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.
Since 2016 and the first Trump election, many on the left wore “resistance” like a merit badge. It was on yard signs, coffee mugs and cable news graphics.
Yet, after the results of the midterms, that brand has a problem. The “resistance” is headed to Washington.
Capitol building at sunset, Capitol Hill, Washington DC. American Congress.
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
— H.L. Mencken
Since 2016 and the first Trump election, many on the left wore “resistance” like a merit badge. It was on yard signs, coffee mugs and cable news graphics.
Yet, after the results of the midterms, that brand has a problem. The “resistance” is headed to Washington.
Line up the energy records of the new class and a pattern jumps off the page. Net-zero deadlines imposed by executive order. Pipelines voted down. Oil and gas dismissed as a relic. Hundreds of billions in taxpayer money steered toward the climate movement.
These are the people that will now write the bills and set the hearing schedule. And they’re all in on the Green Agenda…depending on when you asked.
North Carolina’s Roy Cooper signed an executive order demanding net-zero emissions by 2050 and 1.25 million zero-emission vehicles on state roads by 2030.
Ohio’s Sherrod Brown voted against Keystone XL…twice.
Kansas’ Adam Hamilton, a megachurch pastor, preached a 2020 sermon calling for repentance over climate change and suggesting his flock rethink foods “like cattle.”
Maine’s Troy Jackson helped pass the state’s climate laws and sat down for a Q&A with a group pushing public ownership of Maine’s energy system.
That’s not a list of politicians auditioning for the moderate wing. They’re angling for a keynote at the next Sunrise Movement rally.
From Green New Deal to “All of the Above”
Then the campaigns started, and the positions changed. Correction: the stated position changed.
El-Sayed not only deleted his 2019 post “I believe in a Green New Deal,” he flip-flopped and said, “Look, I’m not going to defend the Green New Deal.”
In 2022, Talarico said, “Fossil fuels are destroying the planet.” By September, his campaign was assuring Texans he “knows how essential oil and gas is to Texas’s economy” and backs an “all-of-the-above” strategy. Talarico now says, “too many people in our party talk about eliminating oil and gas.”
South Carolina’s Annie Andrews ran with the League of Conservation Voters’ endorsement calling her “committed to bold climate action.” A week before the election, she said, “I’m an all-of-the-above approach.”
A campaign slogan costs nothing. A Senate vote goes on the permanent record, and the American public pays the bill
Starting in January, these senators will vote on permits, pipelines, power plant rules and tax credits. Every roll call will show which version showed up for work: the candidate who sounded like a wildcatter in October, or the activist who was there all along.
Nobody Voted for The Green New Deal
The exit polls back that up. In NBC’s exit poll, the economy was the top issue at 39%, followed by the state of democracy and immigration. Climate didn’t make the top three.
The election isn’t a permission slip for green mandates that taxpayers will be paying off long after this Congress is gone. After all, North Carolina knows how that goes.
Under Governor Roy Cooper, state and local governments pledged more than $1.2 billion in incentives for an electric vehicle plant. The 7,500 promised jobs shrank to about 1,400 while the opening slid to 2028. Earlier this year, the state sued to take back the land. Lawmakers in both parties signed off, but taxpayers are the ones left holding an empty lot.
The Shoe Is on the Other Foot
For years, Democrats described standing up to the people in charge was the highest form of patriotism.
Every time this caucus pushes a rule that raises a power bill, they should hear about it. Every time a pipeline permit stalls, the Kansas rancher and the Texas trucker deserve to know whose desk it’s sitting on.
China isn’t waiting on Senate hearings. It’s building coal plants faster than any nation on earth, and every kilowatt America refuses to make is one Beijing is glad to supply.
Voters gave the keys to the Senate, not a blank check for the Green New Deal.
For years, these former outsiders spent all their time “resisting.” Now, they will get to see how they like being resisted.
One thousand million dollars a year, soon to be more, is being sucked out of the Australian economy to pointlessly track carbon emissions. And companies will pay even more than that to hire consultants to calculate the emissions in the first place so the accountants (the ones earning a billion dollars) can check them.
These a billion dollars that isn’t making better widgets, growing food, or curing cancer. Customers will have to pay more for the exact same product.
Australian companies will pay $1+ billion in climate accounting fees, including reporting CO2 produced in other countries
One thousand million dollars a year, soon to be more, is being sucked out of the Australian economy to pointlessly track carbon emissions. And companies will pay even more than that to hire consultants to calculate the emissions in the first place so the accountants (the ones earning a billion dollars) can check them.
It creates a new vested interest who will lobby for more of this red tape.
All over the country fully functional people with 15 years of education (at least) are busy researching and calculating numbers that serve no useful purpose. Even if we pretend carbon dioxide was worth limiting (bear with me), what point is there is tracking emissions produced in China, say, from burning our coal? So, we can flagellate ourselves at UN cocktail parties? So, we can tell off President Xi?
Australian companies are being required to account for emissions they don’t produce, from facilities they don’t own, in countries where Australian law has no jurisdiction. Penalties are in the order of $18 million or 10% of annual turnover. What are we thinking?
These a billion dollars that isn’t making better widgets, growing food, or curing cancer. Customers will have to pay more for the exact same product. Shareholders get nothing but a smaller dividend. Australia becomes just a bit less competitive. But some bureaucrat will have some great stats to share on a slideshow at the next UN convention.
The Labor Party has brought in laws saying all Australian companies with more than 100 employees* have to calculate their carbon emissions in detail, including not just the emissions they control (Scope 1) but the emissions produced by their suppliers of electricity, heating and cooling (Scope 2) and even by their customers (Scope 3).
ClimateZero has helpfully laid out the full bureaucratic nightmare that poor CEOs must employ lawyers and accountants to wade through. This onerous task is being phased in, starting with largest companies last year, and bringing in the smaller $50 million operations* mid next year. “Scope 3” emissions get added to the burden a year after the Scope 1 and 2 emissions.
The awful truth is that big companies are doing all this work and then paying around $85,000 just for accounting firms to check and approve their numbers. Mid-sized companies are slugged for about $61,000 for the same process. This is really going to hurt smaller businesses.
The Australian Financial Review ran an article discussing “the billion-dollar bonanza” these onerous rules give to the Big Four accounting firms. They noted that the Labor Government is promising to reduce the burden by $210 million or so and was tinkering around the edges considering whether to allow some smaller companies to escape.
Two years ago, two Coalition Senators estimated that climate reporting will cost business $2.3 billion. They estimated 1,800 entities would be captured. It’s just a paper pushing farce, tracking a gas that feeds plants and trees. The Labor Party is creating jobs burying bottles of cash and paying people to dig them up again.
Surely this is soul destroying for the national psyche? Half the population already doesn’t think Net Zero is worth spending a cent on. How long before the people doing the accounting and auditing realize their career is a pointless inanity?
Australia’s climate disclosure regime is being examined by a Treasury consultation seeking to pare back some rules and cut the costs of compliance.
The consultation follows a proposal in this year’s federal budget to raise the thresholds for large proprietary companies. This is a move that could free many small companies of the obligation, and the big accounting costs that come with it.
In related developments, the Coalition also announced last Wednesday that it would significantly curtail climate reporting for business, by carving out emissions from Australian gas and coal burned overseas and reducing the number of companies captured by the scheme.
“The European Union and New Zealand have scaled their climate reporting rules back significantly, while the US has stopped pursuing it at the federal level.”
But reducing this accounting burden will cut the income of the Big accounting firms, cry me a river….
Climate fee bonanza for big four
Separate research has projected Australia’s climate reporting market to be worth more than$1 billion a year in fees for consultancies and auditors, with companies paying a median $85,000 (!) for assurance – 70 per cent more than Treasury’s initial $50,000 estimate.
The big four accounting firms captured 90 per cent of climate assurance engagements – 504 out of 561 reports – according to research by data consultancy Purpose Bureau, supported by Monash Business School and advisory firm Foresight.
The research found that the median disclosed fee of the big four is $88,000, compared with a median figure of $61,000 for mid-tier firms.
Thankfully, two weeks ago the Coalition announced they will dump the Scope 3 requirement and also drop the smaller companies out of it.
Labor’s own Treasury estimated Scope 3 emissions modelling alone could cost around $245,000 per entity in the first year, and more than $160,000 annually thereafter.
Leader of the Opposition Angus Taylor it is absurd to force Australian businesses to report on emissions they cannot control, using data they often cannot access, at a cost running into hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Even better, One Nation promises to get rid of the Net Zero Legislation, the Paris Agreement, abolish the Safeguard Mechanism and close the Federal Department of Climate Change.
_______________
*It applies to companies with 100 employees or $50 million in revenue, or $25 million in assets. It may change to a $100m cut off soon, with the Labor revamp.
Another year has passed, another ‘Conference of the Parties’ (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will convene. Next Monday the travelling circus pitches its tent again, this time in the Turkish Mediterranean resort of Antalya, for COP31, which runs from November 9th to the 20th. Some 100,000 participants are expected.
Meanwhile, the UN has quietly moved the goalposts. UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report 2026, pointedly titled The Point of Return, concedes that limiting warming to 1.5°C without significant overshoot is no longer achievable.
Another year has passed, another ‘Conference of the Parties’ (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will convene. Next Monday the travelling circus pitches its tent again, this time in the Turkish Mediterranean resort of Antalya, for COP31, which runs from November 9th to the 20th. Some 100,000 participants are expected. Apart from the usual grand-sounding communiqués, more breast-beating by the climate NGOs and alarmist headlines by the legacy media, nothing much of practical significance will come out of COP31 in Türkiye.
