Ed Miliband has promised to inject some ‘radical truth-telling’ into the climate-change debate. Fearing waning support for his Net Zero agenda, with the climate-sceptical Reform UK surging in the polls, the UK energy secretary is planning to deliver a ‘state of the climate’ speech in the House of Commons, in which he will declare the British way of life to be ‘under threat’ and accuse his opponents of ‘betraying future generations’.
Of course, anyone expecting ‘radical truth-telling’ from Miliband is bound to be disappointed. In office, the Labour government has taken the Conservatives’ already punishing climate agenda and ramped it up to 11, immediately banning new fossil-fuel exploration and promising a faster transition to carbon-free energy. He is not only convinced that climate change will bring nothing but death and destruction, he is also convinced that accelerating Net Zero will benefit Britain, through cheaper electricity bills and the growth of new, green industries. He is catastrophically wrong on all fronts.
A truth Miliband is yet to acknowledge is that the so-called energy transition is at the heart of Britain’s cripplingly high energy costs. Wind and solar power are intermittent, meaning how much they produce depends entirely on the weather. Wind farms can’t produce energy when the wind doesn’t blow, and solar farms can’t produce energy when the Sun doesn’t shine. Right now, we get around this by having gas power plants on standby for dark and windless days. We also import far more energy than we used to. This strategy, however costly, is at least keeping the lights on – for now. Executives at the National Energy System Operator have privately warned to expect blackouts in London and south-east England by 2028.
The rising costs and increasing unreliability of energy are not only painful for struggling households. The UK also has some of the highest commercial electricity prices in the developed world, thanks largely to climate policy. As researchers Kallum Pickering and Charles Hall point out, over the past two decades, the electricity available in the UK has fallen by a whopping 21 per cent, coinciding with the New Labour government’s decision to put climate change at the heart of energy policy. This squeezed supply has sent prices soaring, throttled productivity and destroyed industrial competitiveness. As a result, Britain is fast deindustrialising, with thousands of jobs and vital strategic industries being sacrificed to meet Miliband’s green goals.
The picture Miliband paints of the UK being overwhelmed by a climate apocalypse is also grossly misleading. The energy secretary even claims that the ‘climate and nature crisis’ and ‘extreme weather’ are ‘already happening’ and are not just a future risk. But while there is plenty of evidence of a changing climate, the risk this poses to us is fairly negligible. Globally, over the past 100 years, the number of people dying from extreme-weather events has actually fallen by 95 per cent, according to data from the OFDA / CRED International Disaster Database. Financial losses from weather disasters have also decreased over the past three decades, despite claims that we are in the grip of a crisis. This is because industrialisation, economic growth and innovation are the main determinants of the risks we face, not the climate or CO2 emissions. Modern infrastructure, improved warning systems and building codes have severed the link between natural disasters and certain death and destruction.
Advanced, industrial societies have an excellent track record of adapting to all kinds of adverse conditions. But climate zealotry is only making this task harder. The recent summer heatwave, for instance, has highlighted the UK’s chronic lack of air conditioning. If the climate doomsters are to be believed, extreme heat will be a growing problem, yet only five per cent of new homes come built with cooling systems, thanks to stringent new energy-saving measures. Meanwhile, insulation standards designed to reduce gas and electricity use are making new homes unbearably hot in the summer. Britain’s climate policies, not climate change, are the main cause of all those sweltering sleepless nights.
The ‘radical truth’ about Net Zero? The dangers it poses, from exorbitant energy bills and rapid deindustrialisation to the rising risks of blackouts, far outweigh the risks it is supposed to mitigate. It is Miliband’s pursuit of Net Zero that is really threatening the ‘British way of life’. This disastrous experiment cannot end soon enough.
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