Ed Miliband is Now the UK’s Major Source of Net Zero Disinformation

TILAK DOSHI

On Easter Sunday, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband launched a blistering attack on Nigel Farage, accusing the Reform UK leader of spreading “nonsense and lies” about the UK’s Net Zero policies. Miliband blasted Farage and the Conservatives for linking Net Zero to the collapse of British Steel’s Scunthorpe plant, the last facility in Britain capable of producing virgin steel.

‘Mad Ed‘, as critics call him, branded Farage a reckless opportunist who would “keep Britain locked in dependence on global markets we don’t control”, “forfeit clean energy jobs” and “sell future generations down the river” by ignoring the “climate breakdown”. His pitch? “Cheap, home-grown” renewables to secure UK jobs and prosperity while also helping save the planet from “climate breakdown”.

Miliband’s rhetoric embodies Brandolini’s Law. Also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, it states that: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” Or as Terry Pratchett has it in one of his novels: “A lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on.”

Debunking Miliband’s claims of cheap clean energy, green jobs and fighting imminent climate doom requires reasoning and appreciation of the laws of physics and economics. This may seem to be a losing proposition in a post-truth world where Left-wing billionaires and USAID-funded narratives rule the mainstream media.

Yet, people cannot be gaslighted over Net Zero’s economic toll indefinitely. From the Farage-championed Brexit to Trump’s 2016 win, the public can see through reigning agendas whatever the opinion polls might say. As Michael Deacon of the Telegraph argues, Mr Farage may well prove right in his view that the British political class’s Net Zero obsession could be the new Brexit.

Miliband’s Obfuscations

Miliband blames a surge in gas prices for Britain’s rising energy bills as he urged households and companies to back Net Zero to bring costs down. He said bills were rising “because we’re so reliant on fossil fuels, in particular gas… and the markets that determine the price of those fossil fuels are controlled by the decisions of petrostates and dictators”.

Never mind that the three major sources of natural gas imports into the UK are piped gas from Norway (accounting for almost 60%), followed by LNG from the US (26%) and Qatar (6%). And never mind that Norway gets its gas from the North Sea where the UK Government has declined new licences for oil and gas development in its own jurisdiction.

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In his Easter weekend attack on Farage, Miliband said: “Our exposure to fossil fuels meant that, as those markets went into meltdown and prices rocketed, family, business and public finances were devastated. The cost of living impacts caused back then still stalk families today.”

Natural gas prices in Europe have declined to almost where they were before the supply crisis brought on by the Ukraine-Russia war. However, estimated electricity bills for an average household in the UK have increased by 35.5%, from £652 in 2021 to £884 in 2024, according to Ofgem data. While increased gas prices (which include an additional carbon tax paid by power companies that generate electricity using natural gas) played a role in this increase, the work by David Turver and Andrew Montford shows that the array of subsidies, systems balancing costs (due to intermittency of renewables) and expanding the grid to support increased reliance on solar and wind farms plays a far more important role.

The argument that natural gas sets the high UK electricity prices – because of the merit order bidding process in the wholesale power market where natural gas-based power generators set the marginal cost (highest price) – was put across on X on Thursday by Dale Vince, another adept student of Brandolini’s Law. The eco-zealot owner of Ecotricity, Labour mega-donor and buddies with Miliband said: “We have to break the link with gas to get off the rollercoaster of global energy prices.”

Whether this asymmetric bullshit classifies as ingenious or disingenuous might be subject to one’s point of view, but bullshit it is. Debunker Kathryn Porter puts across the point as simply as possible in a response post on X to Mr Vince’s self-serving sound-bites. Gas sets the wholesale price of electricity, but this accounts for only 40% of the household bill. As Porter’s chart below shows, the other 60% accounts for all the renewable subsidies, back-up costs (for dispatchable power when the wind and sun are not around), grid costs, balancing costs for grid stability and curtailment costs (when there is too much wind). Those extra costs amount to billions of pounds every year.

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“Cheap” renewables are a myth, but Miliband/Vince soundbites spread faster than the more complex real-world outcomes which require parsing Ofgem reports and having a modicum of economic literacy. Mr Turver estimates that some combination of UK ratepayers and taxpayers pay £11 billion per year in renewables subsidies, £2.5 billion for grid balancing and a further £1 billion for the capacity market. To this must be added an estimated £112 billion in spending on grid expansion by 2035, according to the National Grid.