After a bruising contest between rival bidders, Turkey won the right to host while Australia’s Climate and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, was handed the gavel as “President of Negotiations”. One country hosts, another negotiates, and the Pacific islands, with Australia’s help, got a pre-COP of their own. The World Resources Institute’s David Waskow has summed up the defining context of the summit as “heat and Hormuz”, referring to this year’s blistering summer in Europe which supposedly proved that climate crisis is upon us, and to Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which cut off a significant share of the world’s oil and gas supplies and sent prices soaring.
The Hormuz effect
The climate Establishment has spent months arguing that both Europe’s hot summer and the Hormuz supply shock prove its case. Call it the Hormuz effect: first Ukraine, now Iran – every war in an oil- or gas-producing region exposes our dependence on what Ed Miliband, the UK’s previous energy secretary and now Foreign Minister, called “petrostates and dictators”. The only answer, claims Miliband and fellow climate ideologues in the EU, is “home-grown renewables” that no despot can switch off. UN climate chief Simon Stiell says fossil fuel dependency is “ripping away national security and sovereignty”. At the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin in April, ministers sensed an opportunity to recast wind and solar as guarantors of energy security, and Britain’s climate minister, Katie White, called the transition “even more imperative”.
It is a curious reading of events. A country at the mercy of imported hydrocarbons might conclude that it should produce more of its own, as Washington has done, rather than double down on intermittent power that needs gas-fired backup on every windless winter evening. Nor is swapping dependence on Gulf oil for dependence on Chinese panels and minerals an obvious gain in sovereignty.
The host’s revealed preference
The Government hosting COP31 is a case in point. Economists have a useful rule: judge people by what they do, not by what they say. Weeks before welcoming the world to Antalya, Türkiye’s Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar stood beside Iraq’s Oil Minister and pitched the port of Ceyhan as a “global energy hub” and an alternative to Hormuz, with plans to expand Iraqi pipeline capacity and bring in Qatari gas. A Global Witness analysis of Rystad Energy data projects that the state oil company TPAO will nearly triple its gas production by 2035. Ankara is not abandoning oil and gas. It is positioning itself to collect transit fees on them.
Then there is coal. It still supplies nearly one-third of Türkiye’s electricity, propped up by a guaranteed-price purchase scheme for coal plants that runs to 2030. In June, the Government announced a 1,050 MW expansion of the Cenal coal power plant. When a court struck down the planned expansion of the Afşin-Elbistan lignite plant, the environment ministry, headed by none other than COP31 President Murat Kurum, appealed the ruling. Across the world in Canberra, Bowen’s own Government recently approved an extension of the Saraji open-cut coal mine in Queensland.
The green lobby frames all this as a “credibility” problem for the COP31 hosts. It is nothing of the sort. It is revealed preference. Governments answerable to voters who pay electricity bills and fill petrol tanks will protect energy security first and recite climate pledges second. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said as much, warning that any proposal failing to reconcile climate objectives with social and economic realities is doomed to fail. That may well be the most honest sentence uttered by anyone associated with COP31.
Electrify everything – but with what?
With no agreement on fossil fuels in prospect, the Turkish Presidency’s centrepiece is a voluntary pledge, dubbed ‘35-by-35’, to raise electricity’s share of global energy demand from around 20% today to 35% by 2035. Campaigners were dismayed to find that the text does not ask governments to commit to producing the extra power from clean sources; it says only that the use of clean electricity will vary according to national circumstances. Activists warn that the pledge could allow governments to count expanded gas-fired generation as progress.
From their standpoint, they are right to worry. Around one-third of the world’s electricity is still generated from coal. More fundamentally, electricity remains only a fifth or so of final energy consumption. The rest is the direct burning of oil, gas and coal for transport, industrial heat, petrochemicals, fertilisers and much else that intermittent solar panels and wind turbines cannot provide for. A technology-neutral electrification target is a tacit admission that the decarbonisation of the other four-fifths will not be delivered by UN declarations.
There is a further twist. The fastest-growing source of new power demand in the rich world is artificial intelligence, and data centres need electricity around the clock. The IEA expects their demand to double by 2030; in the United States, gas already supplies 40% of it, and the IEA credits American data-centre demand with supporting coal burn too. The AI boom is being built on gas, coal and nuclear, because wind, solar and batteries cannot feed a voracious appetite for baseload power.
And the cheapest and most reliable source for much of Asia remains coal. The IEA’s mid-year update now expects global coal demand to rise by 1.2% in 2026 to a record 8.94 billion tonnes, reversing its earlier forecast of decline. China and India together account for around 70% of global consumption. If Old King Coal was the elephant in every meeting room at COP28 in Dubai, in Antalya he will paying for the room.
Roadmaps to nowhere
At COP30 in Belém, Brazil last year, more than 80 countries backed a “roadmap” to transition away from fossil fuels, but major oil producers and several emerging economies refused any reference to it in the negotiated text. This week Brazil published that voluntary roadmap, declaring the transition urgent and inevitable, while its officials stressed that it was a call to voluntary action and not a document to be negotiated at COP31. The phase-out of fossil fuels is not even a formal agenda item in Antalya. Instead, the talk is of countries following transition roadmaps ‘tailored’ to their own circumstances and constraints, which in practice means each government will do what it was going to do anyway.
Frustrated by the consensus rule that lets oil producers say no, the zealots have started a parallel track. In April, 57 countries met in Santa Marta, Colombia, for the first conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels; China, Russia and the United States were not invited. It produced only voluntary workstreams, and a Fossil Fuel Treaty backed by just 18 countries did not make the final text. David Wojick of CFACT asks whether such a treaty could become a still more radical rival to the UNFCCC, competing for a shrinking pool of money now that Trump’s America has walked away.
The final outcome in Antalya, too, is being pre-softened. Australia and Turkey will produce a “presidency-led” cover decision which, unlike other formal texts, is not negotiated word by word between governments. After 30 years in which every term of every communiqué was fought over through the night, the COP process is drifting from treaty-making towards a bazaar of voluntary pledges on transition roadmaps and electrification.
Meanwhile, the UN has quietly moved the goalposts. UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report 2026, pointedly titled The Point of Return, concedes that limiting warming to 1.5°C without significant overshoot is no longer achievable. Launching it, Secretary-General António Guterres declared that the mission is now to make any overshoot “as small and as short as possible”. The 1.5°C figure was always an arbitrary limit conjured for the convenience of politicians. Now that it has been formally abandoned, nobody in the climate bureaucracy proposes winding down the apparatus built to defend it. Instead, we get a new target and a plea to return from overshoot.
Delivery without dollars
At one level, every COP is about money: how much Western governments will pay to impose green solutions on themselves, and how much more they will pay, in the form of ‘climate finance’, to persuade the rest of the world to follow. The principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” built that asymmetry into the system. At COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, rich countries pledged $300 billion a year against the $1.3 trillion demanded by developing countries, papering over the gap with a “roadmap” whose first implementation update is due in Antalya.
This year the chequebook is staying shut. An internal EU document seen by Reuters says there is “no scope” for new climate funding commitments at COP31. Instead, Brussels will push a “mitigation package” to turn countries’ existing pledges into real-world emission cuts. In other words: deliver on your promises, but don’t expect us to pay for it.
The EU also wants to globalise the “Just Transition Mechanism” agreed in principle at Belém, modelled on its own scheme for Europe’s coal regions: in effect, a fund for the oil, gas and coal workers to be put out of work while the world “transitions” to renewables. But at the Bonn talks in June, as the African Group demanded grants, Britain insisted the mechanism “is not about finance”. A just transition with no money attached is a slogan, not a mechanism.
Why the sudden parsimony? Trump’s counter-revolution has shut the biggest spigot of all. Antalya is the first COP since America’s second exit from the Paris Agreement took effect, on January 27th 2026, and the White House has announced its withdrawal from the UN Framework Convention itself, the first nation ever to do so. Washington no longer merely abstains from globalist schemes but blocks them, as when its diplomats, with Saudi Arabia, got the International Maritime Organisation to defer its global carbon levy on shipping last year.
Europe cannot fill the gap. The collective West, minus Trump’s America, is itself running on empty: Britain and France are weighed down by massive debts and deficits, Germany is emerging from years of stagnation amid high energy costs and deindustrialisation, and NATO members have pledged to raise defence and security spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. Money spent on tanks and air defences cannot also be spent on solar farms in Africa. For decades, climate finance has been a game of bootleggers and Baptists: pledge allegiance to the cause and collect the grants. Developing countries were always going to put their citizens’ legitimate aspirations ahead of Western demands to forgo the fossil fuels that made the West rich, a form of climate colonialism that Africa’s leaders have increasingly rejected.
Martyrs, campaigners and scapegoats
With Australia holding the gavel, the small island states will again take centre stage, fresh from a Pacific pre-COP and its Taku Pakasoa Declaration. Rupert Darwall, whose new book I recently reviewed, has dissected the role of these “climate martyrs” and their disappearing islands, a staple of every COP. Inconveniently, a 2018 study found that Tuvalu’s land area actually grew by 2.9% between 1971 and 2014.
As usual at the COP carnivals, the NGOs and their media allies will be out in force. After wildfires near Antalya in September, 350.org demanded that Turkey announce a coal phase-out timeline before the summit. For the campaigners, the spoilers of recent COPs are easy to name: a US President who calls climate change a “hoax” and the ‘defeatism’ of Bill Gates, whose U-turn on climate catastrophism gave the game away. That voters and Asian power planners have simply weighed the costs and found Net Zero wanting is not a possibility they entertain.
That leaves Europe and Britain as the last true believers, still preaching the gospel of climate leadership to a congregation that has largely left the church.
COP31, yet another damp squib?
