible for less than 1% of global carbon emissions. Lord Nicholas Stern – the leading climate alarmist economist who authored the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change – predictably welcomed the move as a signal that would resonate “powerfully” internationally. No one who has followed Miliband’s career should be surprised. Ed Miliband has spent nearly two decades ratcheting up Britain’s climate commitments, from the 2008 Climate Change Act he shepherded as Gordon Brown’s Climate Secretary through to the legally binding 2050 Net Zero target and the windfall taxes that have throttled North Sea production.
His tenure at the oxymoronically named Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is defined by an economic illiteracy borrowed wholesale from his favourite economist Mariana Mazzucato’s “mission-oriented” industrial policy. Miliband’s doubling-down instinct has persisted even as the IPCC’s own high-emissions scenarios were quietly abandoned as unrealistic. His successor at DESNZ, Miatta Fahnbulleh, offers no meaningful change of direction and the real question is whether she will be “as mad as Ed Miliband”, not whether Britain’s Net Zero trajectory will bend under this new Burnham Government. What has changed is the stage. Miliband now carries his climate maximalism from a domestic arena that voters can eventually punish at the ballot box into an unelected international board seat at the World Bank precisely at the moment Washington is dragging that institution back toward energy realism.
A green activist in Downing Street
Miliband’s elevation cannot be separated from who put him there. Prime Minister Andy Burnham, the former Manchester mayor now installed in Downing Street, is himself an enthusiastic green activist, insisting there should be “no turning away from Net Zero”, even as households across Britain buckle under energy bills inflated substantially by that same agenda. While the UK Government’s overseas aid will fall from 0.5% to 0.3% of gross national income by 2029, and climate finance itself has already been cut by 14% – it doubles down on the rhetoric. That combination, cutting the cheques while intensifying the sermon, is entirely of a piece with a governing instinct that treats climate virtue as costless because someone else, eventually, pays the bill: the British consumer at home, the World Bank’s other shareholders abroad. Burnham and Miliband are not an odd pairing but a matched set, each reinforcing the other’s conviction that Net Zero orthodoxy is not up for renegotiation, whatever Washington or the British electorate might think.
Collision course with Washington
None of this bodes well for the transatlantic relationship. Donald Trump could barely tolerate Sir Keir Starmer; he will find still less to like in a Downing Street occupied by an unapologetic green activist and a Foreign Secretary who has spent a decade insulting him. Miliband once called Trump a “racist, misogynistic, self-confessed groper”, a line that resurfaced painfully when BBC Breakfast’s Jon Kay put it back to him on air and Miliband could only mutter that he had “said some things in the past”. Trump allies have not let the appointment pass quietly: Steve Bannon told the Telegraph the choice was “very injurious” to the special relationship, and the White House was reportedly “deeply concerned” well before the appointment was confirmed.
President Trump has shown before that he can forgive past insults, but as one commentator observed, Miliband may yet have to “bend the knee” much as the ill-starred Peter Mandelson did in describing his own past attacks on Trump as “ill-judged and wrong” before taking up his short-lived Washington ambassadorship – a piece of public grovelling that Miliband, given his temperament and his convictions, seems far less suited to replicate.
The deeper problem is not personal but structural. Miliband’s record gives Washington plenty of substantive grounds for concern beyond old insults: he has been a vocal opponent of new North Sea drilling and, as one commentator noted, led opposition within government to the US use of Diego Garcia for American bombers – hardly the profile of a British Foreign Secretary Washington would have preferred. Washington’s entire strategy at the World Bank and IMF has been to strip out precisely the climate mandate creep that Miliband now intends to reassert from his new perch. A British Foreign Secretary who arrives at the Bank’s board table determined to reverse Bessent’s hard-won progress is not merely an awkward diplomatic footnote; he is a direct challenge to the declared policy of the United States Government, delivered by a minister with no shortage of past provocations already on the record. Add a Prime Minister who seems unlikely to countenance any retreat from Net Zero, and the ingredients are in place for a genuinely fractious chapter in US-UK relations – one considerably more consequential than the everyday friction of allied governments who happen to disagree.
