Red Ed survived the reshuffle, only to have his beloved Net Zero agenda torn up
The wholly discretionary rush to Net Zero increasingly looks like an act of wanton vandalism
“This is a crime scene,” the sign declared: a reference to a highly contentious decision by the regulator to allow drilling at Rosebank oil field.
Following the 2024 general election, the new Labour government set about reversing this consent. All Energy Secretary Ed Miliband had to do to make it happen was stand back and let green campaigners challenge the ruling in the courts, and voila! Labour’s manifesto pledge to ban new oil and gas drilling was delivered.
For Red Ed, a figure who becomes more of a political liability by the day as public opinion on Net Zero shifts, the demise of the largest untapped oil and gas field in the UK must have seemed an easy win. In the months that followed, he stepped up his demented crusade to phase out fossil fuels and transform the UK into what he called a “clean energy superpower” by 2030. This involved jumping on a series of carbon emission-belching long haul flights to Brazil, New York, Washington and Azerbaijan to attend global climate change shindigs, and bigging up a new government-run clean energy company called Great British Energy.
For all his herculean efforts however, he has been unable to escape a cold hard reality: the UK continues to pay the highest electricity prices in the developed world. Much as they would like to save the planet, voters and businesses are getting fed up. Among the public, questions being asked over what exactly is to be gained from our much vaunted “world leadership” on climate change. Among our leaders, there are encouraging signs of common sense creeping back in. Belatedly, at least some ministers are waking up to the fact that they face a choice. Amid a sea change in public opinion on what constitutes a reasonable response to changing weather patterns, either they continue yelling about “global boiling” and “climate catastrophe” as the good ship Britain goes down, having run out of fuel – or they change course.
Miliband’s own eco evangelism will not be easily dimmed. He still plans to carpet an area the size of the west Midlands with hideous solar panels, the majority expected to be imported from China. (Never mind the greenhouse gases from all that shipping.) While former prime minister Tony Blair thinks his strategy is “doomed to failure,” he wants to lay 2,800 miles of undersea cables and 600 miles of overland power lines to transport so-called clean energy.
It is all, as the former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove recently put it, “completely mad” – and even the Energy Secretary cannot continue to stick his fingers in his ears. Under pressure from trade union bosses over looming job losses and the cost of Net Zero to British industry, he is said to be preparing to approve oil and drilling in certain areas adjacent to oil fields that have existing licences. If he does, the screeching of his handbrake turn will be heard from Whitehall to the Shetland Isles.
Awkward? Absolutely, but the Energy Secretary can take comfort from the fact that he is not alone in having to U-turn. Amid growing panic at the Treasury at the flatlining economy, one minister after another is having to face up to the fact that the quest for Net Zero may be killing growth. Energy costs are widely blamed for driving up inflation to 3.5pc and strangling growth.
Accordingly, Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has just given the go ahead for a £2.2bn expansion of London Gatwick Airport…
[…]
Lest anyone get too excited, we are a long way off what former Tory prime minister David Cameron supposedly called getting rid of the “green crap.” Miliband for one would surely sooner die in a political ditch than flush his beloved carbon emission cutting agenda down a composting toilet. Yet there is a political and economic imperative for pragmatism.
To many overseas investors, this country increasingly resembles the Titan Atlas of Greek myth, staggering under an unbearable burden of high taxation, stifling regulation, and soaring welfare dependency.
The Telegraph: continue reading
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Ed Miliband is finally seeing sense on energy policy
DAVID ROSE
We should probably whisper it, but Ed Miliband, Britain’s Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, appears to be displaying the first signs of qualities he has so far seemingly lacked: realism and common sense.
This week, Miliband’s department, which is also committed to building the much bigger Sizewell C reactor in Suffolk, indicated it might overrule local opposition to the construction of nuclear waste dumps — projects that legally require local public approval. The announcement follows Keir Starmer’s agreement with Donald Trump last week to develop a new fleet of small modular nuclear reactors, even though they won’t produce electricity for many years.
Perhaps more surprisingly, Miliband is also reportedly planning to water down the ban he introduced last year on drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea. He intends to do this by allowing so-called “tie backs” — the development of new fields via existing, adjacent ones, using their infrastructure. If this is followed through, it cannot be a moment too soon. Fossil fuel extraction is currently responsible for some 120,000 jobs, but the industry body Offshore Energies UK claimed three weeks ago that 1,000 are being lost every month.
Of course, Miliband remains wedded to his Clean Power 2030 plan, a pledge to reduce electricity generation derived from fossil fuel to almost nothing by tripling offshore and doubling onshore wind capacity, along with the tripling of solar. Many experts think the necessary turbines, solar panels and supporting infrastructure simply cannot be installed in the time frame he has set, while Labour’s 2024 election promise —that the policy would shrink consumers’ energy bills by £300 a year — was fantasy.
As UnHerd revealed in March, a sophisticated computer model developed by Professor Gordon Hughes, suggests that the subsidies, levies and other hidden costs embedded in Miliband’s proposals will see not a reduction but an 80% increase in the cost of electricity by his 2030 target date — and this in a country where industrial users already pay the highest prices of G7 states.
Nevertheless, the reason for Miliband’s newfound realism isn’t hard to spot. Two of Labour’s biggest union paymasters, Unite and the GMB, which both backed Miliband as Labour leader when he won a leadership election in 2010, have declared themselves vehemently opposed to his Net Zero policies. According to the GMB’s general secretary Gary Smith, their success will be “measured in redundancies”, while his Unite counterpart Sharon Graham has said it is a “disgrace” that the government “has no plan to transition oil and gas workers into green jobs”.
However, as with the Starmer government’s tough talk on migration, there is a further source of pressure for a change of course: Reform UK, whose deputy leader Richard Tice is determined to make scrapping Net Zero a key political battleground. He has declared that, under a Reform government, there would not only be new offshore drilling licences, but large-scale onshore fracking, to extract natural gas trapped in shale which he claims will be worth hundreds of billions of pounds.
Miliband, who usually tops ministerial popularity polls among Labour Party members, loves posting social media videos highlighting the supposed benefits of his policies. One notable example was his rendition of Blowing in the Wind, filmed next to wind turbines while he strummed a ukulele.
He may not yet have sung a song about the virtues of nuclear waste dumps or fossil fuel tie-backs, but as with any sinner, many will welcome these glimmers of repentance.
This article (Ed Miliband is finally seeing sense on energy policy) was created and published by UnHerd and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author David Rose
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