What, then, should we expect from Antalya? A clutch of voluntary pledges; a “roadmap” that nobody is obliged to follow; a “just transition” mechanism without the money to make it work. Plenty of solemn warnings about overshoot, and rather less said about the coal demand records, the gas-fired data centres, the Ceyhan pipeline plans and the Queensland mine extensions. The 100,000 participants will fly home, and the world’s energy system will carry on much as before, governed by the arithmetic of cost, reliability and security rather than the theology of climate conferences.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic’s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former (cancelled) contributor to Forbes. Follow him onSubstackandX.
Is Net Zero increasingly coming down to earth? Little by little, the driving force behind Government policies seems to be throttling back. The latest is that Burnham’s Labour Government is to ease Net Zero airline fuel quotas involving sustainable (or synthetic) aviation fuel (SAF).
Is Net Zero increasingly coming down to earth? Little by little, the driving force behind Government policies seems to be throttling back. The latest is that Burnham’s Labour Government is to ease Net Zero airline fuel quotas involving sustainable (or synthetic) aviation fuel (SAF). The Telegraphhas the story:
Ministers are preparing to back down on quotas for the use of synthetic fuel by airlines, after warnings about how much they could increase costs for holidaymakers.
The Government has been told the mandate, which is due to come into force on January 1st to reduce emissions from planes, would force passengers to pay an extra £25 for short-haul flights.
Under the rules, airlines would face large fines if they failed to hit targets for the use of synthetic fuel, even though it is virtually unobtainable, with just one refinery out of 600 worldwide producing it.
This comes hot on the heels of another climbdown:
It is the latest Net Zero retreat by Andy Burnham, who is keen to prioritise measures that ease the cost of living. Earlier this week it emerged that he had ordered a halt to new wind and solar power subsidies to try to reduce household energy bills.
As with so many Net Zero ‘initiatives’, just seems to come down to loading more costs onto consumers:
Some airlines have already added fare surcharges to cover the additional cost of SAF, which is two to five times more expensive than standard jet fuel.
The latest round of SAF rules, due to come into force on January 1st, would require airlines to use a new synthetic fuel known as electro-sustainable aviation fuel (e-SAF). It says they must then incorporate at least a 0.5% mix into their total fuel uptake by 2030.
Overall, airlines must use at least 10% SAF by the same year – the toughest requirement anywhere in the world.
Richard Holden, the Shadow Transport Secretary, said the move was “yet another Labour climbdown” that showed the Net Zero drive was “falling apart”.
Although manufacturers of SAF such as Synhelion are gushing in their enthusiasm for the fuel, which can be made from waste oil, cooking coil and even animal fat, the fact remains that it costs several times much as conventional jet fuel.
That presently is a function of scale, but it seems that bringing the cost down isn’t going to come anything like fast enough for the real world of politics. Unlike the original production of oil, which had time to grow with a new market, the industry of new fuels must confront an already enormous existing market which much cheaper sources of conventional fuel already supply.
Governments have tried to force the change unnaturally fast with the use of quotas and other coercive tactics, keeping prices high and meeting resistance.
This is probably the central problem for Net Zero policies for everything from heat pumps to aviation. It seems some politicians are waking up to this.
At the same time the debate appears to be shifting from the dogma of ‘offset the climate catastrophe at any cost’, to averting a widespread self-inflicted social and economic disaster.
The Telegraph reports additionally that “Burnham is also preparing to cut quotas for sales of electric vehicles (EVs)”.
Ed. Note: This manifesto by Claire Coutinho from last year is reprinted in light of the raging UK debate over “Net Zero” policies pursuant to the Climate Change Act of 2008. A former Cabinet member as Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, and currently an elected member of the Conservative Pary, she has changed views to trenchantly oppose Net Zero.
Ed. Note: This manifesto by Claire Coutinho from last year is reprinted in light of the raging UK debate over “Net Zero” policies pursuant to the Climate Change Act of 2008. A former Cabinet member as Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, and currently an elected member of the Conservative Pary, she has changed views to trenchantly oppose Net Zero.
“I can promise you this. When it comes to energy policy, our priority won’t be ideology, it won’t be vested interests, it won’t be fake promises we can’t deliver. It will be cheap, reliable, abundant energy.”
In the last few decades, we’ve lost sight of a simple truth. Energy is a good thing.
Conservatives know that great eras of British growth and prosperity happen when we have an abundance of cheap, reliable energy. Pitt and Peel who helped to unleash the coal-powered Industrial Revolution. Stanley Baldwin spread electricity across the nation, after the First World War. Mrs Thatcher’s North Sea oil boom got the nation back on its feet after those terrible years of Labour decline.
Today, there is not a single country on earth which has high growth and low energy. That’s because energy is not just part of the economy. It is the economy. It feeds into the costs of every business, every journey, every loaf of bread. That’s why right now, the cost of energy is one of the biggest problems we have. It’s a stealth tax that is making us all poorer. And it’s killing our industry.
Britain has the highest industrial electricity prices in the world. And that has consequences. British industries that use the most energy – like chemicals, glass, and metals – are shutting down week by week. The fibreglass factory in Wigan. The refinery at Grangemouth. Vauxhall in Luton. The North Sea. We’re losing thousands of jobs by the month. And we won’t need any less fibreglass, less gas, or fewer cars – we’ll just import more from abroad, often from countries still powered by coal. Fewer jobs in Britain. Unilateral economic disarmament. For more carbon in the atmosphere.
And this isn’t just about the industries that we already have, the industries of the future need energy too – whether it’s advanced manufacturing or AI. Whether it’s a factory, or a data centre, or a super-lab they will need cheap, reliable energy. And they will go where they find it.
It would be the first time in generations that we would no longer be at the forefront of a technological revolution, and we will be poorer because of it. Those businesses will be created, just not here in Britain. We won’t have saved the planet, we will have failed the next generation. And under Labour this is about to get worse.
Miliband’s Folly
At the last election Ed Miliband promised to cut bills by £300. Keir Starmer promised it. Rachel Reeves promised it. Now last week Ed Miliband had some pretty choice words for Elon Musk about disinformation. So, conference, we’ve got a return message for Ed Miliband. If you want to talk about disinformation, where’s our flipping £300? Far from cutting bills, bills keep going up – and every choice Ed has made is making it worse.
Ed says that building more wind farms will cut bills. But he’s signing up to prices that are the highest in a decade, well above the market price of electricity. Look at this. When he made his promise to cut bills, the price of electricity was £72. That’s that second bar in black you see.
Last year he bought offshore wind at £82, and this year he’s said he’s willing to pay up to £117. Now, that’s before you add in the extra costs for connections, the backup, and the £8 billion we’ll soon be paying wind farms, not to generate any energy, but to turn off when there’s too much wind. And what’s worse, is that he’s extended the wind developer’s contracts to twenty years, locking us into these higher prices for longer.
You can think about it like this. He’s moving our energy onto a fixed-rate mortgage at 10%, because he doesn’t want to be on a 4% variable. Anyone with half a brain can see that won’t cut bills. Now, he says prices are going up because gas is expensive. But that blue bar on the left, £55, that’s gas without taxes. You tell me what’s higher or lower. It’s not hard is it?
He also said that Great British Energy would lead to, and I quote, a “mind-blowing” reduction in bills. But it won’t generate any energy. Only Ed Miliband could launch an £8 billion energy company that won’t produce any energy. Let’s call it what it is. A vanity project that won’t cut bills. So, we will scrap it.
I will give Ed credit for one thing though. He’s managed to do something which is quite difficult, he’s managed to unite the Trade Unions, the Conservative Party, the voters, and Keir Starmer. How? Because they all want the same thing. Turns out they all want him sacked.
And here’s the problem with the Left – they’re infected with a poverty mindset. They believe that Britain has a duty to make itself poorer on the altar of Net Zero. And they think that ordinary people should be the servants of their climate targets.
So, take air conditioning. In America, nearly every single home has air con. Here in Britain? Just 5%. But Sadiq Khan’s London Plan effectively bans air con in all new homes – why? Because it uses too much energy.
Rather than people fitting into the Government’s policy on energy, I believe a Conservative energy policy should serve the needs of the people. Take the North Sea, Ed Miliband’s plans to ban new drilling would make us the only country in the world shutting down our own energy supplies. Up to 200,000 jobs and twelve billion pounds in tax revenue lost.
Why? So that we can import more gas from Norway from the same fields we could drill ourselves. Our imports of liquified gas have soared by over 40 per cent in a single year. Conference, as long as we need gas, as much of it as possible should come from Britain. That’s why we will scrap Ed’s mad ban on new oil and gas licenses, we will reverse the energy profits levy, and we will back the North Sea.
Energy vs. Poverty
We will remember what has been forgotten for too long. Energy is prosperity.
Now, we have to be honest. The poverty mindset has become inseparable from our climate legislation. We shouldn’t have let it sit on the statute book for so long. I wasn’t in Parliament in 2019 when the 2050 Net Zero target was set. But I’ll tell you who was – Kemi Badenoch. She was one of only two people in that entire debate who had the courage to speak up and ask about the costs.
When I came in as Energy Secretary, I started a reset to unpick some of what we got wrong in the face of huge opposition. I started that reset because whilst we have halved our emissions, China has been doing this. Global emissions are rising much, much faster than we can cut them here.
When something clearly isn’t working, we Conservatives should have the courage to tell the truth and say so. Net Zero isn’t working for Britain, and it’s not working for the climate. The British people are no stranger to sacrifice for a just cause. But watching good jobs move abroad is not just. Piling more pain onto people’s bills is not just. And passing down a country that is less secure and less prosperous is not just.
For too many people, Net Zero has become a religion, and for too long we were an unthinking part of the congregation. Here’s the problem with the legislation. We know it’s not working for climate change. But it’s also forcing Ministers to make decisions that make people poorer.