The British Government appears not to have noticed the ground has already shifted beneath it. The IEA, the World Bank and the IMF are, however fitfully, rediscovering their founding purposes under American pressure. Miliband’s determination to drag the World Bank back the other way, backed by a Prime Minister who shares his convictions, suggests Britain is about to find out just how much leverage a single governor’s seat still carries against the wishes of the institution’s largest shareholder – and just how much patience Washington has left for a government that keeps choosing the losing side of that argument.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
There is a quiet, coordinated campaign underway to reshape American energy policy. It is being waged not by voters or their elected representatives, but by a small network of activist lawyers, blue-state officials, and anonymous donors. They have figured out that what they cannot win at the ballot box, they might extract from a courtroom. And it is costing you already.
There is a quiet, coordinated campaign underway to reshape American energy policy. It is being waged not by voters or their elected representatives, but by a small network of activist lawyers, blue-state officials, and anonymous donors. They have figured out that what they cannot win at the ballot box, they might extract from a courtroom. And it is costing you already.
The vehicle is climate litigation. Across the country, about 40 nearly identical lawsuits have been filed by states, counties, and cities demanding that oil and gas companies pay billions of dollars for their alleged role in climate change.
Eleven states, the District of Columbia, and dozens of local governments have signed on. And behind a striking number of them is the same California firm. Sher Edling is filing copy-and-paste complaints on a contingency-fee basis, meaning the lawyers get paid only if the money flows, and then take a healthy cut.
Who bankrolls this? Congressional investigators have documented millions in “dark money” that Sher Edling reportedly received — roughly $3 million routed through the Collective Action Fund and the New Venture Fund. They are pass-through vehicles that are not required to disclose their donors.
Activists, funders, and government prosecutors have even convened off the record to coordinate strategy. This is not grassroots justice. It is a professionally financed campaign to make national policy through friendly local courts, one jurisdiction at a time, accountable to no electorate.
The word lawfare means using litigation as a weapon to achieve a political end that could not survive an honest, open debate. And the genius of it, from the activists’ point of view, is that the public pays either way.
Producing and selling gasoline, diesel, and natural gas is entirely legal; it is what keeps America moving, warm, and lit. But every dollar a producer is forced to surrender, and every dollar spent defending against these suits, gets folded into the price the rest of us pay at the pump and on our utility bills. It is a tax on energy that no legislature enacted and no voter approved, collected through the back door of a courthouse.
The good news is that the tide may be turning. The Supreme Court agreed this year to hear the Boulder, Colorado, case, which squarely tests whether a single county’s courtroom can set energy policy for the entire country.
States are no longer waiting. This spring alone, Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Iowa passed laws barring these speculative climate-damage claims from their courts. Oklahoma’s is fittingly titled the Energy Security and Independence Act.
In Congress, Rep. Harriet Hageman of Wyoming has introduced the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act, which would end retroactive climate-liability suits and reaffirm that emissions policy belongs to accountable federal lawmakers, not roving trial lawyers. These are policies made in daylight by people who voters can hire and fire.
But here is the part the litigation industry would rather you not dwell on, even on its own terms: this crusade is pointless. Suppose every one of these lawsuits succeeded and American energy grew more expensive. What would it accomplish for the global climate? Almost nothing.
China now emits more greenhouse gasesthan all developed nations on Earth combined, and emissions from India and the rest of the developing world keep climbing. The United States could hobble its own producers, raise its own families’ bills, and weaken its own energy independence, and the global emissions curve would barely flicker, because the growth is happening on other continents.
The real cost of climate lawfare could be billions paid by all of us. It does not cool the planet. It makes American energy scarcer and pricier; it enriches a handful of lawyers and the shadowy funds behind them, and it transfers power from voters to litigators and judges.
Worse, it does all this at the exact moment we should be pursuing energy dominance. By outproducing our rivals, keeping costs low for working families, and refusing to hand an adversary like China a strategic advantage, we volunteered to give it away. Through no choice of ours.
Americans deserve energy that is affordable, abundant, and reliable, and they deserve to decide their energy future at the ballot box, not through a lawsuit. The courts were never meant to be a policy-laundering service for interests that lost the argument everywhere else. It is time to say so and to shut the racket down.