Miliband’s “home-grown” claim is equally flimsy. Wind turbines, solar panels and batteries for electric vehicles rely on imports from Chinese companies – overwhelmingly powered by coal-generated electricity – which dominate global supply chains and the refining of minerals and rare earths. China now consumes nearly 40% more coal than the rest of the world combined, largely for power generation. It also accounted for 95% of all new coal power plants constructed in 2023.

Hiding Net Zero’s Price Tag

Miliband’s ideological zeal is exposed by former Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho, who revealed on X that Miliband scrapped her department’s plan to assess the costs of Net Zero on UK households and businesses. Her post, seen by over half a million users, accused him of dodging transparency to shield his green agenda.

In an interview with Mike Graham of Talk TV this week, Andrew Montford of Net Zero Watch said that: “Ed Miliband and his energy department are the biggest source of disinformation on Net Zero in the country. I mean, [he’s] actually gone out of his way to make sure that the truth never comes out.”

Professor Gordon Hughes, among the UK’s leading energy system experts, recently estimated that Miliband’s Clean Power 2030 plan will add at least £25 billion per year to the cost of the electricity system. This will cause prices to soar, hitting every household in the UK with a cost-of-living increase of over £900. These estimates draw upon a detailed dispatch model for the GB electricity system.

Another independent estimate of the cost of Net Zero is provided by Michael Kelly, an eminent engineering professor who was the inaugural Prince Philip Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge. With extra costs comfortably in excess of £3 trillion, and for no measurable attributable change in the global climate, achieving Net Zero emissions for the UK economy by 2050 is not only an “an extremely difficult ask”, to put it mildly, it is also a pointless one since the “climate collapse” will not be avoided by a Net Zero UK which now accounts for less than 1% of global CO₂ emissions.

Adherents to Brandolini’s Law such as the Climate Change Committee, the UK’s quango that must be “consulted” by the Government in Net Zero policies, have a far cheerier outlook for their radical green agenda of manageable costs, tremendous benefits in terms of avoided climate damages and future ‘green’ jobs for the UK. All this, for a total net cost by 2050 of £108 billion. This is about £4 billion per year or 0.2% of GDP. This estimate is 73% less than thought previously in the earlier carbon budget by the CCC. Allegedly, household energy and fuel bills will fall to £1,400 per year. The Brandolini asymmetry in this case is the CCC’s £4 billion per year to Prof Hughes’s conservative £25 billion.

The problem at the Scunthorpe steel industry, central to Miliband’s spat with Farage, is that the Brandolini asymmetric bullshit is hard to spin. Both Farage and the Tories have blamed the perilous situation at British Steel’s Scunthorpe plant on high energy costs. There is little to counter the fact that the UK has the highest power prices in the developed world. British companies are paying the highest electricity prices among comparable countries. The cost of power for industrial businesses has jumped 124% in five years and is now 50% more expensive than in Germany and France, and four times as expensive as in the US.

The Public Isn’t Fooled Forever

Economic illiteracy, as amply exhibited by Miliband in his car crash interview with Sky News on Thursday, is evidently no constraint to the practice of Brandolini’s Law. Nothing stops ‘Mad Ed’ cluelessly banging on about climate leadership, green jobs and cheap home-grown energy – how did he get his ‘E’ in his Oxford PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) one wonders. Unfortunately, it seems for now that much of the public is taken in. Luke Tryl, UK Director of polling organisation More in Common, said that “our research finds that in every UK constituency voters say they are more worried about climate change than not, and most see renewable energy as the path to energy security, jobs and cheaper energy”.

But there are limits to asymmetric bullshit and Farage’s warning that Net Zero could be “the next Brexit” might yet be prescient. Brexit and Trump’s election in 2016 were followed by Javier Milei’s election in 2023 and Trump’s re-election the following year. When things become bad enough, a majority of voters can, against all odds, willingly break with the status quo in dramatic ways, going against a presumed consensus backed by opinion polls and focus group feedback. Brandolini’s Law works against itself in time.

This article was first published in The Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2025/04/26/ed-miliband-is-now-the-uks-major-source-of-net-zero-disinformation/

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.

This article (Ed Miliband is Now the UK’s Major Source of Net Zero Disinformation) was created and published by Tilak Doshi and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author David Wright