Ed Miliband’s 2008 Climate Change Act sets legally-binding targets. Every five years, targets are drawn up that dictate what products people must buy, and when, and in what quantities, a decade into the future. Conference, we had a name for that back in the 70s, it’s central planning.
If all of our industry shut tomorrow, and we replaced those goods with imports that would be a win for climate targets but a disaster for Britain. If people don’t want a heat pump, the Act requires you to tax or ban them into it.
We are burning wood shipped here from America to produce electricity at three times the cost of gas, and four times the pollution levels of our last coal plant. Why? Because it doesn’t count towards our climate targets.
Those ridiculous prices I just showed you for offshore wind, why would we have to buy any at those prices? You guessed it. Our climate targets.
And here’s the truth, whether it was EU directives, or the Climate Change Committee, or the courts who rule on the activists’ cases, none of them are accountable to the people who will lose their jobs, or people who pay their energy bills, or who need to keep the lights on.
We handed too much control to people who pay no price for being wrong. That was a profound mistake. So, we will set out a new way of doing things. Conference, I know many of you are proud lovers of the environment. I am too. We will not cede that ground. But we will set out new plans under Conservative principles.
Energy Freedom
Our first principle will be to back British innovation. For too long when we talked about innovation, what we meant is that we would force Britain to be the early adopters of technology made in other parts of the world. But look at these charts. Refrigerators, dishwashers, central heating. Here’s the thing, when new tech makes people’s lives better, people will buy it. What we are doing is insisting everyone buys these products before they want to, just to meet a government target. Rather than force our people to be the early adopters, I want us to be the early creators.
The early creators of technology we can export around the world. We’re only 1% of emissions. 99% are happening elsewhere and they’re rising. We clearly have not got this right yet. We have not created all of products we need. But if we can create technologies that others can’t, that will be by far Britain’s biggest contribution to tackling climate change.
Our second principle will be to protect nature. For centuries, environmentalism was the domain of ordinary people – people who were rooted in a sense of place and a love of home. They wanted to protect and cherish the world they loved around them. Roger Scruton called this the “small-scale wisdom of the human heart”. But nature is not Net Zero, in fact some of the time it pulls in the opposite direction. I can think of no better image than this – the Amazon Rainforest being carved up to build a motorway to the latest Climate conference in Brazil.
But what’s worrying is that’s not so dissimilar to what we’re pursuing here. On the left, that tiny dot is the land needed for a nuclear power plant, underneath is what’s needed to get the same amount of energy from wind and solar. Because wind and solar use up to 3,000 times more land. To generate the same amount of power as a nuclear power station, you would need a wind farm the size of the New Forest, or a solar farm the size of the Isle of Wight. On a small island like ours where every inch of countryside is precious, that matters. So instead of carpeting the countryside in wind and solar farms, we will make it easier and cheaper to build dense, reliable, secure, clean nuclear energy.
Repeal the Climate Change Act!
Our third and most important principle will be to prioritise cheap, abundant energy. And we will do that unashamedly. That’s why the next Conservative Government will repeal the Climate Change Act. If a law is not working in the national interest, it is not just possible for us to change it – it’s our duty to do so. All it takes is courage.
Increasing the cost of electricity is the worst possible climate policy too. If you want people to use electric cars, here’s a revolutionary idea. Make electricity cheap. If you want people to use electric heating. Make electricity cheap. If you want to build data centres, to cut bills, to reduce poverty and drive growth. Make electricity cheap.
At the moment Labour’s giving handouts to people to buy electric cars and electric heating at the very same time they’re making electricity unbearably expensive. That’s back to front and we will reverse it. Our priorities will be the priorities of the British people, a strong economy, protecting nature, and cutting bills. So, conference, today I can announce the first policies from our Cheap Power Plan.
First up, the next Conservative Government will axe the Carbon Tax on electricity generation. When Ed Miliband blames gas for high energy bills, what he doesn’t tell you is that over 30% of what we pay for gas power is not to pay for fuel, but to pay for a Carbon Tax that the government chooses to impose.
Now, we know we will need gas to keep the lights on for decades – so it just adds extra costs to our bills for no reason. But here’s the rub – the Carbon Tax inflates the cost of almost all other types of electricity too. So, all the wind and solar farm owners pocket those higher prices as higher profits.
And since the start of the year, guess what Ed has done to Carbon Taxes? That. We warned Ed about doing this. He didn’t listen. Labour’s EU deal increased the Carbon Tax by 70 per cent in the space of 9 months. They did not have to do this. It was a political choice. A political choice that we Conservatives fought against.
Axing the Carbon Tax would cut bills instantly by almost £8 billion a year. Next. We’ll scrap Ed Miliband’s old rip-off wind farm subsidies. Back in 2008, Ed Miliband, in his infinite wisdom, chose to double the subsidies on offer for wind farms. That means when the wind blows, there are wind farms getting up to three times the market price of electricity – and you’re paying for that through your bills. It’s the biggest racket going. We closed the scheme when we were in office, but we’ll go further and say we must scrap those subsidies for good.
Our energy system is not here to prop up the profits of multi-million-pound wind developers at billpayers’ expense. It’s here to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the country.
Together, our policies to Axe the Carbon Tax and scrap Ed’s rip-off wind subsidies would cut people’s electricity bills by 20 per cent. The average family will save £165 a year off their electricity bill. And I realise this sounds less than the promises other parties have made. Ed promised to cut your bills by £300, but we all know that’s a fantasy.
But Reform are just as bad. They’ve promised to cut your electricity bill by £1,000. Do you know how I know that’s garbage? The average bill is only £850. What’s he gonna do, go round writing people cheques?
If you think any politician can promise you electricity for free, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you. They are just as ideological as Labour, it’s just the mirror image. The difference with our policy is that this is real. It’s in the gift of Ministers. This could be done tomorrow. And it would cut your electricity bill by 20%.
So, I can promise you this. When it comes to energy policy, our priority won’t be ideology, it won’t be vested interests, it won’t be fake promises we can’t deliver. It will be cheap, reliable, abundant energy.
Now Conference, being in opposition can be tough. Although I’d like to thank the wider Energy team – Andrew, Malcolm, Nick, Greg, and Bradley for all their excellent work. We know this half-baked tax-and-spend socialism of Labour is a disaster for Britain. When we said in the election, that if you name it, Labour will tax it, we meant it.
Anti-Progress Mentality
There’s a farmer’s tax, a groceries tax, a jobs tax, a jets tax, a lets tax and a bets tax, an oil tax, the soil tax, and a boiler tax. There’s even rumours of a taxi tax! The truth is they would rather tax the pants off this country than get their spending under control.
And it reveals a fundamental belief. If you try to do well for yourself, get a good job, pay for your child’s education, buy a house, start a successful business – they don’t celebrate you. They sneer at you. They want to redistribute away your success. They talk about poverty like they care. But their policies are making energy, food, childcare and housing more expensive. And their answer is always more redistribution rather than confronting the truth that this Government is choosing, choosing to raise the cost of almost every basic good.
Now, Reform I’m afraid to say have the economic policies of Jeremy Corbyn. They’re promising nationalisations we can’t afford, more tax for more welfare, more spending, which means more borrowing, which means more debt for our children. If Government is here to serve the liberties of the people, that means allowing them to keep more of the money that they earn.
Now Conference, we know growth is the biggest challenge we face. But growth is not created by Government subsidies. It is created by millions of people. And I worry, our system as it stands is teaching people to be less capable than they are. We cannot survive if our culture becomes a competition of victimhood.
The risk is people start to ask themselves, not what can I do, but why bother at all? Every person who takes on more hours, comes up with bright ideas, take risks, saves and invests in their future and their family’s future. Personal agency. The sense that you can take control of your life and reap the rewards of your efforts. That’s the real engine of growth.
Everything we do as a Party will be in their interests. And we will start by giving them cheaper energy.
Rupert Darwall, previously special adviser to the UK’s then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont and currently Senior Fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics (NCEA), has spent the better part of two decades doing what few writers on climate policy dare to do: following the money, the meetings and the memoranda behind the West’s great green crusade.
Rupert Darwall, previously special adviser to the UK’s then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont and currently Senior Fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics (NCEA), has spent the better part of two decades doing what few writers on climate policy dare to do: following the money, the meetings and the memoranda behind the West’s great green crusade. The Age of Error, newly published, is his most ambitious book (out of three) yet. It attempts nothing less than an explanation of why the West – with the significant exception of Trump’s America – chose to disarm itself economically, energetically and militarily at the very moment big-power geopolitics returned with a vengeance. The book is sweeping in its coverage of world events, learned in its focus on key issues, often brilliant in untangling the machinations that occur in the corridors of power. Yet, in one crucial respect, it is curiously conventional.
From Lehman to L’Aquila
Darwall’s age of error begins with the 2008 financial crisis. Elected politicians lost the authority to govern on their own account. Drawing on Bertrand de Jouvenel, Darwall argues that they recovered it by borrowing the prestige of experts: central bankers, climate scientists and public health officials. The result was what he calls “the co-dependency of politicians and experts with its command to ‘follow the science’”. Decisions migrated from parliaments to unelected committees (quangos in British parlance), and dissent became heresy.
The central bankers went first. Deficit financing and near-zero interest rates were supposed to restore growth; the Bank of England alone bought close to £900 billion of assets. Growth never properly resumed. What came instead were zombie firms, inflated asset prices, stalled productivity and, eventually, the inflation of 2021–22 that the monetary mandarins failed to see coming. Darwall reads this as a Keynesian conceit, the opposite of Schumpeter’s creative destruction of a vibrant capitalism. The real supply-side miracle of the period came not from Threadneedle Street or the Federal Reserve but from the shale fields of Texas and North Dakota, despite the Obama administration’s hostility to fracking.