The European Union’s approach is more diffuse but no less consequential. There is no single Brussels air-conditioning law; instead Ecodesign and energy-labelling rules govern which units may be sold, the revised F-Gas Regulation squeezes the refrigerants that make cooling affordable, and the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive places air-conditioning into a wider inspection and certification regime.
In Camden, North London, a homeowner did something that would strike most of the people in the world as entirely unremarkable: he fitted two air conditioning units to the rear of his flat so that his family might sleep more comfortably through a spell of hot weather. Camden Council’s planning enforcement officers thought otherwise. They ordered the units “permanently removed”, ruling that the installation breached the borough’s “cooling hierarchy” policy, and advised the resident to rely instead on open windows and balcony doors. This was no isolated bureaucratic misfire. It happened during a stretch of hot, dry weather of the sort Britain has seen periodically for decades, one that produced some locally exceptional readings elsewhere on the Continent but nothing that anyone who sweated through the summers of 1976 or 2003 would call unprecedented.
What was unusual was the accompanying alleged body count. Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London and the Met Office announced more than 2,700 estimated deaths across England and Wales attributable to the May and June heat, a figure duly repeated across the press as established fact.
As my colleague Ben Pile points out, it was nothing of the sort. The 2,700 figure was not a count of bodies but the output of a statistical model estimating how many deaths would statistically not have occurred at lower temperatures – a hypothesis presented to the public as an observed fact. Britain’s own official mortality statistics show that cold weather kills roughly four times as many people every year as heat does, a detail rarely mentioned by the same commentators demanding ever more urgent climate action. None of this should surprise readers familiar with the modelling habits of Britain’s climate establishment: last year’s equally confident predictions of a heatwave death spike were followed by mortality data that, if anything, declined through the following weeks.
The narrower point worth making is about consumer choice. The same institutions that tout estimated heat deaths to justify accelerating Net Zero are also among the loudest defenders of the planning regime that blocks the one technology already proven, unambiguously, to reduce heat mortality wherever it has been allowed to spread: the ordinary air conditioner. One might expect a policy establishment that spends every summer touting heat-mortality estimates to embrace, without hesitation, that remedy. Instead, Britain and the European Union have spent the better part of two decades constructing precisely the opposite – a regulatory architecture engineered to make it as difficult as possible for ordinary households to own, install and run an air conditioner. This is the energy-efficiency mindset carried to its logical, and thoroughly illogical, conclusion.
The cooling hierarchy
London’s planning rules, inherited from the 2021 London Plan under Mayor Sadiq Khan, instruct developers to minimise reliance on “energy-intensive” cooling wherever possible, and boroughs including Camden and Islington have adopted the doctrine into their own local frameworks. Nationally, England’s building regulations require new-build developers to prove that shading, insulation and ventilation have been exhausted before mechanical cooling is even considered. None of these regulations amount to an outright ban – existing homeowners face no legal bar to fitting a window unit – but the cumulative effect has left Britain with barely three in every 100 homes air-conditioned, against roughly nine in 10 in the United States. Claire Coutinho, the former UK Energy Secretary, called the Camden enforcement action absurd and accused planners of trapping Britain in a self-imposed climate of deprivation – a fair complaint, though one wonders how far her own party’s Net Zero commitments differ from it in kind rather than degree.
Brussels’ thermostat
The European Union’s approach is more diffuse but no less consequential. There is no single Brussels air-conditioning law; instead Ecodesign and energy-labelling rules govern which units may be sold, the revised F-Gas Regulation squeezes the refrigerants that make cooling affordable, and the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive places air-conditioning into a wider inspection and certification regime. Member states have then layered their own restrictions on top.
During the 2022 energy crisis following the start of the Ukraine war, Spain and Italy imposed legal minimum thermostat settings on public and commercial buildings, and this summer, as the current heat dome settled in, the European Commission issued guidance urging households not to set their units below 25°C, noting that every degree colder adds roughly 7% to electricity consumption – advice from Brussels on how cool a citizen may make his own living room.