Easy money had a further consequence. “Easy money begat ESG,” Darwall writes. Cheap capital disguised the true cost of capital-intensive wind and solar, while Wall Street embraced environmental, social and governance investing to buy itself a social licence after the crash. Mark Carney’s campaign to turn central banks into climate regulators, which I criticised at the time, and the fatal combination of central banking and ESG that followed, belong to the same story. Markets killed ESG in 2022, as Darwall wryly observes, although the regulators in the EU have not got the message, as I noted recently.
The intellectual spine of the book is the West’s abandonment of energy realism. Darwall contrasts the St Petersburg G8 of 2006 with the L’Aquila G8 summit of 2009. The 2006 G8 was the last occasion on which Western leaders spoke collectively as members of a fossil-fuelled civilisation focused on energy security. In 2009, the G8 inaugurated “an era of green Keynesianism”, promising emissions cuts of 80% or more by 2050 while claiming that green stimulus would deliver “sustainable growth”. “It was a jumble of policy incoherence,” Darwall writes. It was also a programme to replace efficient energy with inefficient energy, reversing the trajectory of progress since the industrial revolution.
The climate juggernaut, dissected
Darwall is unrivalled in explaining the anatomy of the UN climate process. His account of the small island states as climate ‘martyrs’ is a gem. The poster-child image of the Maldives vanishing beneath the waves served NGOs and island diplomats well. It helped win both the 1.5°C target and the $100 billion climate finance pledge. Yet a 2015 study of a central Pacific atoll that Darwall cites found that “no islands have been lost, the majority have enlarged”. Politics, as he says, “led the science”.
His account of the Paris agreement is equally penetrating. “NGOs turned out to be the most powerful players at the Paris COP.” The formula of Net Zero by 2050 had first been pitched to Obama’s climate envoy, Todd Stern, over an “eye-wateringly expensive tea in London”. “Adopting the goal of Net Zero would be the self-inflicted price the West paid for obtaining a climate agreement at Paris,” Darwall writes. China, meanwhile, kept building coal plants and captured the supply chains of the very ‘green’ industries the West subsidised. Far from liberalising China, WTO membership meant that “America and the West had invited a tiger to eat their lunch”. The belief that climate change poses an existential threat, Darwall concludes, “is an artefact of the Western mind in thrall to an ideology – environmentalism”.
The British chapters will be painful reading for anyone who still believes Westminster governs in the national interest. In June 2019, a lame-duck Theresa May made Net Zero law by statutory instrument, approved after an 88-minute Commons debate without a vote. Her Chancellor Philip Hammond had warned that the cost would be “well in excess of a trillion pounds”. Darwall’s data show a 20.7% increase in British generating capacity producing 24.2% less electricity. “Producing less with more is the essential fact of the energy transition,” he writes. Britain now pays the highest electricity prices in the industrialised world. The folly of ‘climate leadership’ by a country with less than 1% of global emissions is a theme I have covered in these pages.
On the WHO-declared Covid pandemic, Darwall is unsparing. The cover-up of the virus’s origins “has every claim to be the greatest crime in the history of science”, and even the CIA now judges a laboratory origin more likely. His parallels between ‘The Science’ of climate and of the pandemic, from the censorship of dissent to the freezing out of advisers such as William Happer (on climate) and Scott Atlas (on public health), are insightful and right on the mark.
Darwall reads Donald Trump’s election as the populist revolt against all this. “Trump’s re-election killed climate catastrophism as a political force,” he writes. Trump told the UN General Assembly that climate change was “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”. Eleven months after the election, in Darwall’s phrase, “Bill Gates read the funeral rites for climate change”, an epiphanic retreat from doomsday rhetoric.
The Russian blind spot
It is all the more surprising, then, that a writer so alert to the manufactured consensus on climate and Covid accepts the Western consensus on Russia almost wholesale. “Russia today and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s are both revisionist powers,” he writes. “Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and her band of EU appeasers had cleared the way for Europe’s most destructive war since World War II.” He calls the “Washington-backed coup” narrative of 2014, which John Mearsheimer adopted, “spurious”. Yet Mearsheimer’s broader thesis, that NATO expansion lay at the root of the conflict, echoes the warnings of diplomats such as George Kennan and William Burns.
To his credit, Darwall gives the realists a hearing. He quotes William Burns, then US ambassador in Moscow, warning Condoleezza Rice in February 2008 that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” Burns had already cabled that membership could split Ukraine and “force Russia to decide whether to intervene”. He quotes Sir Roderic Lyne, Britain’s former ambassador to Moscow, who called the push to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO at Bucharest “stupid on every level”. He even concedes that Western governments “were culpable in ignoring the advice of their diplomats and national security experts”. He names George Kennan, “the architect of Cold War containment”, among the critics but does not quote Kennan’s own 1998 verdict that NATO expansion was “a tragic mistake” and “the beginning of a new cold war”.
Darwall nonetheless dismisses the warnings on three grounds, none of which I find persuasive. First, he cites a 1990 memo by Gorbachev’s adviser Anatoly Chernyaev arguing that Moscow’s security rests on the nuclear balance, so NATO’s advance could not really threaten it. By that logic the United States, with overwhelming nuclear superiority in 1962, had nothing to fear from Soviet missiles in Cuba. It risked nuclear war anyway. Second, he notes that Viktor Yanukovych’s declaration of neutrality in 2010 took NATO membership off the table and that it returned only because of Putin’s aggression. But Yanukovych was driven from office in 2014, and the 2008 Bucharest promise that Ukraine “will become” a member was never withdrawn. Third, he cites Britain’s then Defence Secretary Ben Wallace for the claim that ethnonationalism, not NATO expansion, lies at the heart of Putin’s position. A minister who would soon be sending Ukraine made-in-Britain long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles is hardly a disinterested witness.
The Norwegian scholar Glenn Diesen put the realist case in a recent interview. The post-Cold War settlement, he argues, was meant to rest on indivisible security, the principle written into the 1990 Charter of Paris that no state should enhance its security at the expense of another’s. Darwall argues that the “not one inch eastward” assurances given to Gorbachev concerned German reunification only and that NATO expansion beyond Germany “was simply not an issue at the time”. Even if that is so, NATO’s march to Russia’s borders replaced indivisible security with the potential for NATO to base nuclear-capable missiles closer to Russia, down to seven to 10 minutes’ flight time to Moscow. In this view a neutral Ukraine was always in everyone’s interest, Ukraine’s above all, as Henry Kissinger argued in 2014.
Darwall’s account contains an unresolved conundrum. Ukraine’s move to the West, he writes, threatened not Russian security but “Putin’s rule”, and he quotes Ambassador Lyne saying the Kremlin’s leaders “know they are not legitimate”. On this telling, Putin is so weak that he cannot afford a free Ukraine moving towards the EU and NATO to be held up as an example for ordinary Russians to emulate. Yet Darwall himself concedes that Ukraine was “poorer, more corrupt, more oligarch-dominated and less politically stable” than Russia, hardly a model Russians were clamouring to follow. A few pages later Putin is Bismarck, a cold calculator bent on redrawing the map of Europe, a revisionist power akin to interwar Germany with “ambitions to re-establish Russian power in the post-Soviet space”. Darwall also cites Angela Stent’s observation that after 1991 Russia’s presence in Europe “had shrunk to its smallest extent since the 17th Century”. A Russia that could not take Kyiv in 2022 is hardly a Wehrmacht poised on the Rhine.
What the appeasement frame leaves out
Darwall sees appeasement in the West’s insistence on the Minsk agreements. He describes Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond urging Kyiv to honour them as “epitomising the prevailing spirit of appeasement”. Yet Merkel herself later admitted that Minsk was “an attempt to give Ukraine time”. The book is silent on the Istanbul talks of spring 2022, which, as Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko have documented, came close to a settlement built on Ukrainian neutrality. If there was a failure of Western statecraft, it looks less like appeasement than its opposite.
Darwall notes that Volodymyr Zelensky won 73% of the vote in 2019 by offering “the prospect of peace with Russia through dialogue”, and he concludes that Putin’s subsequent choices “defy reason”. The question not asked is why that mandate was never delivered, and why the Istanbul talks of spring 2022 came so close to a settlement only to collapse after Boris Johnson’s visit to Kyiv. According to Ukrainska Pravda’s sources, Johnson’s message was that Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with”; Johnson calls the charge that he sank the talks “total nonsense”. By 2024, Zelensky had instead signed a law to ban religious organisations affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church.
Darwall’s account of the green NGOs in the corridors of power in Western capitals and within the UN and other multilateral agencies is among the most penetrating analyses available in the literature about these amorphous entities. But disappointingly, there is little if any coverage of Washington DC’s ‘democracy promotion’ networks run by the State Department and its grantees and quasi-governmental bodies such as the Congress-funded National Endowment for Democracy.
Darwall notes that Victoria Nuland – the Obama State Department’s point woman on Ukraine – was in Kyiv backing the protesters when she was caught on a leaked call discussing who should form the next government. Darwall casts her – not without reason – as someone who “would acquire an outsize role in the depiction of subsequent events, not least because that’s how she liked to present herself”. In December 2013, three weeks into the Maidan protests, Nuland told a Washington DC audience that since 1991 the United States had “invested over $5 billion” to assist Ukraine’s ‘democratic’ development. Tracking these vast sums through the web of the State Department’s and USAID’s NGO grantees in ‘democracy promotion’ would have been of considerable interest to understanding the events of the Maidan revolution.
At its economic core, Russian-European relations have been based on Soviet and then Russian natural gas, flowing to West Germany since 1973 and a pillar of German industry for half a century. And it was disputes over natural gas trade that created “the first test of wills between the Paper Empire [i.e. the EU] and Vladimir Putin”, as Darwall puts it. Following Thane Gustafson’s account, Darwall casts the EU’s victory over Gazprom on its third energy package as proof that “the Paper Empire had teeth”. An oil and gas industry veteran might see instead gas following oil after the 1986 oil price collapse, from rigid OPEC-based oil-indexed contracts towards liquid spot markets. Darwall charges Gazprom with “softening up” Europe in 2021, while conceding that it “continued to honour its long-term gas contracts”. A supplier that meets its contracts and declines to sell more into a spot market is behaving as the liberalised market Brussels built incentivised it to.
What’s sauce for the goose
Perhaps the deepest omission in many accounts of Russia’s alleged revanchism under President Putin is the Cuban analogy. Darwall’s book offers no mention of the 1962 missile crisis. Glenn Diesen asks us to imagine a Russia helping to topple an elected government in Mexico, installing a hostile regime through ‘democracy promotion’ and arming it to strike the US heartland. No American president would or could accept it. To recognise great powers’ security interests on their borders is not appeasement but the beginning of diplomacy.
Darwall calls the 2014 annexation of Crimea, home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and an overwhelmingly Russian-speaking population, “the first forcible redrawing of borders in Europe since 1945”. He relegates Kosovo to a “partial exception”. Yet the Kosovo precedent was created by NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 without UN authorisation. The ‘rules-based order’ Darwall invokes was frayed by Western interventions from Serbia to Iraq and Libya long before 2014.
There is an irony here. Darwall quotes with approval the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy in rejecting “the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies”. He urges taking “a hammer” to them. But he balks when the same document calls the outsized influence of larger and stronger nations “a timeless truth of international relations”, dismissing realism as “a species of utilitarianism”. He follows Trump on climate, but not on Russia.
None of this makes Russia an innocent. But Darwall, who exposes better than anyone how elites manufactured an existential climate threat, should recognise the pattern when it recurs. Having wrecked their economies with Net Zero, Europe’s leaders now ask their citizens to prepare for war with Russia. I described that descent from green folly to military mobilisation earlier this month.
Realism or dissolution?
Darwall closes with a warning that if the West does not correct its path, “the age of error” will be followed by “an age of dissolution”. It is an ominous warning. On climate, central banking, ESG and Covid, his prescriptions are compelling: smash the Net Zero ideology, re-carbonise and restore democratic choice over expert diktat across the board. But this counter-revolution cannot stop at the water’s edge. It means taking seriously the perceived security concerns of a neighbouring nuclear-armed superpower, as Kennan, Kissinger and Burns did. On that score Darwall’s otherwise formidable book remains a prisoner of the establishment consensus it demolishes so effectively elsewhere. Whatever one’s view is of the vexed Russia question, Darwall’s tour de force should not be tossed lightly aside – it deserves to be closely read and argued with.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic’s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former (cancelled) contributor to Forbes. Follow him onSubstackandX.
So, the EU wants a free trade agreement but only if they can slap trade sanctions on us if we breach the Net Zero “Paris Agreement” rules. Righto. We only sell about 6% of our saleable stuff to the EU, and for a small gain in that, we’re going to let them lock us into rules about energy production that affect the other 94%? Worse, we’ve been thinking about this absurd demand for months and no one in the government has figured out how to say, “Not on your life”.
Just because the EU calls it a free trade deal doesn’t mean it is one
So, the EU wants a free trade agreement but only if they can slap trade sanctions on us if we breach the Net Zero “Paris Agreement” rules. Righto. We only sell about 6% of our saleable stuff to the EU, and for a small gain in that, we’re going to let them lock us into rules about energy production that affect the other 94%? Worse, we’ve been thinking about this absurd demand for months and no one in the government has figured out how to say, “Not on your life”.
Free trade supposedly means we can buy and sell goods without taxes, regulations, subsidies, and limits, but the EU’s version comes with requirements that we tax, regulate and limit the emissions that apply not just to our exports to them but in every single export we make to every other country. What kind of Communist mental disorder do they have?
So, we gain a bit more trade with the EU at the expense of paying more for energy which makes all our exports to every other country less competitive? (And our domestic energy more expensive too?)
The EU deal with Climate Shackles is not a Free Trade Agreement. If they wanted to buy our green steel, they would be welcome to, yet they are saying they want to buy our green steel but all the other steel we sell to everyone else has to be greenish too, even if our other customers don’t care. (Obviously this is just a hypothetical example, since almost no one on Earth wants to buy green steel).
And the irony is that while the EU seeks to dragoon us into the Paris Agreement, the largest single export we send to the EU is coal. The EU buys almost 20 million tons of our metallurgical coal to make steel in their last surviving smelters.
Greg Sheridan carries a warning in The Australian that the EU deal on free trade is undemocratic:
It would be a tremendous mistake, seriously against the national interest, if Angus Taylor’s Liberal-Nationals Coalition allows itself to be bullied into voting to ratify the Australia-European Union free-trade agreement.
To do so would undermine its political program, destroy its credibility and contribute to the enfeeblement of Australian government and democracy.
In net-zero targets and industrial relations, the FTA fundamentally undermines our democracy by imposing legally binding commitments on future governments. It’s a profoundly undemocratic agreement, proceeding from two essentially anti-democratic impulses, which are part of the DNA of both the EU and the Albanese government.
This is a question of sovereignty. We could become a little non-voting vassal state of the EU. No control, just punishment if we disobey.
This will mean the EU gets it octopus suckers on our national policy decisions, and we may never get away
This agreement will have all kinds of pacifying caveats about how we can leave anytime, and how they recognize our sovereignty, which will mean nothing. At the end of the day as soon as the trade deal opens a new sliver of market, our farmers and small businesses will take out loans to expand operations and we’re as good as locked in perpetuity, or until the EU shafts us some other way.
Once the money is on the table for machinery, staff, land, and processing plants, the EU can use our small business pain as leverage to make us behave. Nice business you’ve got there. Be a shame if something happened to it. Now, how many Volkswagen ID.4s can we put you down for?
If Australia tried to leave the Net Zero shackles the EU just has to mention adding on trade sanctions again and all these businesses are pushed to the wall. The Labor government probably likes it that way (because small businesses don’t vote for Labor) and Labor wouldn’t back out of a multinational regulatory bomb anyway. But the Liberals and Nationals will feel that pain as their natural voters want them to leave the deal, and their business donors beg them to stay in the whole EU.
The EU might not need to impose a single tariff. The credible possibility of retaliation will influence Australian policy.
And farmers might think they can just ignore the EU market, but the EU market won’t ignore them. Since EU imports will be arriving and competing for market space in Australia, in a sense, Australian farmers will be forced to expand to the EU. Running to stand still…
Fake “Free trade” is a handy disguise for a Globalist move
Even Mathias Cormann, head of the OECD, gets in on the game of lecturing us about “free trade” even though this is patently unfree, and telling us we must choose “openness” which means being open to the EU bossing us around. We supposedly need to run from the poison of “populism”, which sounds a lot like someone in Paris arrogantly dismissing 30% of Australian voters. So much for the OECD “commitment to democracy”?
Our former Minister of Finance has apparently, emigrated from Australia and moved to Blob-Land. As secretary general of the OECD his first allegiance now is the larval One World Government that pays his salary.
In June 2026, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany was meant to prepare the ground for COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, this November 9th -20th. Instead, it exposed how far the world remains from a unified path toward decarbonization.
That admission of paralysis sits awkwardly alongside COP30’s own record. In Belém, Brazil delegates logged 317 private-jet landings, producing an estimated 1,541 tons of CO₂ by Eurocontrol’s Small Emitters Tool — private jets emit up to 14 times more CO₂ per passenger than commercial flights. “You-first-ism,” it turns out, extends beyond negotiating positions to how attendees themselves choose to travel.
Bonn made one thing clear: the world is not moving toward decarbonization as a single bloc. COP31 will only make these divisions more visible.
In June 2026, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany was meant to prepare the ground for COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, this November 9th -20th. Instead, it exposed how far the world remains from a unified path toward decarbonization.
Negotiators could not agree on the Mitigation Work Programme, the mechanism meant to push countries toward deeper emissions cuts. The EU pressed for stronger commitments; many other nations insisted the forum was meant only for exchanging information, not setting new obligations. No resolution was reached — the question was simply deferred to COP31.
The dispute over the 1.5°C target was sharper still. The EU and Switzerland accused several countries — Saudi Arabia, China, India, and Russia among them — of undermining climate science to protect fossil-fuel demands and interests.
Beneath that accusation lies a question international discourse rarely confronts directly: whether the 1.5°C target itself remains achievable, and whether energy security and realistic adaptation deserve more weight than adherence to a number as COP31 attendees remain OBLIVIOUS to REALITY that the worldwide economies run on transportation fuels.
In addition, raw crude oil, once processed through refineries provides the molecules that are the basis of more than 6,000 products that modern life depends on, made from those oil derivatives — products that did not exist just a few centuries ago.
In addition, electricity can charge an iPhone, but neither wind turbines nor solar panels can make an iPhone — everything that needs electricity is itself made from oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil. Without crude oil, there would be no iPhones, X-ray machines, or computers that need electricity in the first place.
For the first time, delegates also held formal talks on climate policy and trade — centered almost entirely on the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. The EU frames CBAM as environmental necessity. Developing nations call it something else: protectionism exercised through market power, dressed in the language of climate responsibility.
Closing the conference, UN climate chief Simon Stiell lamented a “you-first-ism” — each nation waiting for others to act before committing itself. It was a candid admission of paralysis. But it missed a simpler explanation: nations are not failing to cooperate out of stubbornness. They are prioritizing their own industries, electricity security, supply chain security for transportation fuels and the 6,000 products made from processed crude oil, and citizens — because no government can responsibly do otherwise.