Nowhere is the paternalism more explicit than in Switzerland, admittedly outside the EU but instructive all the same. In Geneva, a homeowner seeking a permit for a fixed air-conditioning unit must demonstrate a genuine need for it, and comfort does not qualify; some residents have resorted to producing a doctor’s certificate. Basel-Stadt and Basel-Landschaft go further still, barring residential units outright, while Zurich has in the past refused permission for a care home to run an ageing unit through a heatwave because it fell short of efficiency thresholds. The predictable result, as reporting from the canton shows, is a surge in sales of cheap, inefficient portable units that guzzle more electricity than the fixed systems residents were denied.
The energy-efficiency gap, revisited
The mandatory fuel-economy and appliance standards beloved of the Obama and Biden administrations rest on the presumption of a widespread “energy-efficiency gap”. Careful ex-post studies have repeatedly found that the magnitude of supposedly unexploited, profitable efficiency investments is far smaller than engineering studies claim, and that ordinary households and firms generally know their own circumstances better than a regulator armed with a spreadsheet.
A Mexican Government programme which subsidised the replacement of old refrigerators and air-conditioners on the promise of a 30% energy saving delivered only 7% once the engineers’ ex ante models met actual ex post consumer behaviour. What Europe’s air-conditioning saga adds to this record is a darker variant: rather than merely mandating that appliances be efficient, governments have moved to discourage ownership of the appliance itself, redefining comfort as a vice to be rationed through planning law, cantonal permits and moral suasion.
A recent report from the Consumer Choice Center catalogues the result as a genuine patchwork across all 27 EU states, the UK and Switzerland. Building façade rules, heritage permits, condominium consent thresholds and energy inspections vary so wildly that a consumer moving from Warsaw to Zagreb encounters an entirely different legal universe. The predictable consequence is not less energy use but more disorder: illegal installations have proliferated in the Netherlands because the legitimate route is so onerous, while in Portofino, Italy’s wealthiest town, police mounted a crackdown on illicit units after the mayor spotted one hanging over an alleyway.
None of this looks like careful regulation. It looks like prohibition, with prohibition’s familiar side effects. Red tape, aesthetic objections in conservation areas and the overriding imperative of “climate neutrality” by 2050 have kept effective cooling out of reach for millions. Increasing AC use, we are told, would undermine emissions targets. Better that people suffer than the planet be “harmed” by the very technology that has made hot summers tolerable in America, Japan and much of Asia for decades.
This is the logic of energy efficiency taken to its absurd conclusion.
There is, too, a cultural dimension which no cost-benefit analysis captures. British breakfast television has run segments debating whether using air conditioning is “selfish”. German commentators have coined the term “AC-phobia” to describe a guilt complex around climate that keeps citizens from buying a unit their American or Japanese counterparts would consider unremarkable. In responding to some US journalists and social media influencers criticising and making fun of a sweltering Paris because the city “does not have A/C in every room”, Paris Deputy Mayor Audrey Pulvar recently issued a statement claiming that the US bears a “significant amount of responsibility” for the ongoing heatwave in Europe.
Washington’s different answer
While London’s boroughs draw up “cooling hierarchies” and Geneva’s cantonal officials weigh medical certificates, Washington has taken the opposite path – under an Energy Secretary who has made consumer choice the organising principle of his department. On July 2nd 2026, Secretary Chris Wright announced a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking intended to permanently end federal efficiency mandates governing air conditioners, gas stoves, washing and drying machines, water heaters and refrigerators, rather than merely delaying them as earlier deregulatory notices had done.
Mr Wright put it plainly: “In America, you should be able to choose a dryer that dries clothes on the first try rather than one that takes multiple cycles – unfortunately, past administrations thought otherwise.” For too long, he continued, Americans had paid the price for rules that restricted choice and drove up costs. President Trump had promised to end this nonsense, as one X user posted last year: “[i]t only took 29 years, but Jerry Seinfeld’s complaint about government-mandated, low-flow showerheads was finally taken seriously. Trump signed an EO to make showerheads great again.” Showerheads with greater pressure, washing machines and dishwashers that actually do the job, light bulbs that don’t cost an arm and a leg and plastic straws that don’t fall apart mid-drink make people’s lives easier – and it is common sense, as Secretary Wright would put it.