That admission of paralysis sits awkwardly alongside COP30’s own record. In Belém, Brazil delegates logged 317 private-jet landings, producing an estimated 1,541 tons of CO₂ by Eurocontrol’s Small Emitters Tool — private jets emit up to 14 times more CO₂ per passenger than commercial flights. “You-first-ism,” it turns out, extends beyond negotiating positions to how attendees themselves choose to travel.
Bonn made one thing clear: the world is not moving toward decarbonization as a single bloc. COP31 will only make these divisions more visible.
II. The Iran War: Opportunity, or Confusion of Categories?
Weeks earlier, at a COP31 preparatory meeting in Paris, Stiell had already previewed this framing. He suggested the Iran war was “rapidly accelerating” the world’s shift to the generation of electricity by wind turbines and solar panels, arguing that those who had tried to sustain fossil-fuel dependence were inadvertently fueling a boom of wind and solar — because wind and solar, he said, are safer, cheaper, and immune to the disruption of narrow straits or global conflict.
It is worth pausing on who was really being described here. The nations and industries he characterized as clinging to fossil fuels are not simply nostalgic for the past. Coal, natural gas, and crude oil have been the foundation of industrial civilization since the Industrial Revolution — not only as energy sources but as the raw material for steel, cement, fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, and plastics. Wind and solar can substitute for some electricity generation and a portion of transport fuel. No technology yet substitutes for hydrocarbons as chemical feedstock. Electricity from wind and solar are not a necessary condition for manufacturing civilization’s material goods; hydrocarbon molecules are, as they are the basis for transportation fuels and more than 6,000 products that modern life depends on, made from those oil derivatives — products that did not exist just a few centuries ago.
When oil and gas supplies are disrupted by war, what people need is stable, reliable, affordable electricity, transportation fuels, and all the oil-based products modern life depends on — not an accelerated bet on intermittent electricity. Solar panels do not generate electricity at night. Wind turbines stop when the wind does. In a geopolitical crisis, these are not abstract inconveniences; they are life-and-death vulnerabilities for hospitals, military infrastructure, and food supply chains.
There is also a cost distinction Stiell’s framing glosses over. LCOE — the standard metric for “cheap wind and solar” — reflects only the generation asset itself. It excludes the backup capacity, storage, transmission buildout, and balancing costs that intermittent power requires at grid scale. Measured on a fully-loaded basis (FCOE), the “wind and solar are cheap” claim loses much of its force — particularly in developing nations, where the grid to absorb intermittent power often doesn’t yet exist, and where the buildout cost lands hardest on those least able to absorb it.
III. Who Actually Puts Net Zero First?
Strip away the summit rhetoric, and a narrower reality emerges: full-throated net-zero-by-date commitments are, in practice, sustained by a subset of the EU. Most of the world’s major emitters are pursuing electricity policy on other terms entirely — national interest, industrial competitiveness, and energy security first.
China illustrates this most starkly. It is the world’s largest annual emitter, with recent estimates placing its output at roughly 11.7 billion tons — about 31% of global fossil CO₂ emissions. China has publicly committed to peaking emissions by 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2060. Yet in 2023–2024 it approved new coal-fired power construction at the fastest pace in nearly a decade — construction of plants representing an estimated 94.5 GW, the highest level of new or resumed coal projects since 2015. The gap between China’s stated targets and its infrastructure investment is not a footnote; it is the central fact of global climate arithmetic. No amount of sacrifice by developed-nation citizens can offset it.
China represents the clearest evidence that the world is not moving toward decarbonization as a single bloc — and that the loudest net-zero rhetoric often comes from those least exposed to its economic cost.
IV. What the Conference Host Itself Chooses to Do
COP31’s own host makes the same point in miniature. Turkey holds the COP31 presidency this November in Antalya. Rather than pursuing wind and solar exclusively, Turkey has confirmed that bringing the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant — a Russian-built, Rosatom-operated facility — online in 2026 remains a top energy priority. Turkey’s own environment minister has put it plainly: the country uses both wind and solar and fossil fuels, because it needs to meet demand and remain self-sufficient.
This is not a contradiction to be pointed out with irony. It is a rational energy-mix strategy — one that stands in instructive contrast to the uniform message Turkey simultaneously delivers as COP31 president. Electricity security through diversification, not purity through a single source, is what every capable government actually practices when the stakes are real. Fossil fuels, wind and solar, and nuclear power each have comparative advantages that differ by geography, resource endowment, and economic development stage; sound policy lets countries choose accordingly rather than mandating a single path.
V. The Anchor Point COP Discourse Keeps Missing
Raw crude oil, once processed through refineries, is the basis of more than 6,000 products that modern life depends on — products that did not exist a few centuries ago. Jet fuel for roughly 35,550 commercial aircraft and 100,000–150,000 daily flights. Diesel for trucks, trains, and construction equipment. Gasoline for roughly 1.7 billion vehicles. Bunker fuel for the 116,000 commercial ships that carry approximately 90% of world trade. Feedstock for fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, plastics, and synthetic fiber — including the materials used to manufacture wind turbines and solar panels themselves.
Wind and solar can generate electricity. They cannot supply transportation fuels. That distinction is not a detail; it is the foundation of the entire debate, and it is the one COP discourse — fixated on electricity and emissions — consistently overlooks.
Carbon symbiosis, not carbon elimination, is the framework that matches the complexity of the world we actually live in, because carbon is an element foundational to both biological life (over 6,000 products and transportation fuels) and industrial civilization (energy), not merely the molecule, CO₂, that climate policy targets for elimination. Energy mix answers “how do we generate power”; Carbon Symbiosis answers the deeper question underneath it — “why can civilization not simply subtract carbon,” at the elemental level.
VI. Conclusion
An electricity policy made in the heat of geopolitical crisis, dressed in the language of climate urgency, deserves the same scrutiny applied to any other form of crisis opportunism.
Bonn, and the Iran war before it, have reminded the world how fragile the supply chains for electricity and hydrocarbon-based products really are. The right response is resilience through diversity — energy mixes suited to each nation’s resources and needs — not acceleration toward a monoculture of intermittent electricity that cannot, by itself, power civilization or supply the products modern life depends on.
What exactly did we just see happening in Ethiopia? The IPCC, the UN Climate Panel (a self-appointed organisation), met there with representatives from 195 countries to prepare for what was supposed to be a major UN climate summit in 2028.
In principle, a new IPCC assessment report (the seventh) was to be produced prior to that summit, but there was no funding and no agreement, not even on the report’s publication date.
The climate house of cards is collapsing, as became clear last week at the IPCC meeting in Ethiopia. The climate narrative has never had any substance, and now that the flow of funding is being cut off, there will soon be nothing left, says Wim Röst, Chair of the Clintel Board.
Guest Post by Drs. Wim Röst
What exactly did we just see happening in Ethiopia? The IPCC, the UN Climate Panel (a self-appointed organisation), met there with representatives from 195 countries to prepare for what was supposed to be a major UN climate summit in 2028. In principle, a new IPCC assessment report (the seventh) was to be produced prior to that summit, but there was no funding and no agreement, not even on the report’s publication date.
Google AI Mode described the conclusion of the summit in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, as follows:
“An unprecedentedly fierce political battle raged throughout the week over the timeline for the seventh major climate report (AR7).
Proponents of urgency (including European countries and island states): Want the report to be fully completed by 2028 at the latest. This is crucial to serve as the scientific basis for the important UN climate summit (Global Stocktake) in that same year.
Opponents (including Saudi Arabia, China, India and Russia): Called for a delay until 2029. Officially, they argue that poorer countries need more time to contribute, but behind the scenes it is believed that this is an attempt to reduce the political pressure on the fossil fuel industry.
As IPCC decisions must be taken by full consensus, the outstanding issues regarding the timeline and the budget could not be resolved. The meeting will resume at a yet-to-be-determined date, as soon as possible, to continue the discussion.”
As long as there is money left, there will undoubtedly be a follow-up, and 195 delegations will once again fly to a central location to solve ‘the enormous climate problem’ that is ‘entirely caused by fossil fuels’.
This year’s Gulf crisis demonstrated that we cannot do without fossil fuels. Iran’s blocking of shipping lanes brought the supply of oil and gas to a standstill for a time and when combined with the war in Ukraine, the result was a massive increase in price and fuel shortages. Countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh had to use their scarce energy supplies for purposes other than fertiliser production. Urea plants use natural gas as a raw material to produce the nitrogen-based fertiliser that is indispensable to their agriculture. Without this fertiliser, their agricultural production collapses, with immediate consequences for food prices and food security for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people.
Numerous other factories that rely on fossil fuels to produce essential goods also ran into difficulties, and the least of the consequences were massive price rises. In such a situation, the poorest countries and the poorest populations are left behind, and this quickly amounts to a few billion people.
The Gulf War brought to light the utter impossibility of ‘Net Zero’. This is the deeper context of the current conflict within the IPCC. What was being pursued is completely impossible, quite apart from the widespread doubts about its necessity. No one can ignore it any longer: actually, stopping the production of all fossil fuels means nothing other than a ‘Zero Economy’.
And that is why the climate house of cards is now collapsing.
This article has been written in a personal capacity. It was first published on Clintel.nl. Dutch publications that served as a primary source can be foundhereandhere.
When Andy Burnham returned from the summer recess to make his first Commons speech as Prime Minister, he promised MPs a “clear diagnosis” of what ails Britain. From the 1980s, he said, the country took a series of wrong turns. According to him, political power was centralised, economic assets were privatised and industry was hollowed out. Thatcher was the villain and the 1970s constituted the lost Eden. The Institute of Economic Affairs rightly called it a speech steeped in nostalgia.
“Common good” is no accident of speechwriting. It is the title of Mariana Mazzucato’s recent book.
When Andy Burnham returned from the summer recess to make his first Commons speech as Prime Minister, he promised MPs a “clear diagnosis” of what ails Britain. From the 1980s, he said, the country took a series of wrong turns. According to him, political power was centralised, economic assets were privatised and industry was hollowed out. Thatcher was the villain and the 1970s constituted the lost Eden. The Institute of Economic Affairs rightly called it a speech steeped in nostalgia. Weeks later, at the Labour conference in Liverpool, the PM went further. Invoking 1945, he declared that “we built the common good”, then promised to repeal the Thatcher-era ban on public ownership of water companies and to launch GB Grid, a publicly owned company to take on private energy operators. Energy, water and housing were to come back under “public control”.
“Common good” is no accident of speechwriting. It is the title of Mariana Mazzucato’s recent book. She is the self-billed “one of the world’s most influential economists” and her consultancies with governments, international agencies and politicians are too numerous to list here but investigative reporter Charlotte Gill’s blog provides good coverage. The day before Burnham took the Liverpool stage, she published a Project Syndicate column urging that the state’s public-finance institutions be scaled up and the fiscal rules reformed to let them “grow”. Britain, she says, has recorded the lowest public investment in the G7 for most of three decades, a gap she puts at roughly £500 billion. The column opens by welcoming Chancellor John Healey’s pledge to sharpen the focus of those institutions, which tells you who is advising whom. Mazzucato is the media’s favourite economist, whose ideas helped shape Labour’s pitch for power, and who is fêted on Channel 4, in the New Statesman and the Guardian, and on podcasts without end. She is no less active in social media (here and here).
Meanwhile one barely hears of Jon Moynihan, whose two-volume Return to Growth is probably among the most thorough audits of British stagnation, as I argued in my review. The pattern is familiar. In 1980 the Malthusian doomster Paul Ehrlich bet the economist Julian Simon that the prices of five metals would rise over a decade. All five fell, and Ehrlich mailed Simon a cheque for $576.07. Ehrlich went on collecting honours despite every one of his dire predictions failing. Simon died in 1998 with little notice from the legacy media. Mazzucato is the Paul Ehrlich of British economics, consulted by the powerful whatever the predictive or analytical worth of her work. Moynihan is the Julian Simon. Britain is being handed the Fabian compass when what it needs is Moynihan’s detailed, classical liberal reform manual.
A compass with no needle
What, exactly, is the “common good”? Not, Mazzucato insists, the economics textbook definition of public goods which the state supplies because they are non-excludable and non-rivalrous and hence unprofitable for private enterprise. In her own telling it is “an objective, not a correction”, a collectively chosen goal to be written into contracts, procurement, patents and public balance sheets from the start. The book’s “compass” has five points: purpose and direction, co-creation, collective learning, reward-sharing through “pre-distribution”, and accountability.
As I noted in my June review, there are no difficult, real world economic trade-offs in her list of items for the common good. The content of the “common good”, whether Net Zero, “shared prosperity” or public control of water, is whatever the ‘commissions’ and ‘stakeholder panels’ decide. And who decides who participates in these commission and panels? We don’t know, although it is presumed that these are democratic in construct.
Let’s examine the Climate Change Committee quango as an example. As Ross Clark notes in the Telegraph, the Committee seems to think that “it is being paid to behave like a green pressure group”. The CCC’s recommendations, while not binding on the Government, have been adopted in every instance. One can only imagine Mazzucato-style committees and panels being stuffed with fellow redistributionist Fabians and green zealots and called ‘democratic representations’ of the public. Can you imagine a Tommy Robinson being in a Mazzucato-inspired panel to discuss immigration policy in the UK?
Mazzucato dresses up her Fabian ideals in contemporary clothes. Allow private capital to remain private, but direct it permanently by public purpose as defined by experts. Burnham’s “public control” is its political twin, and the family resemblance is plain. The abstract of Mazzucato’s new UCL report frames its subject as delivering the Government’s commitment to greater public control of essential services. The IEA’s Kristian Niemietz finds the same link, calling Burnham’s ‘Manchesterism’ speech “straight out of the Mariana Mazzucato playbook”. In July, she was already telling readers how Burnham can make devolution work.
Marking her own homework
A sound economist would ask what the doctrine has actually delivered. Camden is the test case Mazzucato never tires of citing. She co-chaired its Renewal Commission in 2020-21, and her institute then drew up the blueprint for a £30 million Community Wealth Fund. Deployment did not begin until 2025, when the council committed an initial £4 million to a pilot, £2 million for a Youth Fund and £2 million for a Diversity Fund, steered by a panel of young people and a diversity panel of over 500. The Youth Fund’s first investment was £112,000 in a single outfit. After years of commissions, strategies and panels, there is little published evidence that child poverty, food access or employment in Camden has improved at all, as I set out earlier in these pages.
What the council publishes so far is mostly about ‘missions’ and process: who sits on the panels, how many residents took part, how well ‘diverse’ applicants fit the missions. None of that tells a Camden resident whether her street, her child or her small business is better off. The process has become the product, and the process is what Mazzucato’s common good project is all about. It’s all hat and no cattle, as the cousins across the pond might say. Charlotte Gill captures this best, if somewhat cynically: “A mission-led mission to use the word mission as much as mission possible.” Here is a doctrine that cannot lose. When mission-oriented policy works, the doctrine is vindicated; when it flounders, the government misunderstood the doctrine, and the remedy is a bigger mandate and a bigger balance sheet.
The UCL September report asks for precisely that. It grades the National Wealth Fund, Great British Energy and the new National Housing Bank against nine design features of a “mission-oriented” public finance institution, criteria of the author’s own devising. She, of course, finds that more scale, more coordination and looser fiscal rules are needed. A student who sets the exam, marks the paper and recommends more generous funding for her school would be viewed with suspicion. The NWF, meanwhile, was launched with a target of mobilising £3 of private money for every £1 of its own, at least £70 billion in all, and its flagship is the £38 billion Sizewell C, in which the British state is the largest shareholder at 44.9%. As Moynihan documents, such reactors cost four to five times what the Koreans or Emiratis pay, given the strangulating regulations in Britain.
Moynihan’s operating manual
Moynihan surveys the same stagnation and writes from a different prescription. Volume I organises the problem around three variables: the size of the state, the tax burden and the volume of regulation. Debt servicing costs over £100 billion a year, debt is over 110% of GDP, and the tax take is forecast to reach a historic high within five years. This is hardly a state starved of resources. Regulation is the third and deadliest variable: housebuilders tangled in habitats rules for bats while demand for homes soars, domestic oil and gas left in the ground while nuclear costs multiply, a City smothered by compliance.
None of these is a shortage of public equity. Set Mazzucato’s £500 billion against that. Her counterfactual treats public capital – which as Margaret Thatcher never tired of reminding us, is taxpayers’ money – as growth-enhancing by definition. The institutions she wants to be “scaled” inherit every constraint Moynihan documents. It would seem that Mazzucato has never read Friedrich von Hayek’s work and its lessons of the inefficiencies of government planning. She is apparently unaware that the policy-induced distortions of government planning are far worse than the market imperfections it is meant to cure. Nor, apparently, is the famous economist aware of how state control of credit, industrial licensing and foreign exchange breeds corruption and rent-seeking. Perhaps her focus on government-led “missions” as the solution to Britain’s two-decades long stagnation blinds her to the lesson that central planning concentrates power rather than creating resources. Prime Minister Burnham, with advisor Mazzucato’s assistance, has misdiagnosed Britain’s ills.
Simon’s fate, Moynihan’s warning
Why, then, does Mazzucato get the microphone? Because she tells governments what they want to hear: that they are the architects of prosperity. Moynihan tells them to shrink the state, cut taxes, slash regulation and allow the economy to grow. This is not something the elites, the state salariat and the legacy media find comfortable.
Konstantin Kisin, writing after the Liverpool speech, concluded that Burnham will get his way because voters when polled in the abstract oppose taxes and government spending in general. “But ask about anything specific and the picture inverts. 72% want higher taxes on the top 5%. 61% will pay more themselves for the NHS.” 82% want water nationalised and 76% the railways, with large majorities of Reform voters among them. It will not work, he argues, because “Britain has a production problem rather than a distribution problem”, with the tax burden already at a post-war high of 36% of GDP. Kisin believes “the whole thing will end in the kind of humiliation that lingers in the national memory for a generation”, as it is hard to see Britain breaking out of the ideology it is trapped in.
The belief that prosperity is brought about by “mission-oriented” government mandarins in Whitehall rather than created by entrepreneurs unencumbered by stifling regulations – as Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged so memorably novelised – is a faith. And faiths are refuted by failure, not evidence. Moynihan himself expects no better: he doubts any government will adopt his reform programme short of a crisis on the scale of the late 1970s. The bond market, where 30-year gilt yields touched 6.03% on October 1st, the highest in 28 years, is watching.
Burnham’s Government will, I suspect, give Mazzucato’s compass a thorough trial: more public control, more public equity, looser fiscal rules, more missions. The Wealth Fund will report billions “mobilised”, a Camden-style panel will bless the result, and the debt-service bill will keep climbing. Britain has run this experiment before, and it ended in the 1976 crisis which led Britain to approach the IMF with the begging bowl.
Dr Mazzucato’s “mission-oriented” policy advice is Britain’s primrose path to economic disaster, and it seems there is no other path that is even faintly discernible on the horizon despite the clear programme outlined by Moynihan. Woe unto Britain indeed, it shall never again rule the waves and being enslaved to sovereign bond holders for a generation is in prospect.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic’s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former (cancelled) contributor to Forbes. Follow him onSubstackandX.
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