This move sits squarely within the broader deregulatory framework established by President Trump’s Executive Order 14,192 of January 31st 2025, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation.” That order imposed a “10-for-1” requirement: for every new regulation issued, agencies must identify at least 10 existing ones for repeal, with the explicit goal of driving net regulatory costs significantly below zero in the first year. It is a sharper version of the 2-for-1 rule from Trump’s first term.
Chris Wright’s proposal rewrites the Process Rule that has, under successive administrations, required each new generation of household appliance to be more efficient than the last, and would make it far harder for a future administration to reimpose that ratchet. Wright put the matter in terms any consumer could follow, arguing that Americans deserve the freedom to choose a dryer that works properly on the first cycle rather than one engineered chiefly to satisfy a federal emissions target. Indeed, as Gary Abernathy of CFACT complained, it is high time that the US Government “stop treating us like children, coercing us into buying overpriced ‘energy-efficient’ appliances that don’t do the job!”
Consumer and climate change advocates object that the old mandates saved households on their utility bills each year while reducing emissions. Yet one academic study found that much of the policy analysis on energy efficiency “runs counter to the most rudimentary economic theory and our general sense that we do not live in a world in which people never make sound choices”. If energy efficiency were such a great strategy, would ordinary people need experts in the IEA, the World Bank or McKinsey to tell them how to save money? Is the pavement filled with $20 bills that remain uncollected, “low hanging fruit as it were”? One would think it natural that businessmen and heads of households know how to save money and cut costs as they see fit.
Two enlightenments
The contrast is not merely regulatory; it reflects two distinct inheritances from the Enlightenment itself. America’s founding generation drew on Locke’s conviction that legitimate government exists to secure a citizen’s natural rights to life, liberty and property – a principle Jefferson refashioned in the Declaration of Independence’s promise of an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. On that reading, state power is a trust granted by consenting individuals for narrow, limited purposes; it is not a warrant for philosopher-kings (or queens), however well-credentialed, to decide how warm a citizen’s living room ought to be.
Continental and British statecraft drew instead on a more paternalistic strand of Enlightenment rationalism characteristic of ‘democratic socialism’ and Fabianism. The post-war EU and UK political elites believed that an educated administrative class could calculate the public good more reliably than the public itself and was entitled to act on that philanthropic calculation. It is this second tradition that produced London’s cooling hierarchies, Brussels’ thermostat guidance and Geneva’s medical certificates: each an expression of the conviction that comfort is too important to be left to the person who has to live with the decision.
Secretary Wright’s Energy Department is reasoning in the older American idiom – that the pursuit of happiness includes the freedom to choose one’s own dryer and one’s own air conditioner, and that the state’s job is to get out of the way of that choice rather than to supervise it.
Europe does not lack the technology, the electricity supply or the wealth to cool its homes. What it lacks is a governing philosophy willing to concede that comfort, like any other good, is for the person paying for it to decide in a free market. A genuinely liberal response would streamline permitting, treat a condenser unit on a balcony as no more of a planning offence than a satellite dish and abandon the pretence that a household which chooses air conditioning over a hand-held fan has failed some test of environmental virtue. In Plato’s Republic, the philosopher king – the ‘expert’ – ruled, and the plebs obeyed. In our liberal democracies, one would have thought, ordinary people run their businesses or their household budgets as they see fit, and energy efficiency is their own business.
There, in the end, is the contrast that matters. London’s borough councils, Brussels’ directorates and Switzerland’s cantons still see no place in their air-conditioning rules for consumer sovereignty; the citizen remains someone to be managed, permitted and, where necessary, ordered to remove what he has already installed.
Consistent with Trump’s counter-revolution in US energy policy, Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been moving in the opposite direction to his European and British counterparts – dismantling the mandates of his predecessors precisely in order to hand the decision back to the household that pays the bill. One tradition traces its authority to a Lockean compact that treats the citizen’s pursuit of happiness as the point of government; the other traces its authority to an expert class that decides on behalf of its hapless citizens.
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