The Madness of Miliband

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is a foaming-at-the-mouth fanatic, a zealot so detached from reality that he makes medieval flagellants look rational. Under his watch, and that of the broader Net Zero cult gripping Whitehall, Britain is pursuing what is probably the most expensive, unreliable, and economically suicidal energy policy in the developed world. This isn’t about saving the planet. Man-made climate change is a massive, evidence-free lie, a Trojan horse for control. Net Zero is nothing more than a mechanism to ration energy, hobble industry, and make the British people poorer and more dependent on the state. The data proves it every single day.

Look at the National Grid’s own figures, reproduced in our daily featured comment on the Today Forum (most days).  One day wind can supply over 50% of our electricity as it did one day in December, with peaks pushing 60%+ during some half-hour periods. The next day? Wind collapses to the teens or lower. In the same month, there were three consecutive days when gas had to ramp up to over 60% because the wind simply didn’t blow. This isn’t an anomaly; it’s the norm for weather-dependent “renewables.” Annual wind generation in 2024 hit a record ~29-30% of total electricity, but that masks wild daily and seasonal swings that no sane engineer would design a grid around. Solar is even worse. It contributes a pathetic ~5% annually, but in winter – when demand is highest – its share routinely drops below 2%, often closer to 1% or less on short, cloudy December days. A 4kW domestic array that might produce 1.5kWh on a good summer day coughs out 0.5kWh or nothing in midwinter. These sources are not “clean energy”; they are expensive, intermittent toys that require a full hydro-carbon shadow fleet standing by.

Nuclear? A reliable, dense, low-carbon workhorse in any rational system. In the UK it limps along at around 14% of generation in 2024 (40.6 TWh out of 285 TWh total) as ageing plants close without timely replacements. Compare that to France, which gets ~70% from nuclear and exports the surplus, expensively to us. Britain imports up to 20% of its electricity demand in some quarters – a record 33.4 TWh net imports in 2024, with nearly 20 TWh coming via the French interconnectors. We are dependent on our neighbour’s nuclear output while deliberately strangling our own. When French nuclear has its periodic high demand or outages (as in 2022, forcing Britain to export instead), the lights flicker and prices spike. This is not energy security; it is energy vassalage.

All of this costs a fortune precisely because it is unreliable. Every “green” technology is propped up by massive subsidies. Contracts for Difference (CfDs) and the old Renewables Obligation have funnelled billions from bill-payers to developers, often well-connected politically, guaranteeing them inflated strike prices regardless of market conditions. Solar and wind need these handouts because their capacity factors are dismal (offshore wind ~38%, onshore ~25%, solar ~11-15%). Then there is the gas backup. Because wind and solar cannot be dispatched on demand, the government runs a Capacity Market that pays generators simply to be available. Since 2015, £20 billion has been committed through this scheme, with around 60% going to hydro-carbon plants, overwhelmingly gas. Consumers are subsidising the shadow fleet needed to keep the lights on when the wind drops. New gas plants are now being ‘green-lit’ explicitly to “back up” renewables. The policy is so perverse that we pay twice: once to build intermittent junk, again to keep dispatchable plant on standby that is deliberately under-utilised.

And then there is the crowning idiocy: carbon capture and storage (CCS). Only a foaming fanatic like Miliband could champion this. The idea is to take CO₂ from power stations or industry, compress it, pipe it, and bury it under the North Sea. The energy penalty alone is lunatic: capturing CO₂ requires 20-30% more fuel to be burned just to power the fans, compressors, and pumps. You emit more CO₂ overall to “capture” it. Real-world projects routinely underperform with capture rates far below the 90-95% promised, run massive cost overruns, and produce leaks that are inevitable because geology is not a perfect seal. The UK’s insane government is throwing £22 billion of public money at a handful of early projects while admitting there is “high degree of uncertainty” whether they will deliver. Storage under the seabed creates perpetual liability: who monitors it for centuries? Who pays when it leaks? CCS is not engineering; it is green theology dressed up as policy, expensive, inefficient, and pointless virtue-signalling that only a zealot could consider rational.

The entire edifice rests on the foundational lie that CO₂ is a pollutant that must be eradicated. It is not. CO₂ is a trace gas, currently at a low of 0.042% or 420 ppm. Without it, plants die, and so does everything that eats them or things that eat them. It is dwarfed by water vapour, which accounts for 95% or more of the greenhouse effect. Paleoclimate records from ice cores show CO₂ lagging temperature rises by centuries, not leading them. This is scientifically obvious as it is a result of warming oceans releasing dissolved gas. It cannot be the driver.

Britain’s total greenhouse gas emissions in 2024 were 371 MtCO₂e. Global emissions are around 50-53 GtCO₂e, making us responsible for roughly 0.7%. If we reduced our emissions to absolute zero tomorrow, shutting every power station, every car, every factory, the effect on global atmospheric CO₂ concentration would be statistically undetectable. A rounding error. China alone emits more in a few weeks than Britain does in a year, and its emissions are still rising. India is building coal plants at pace. The idea that Britain’s sacrifice matters is not science; it is narcissistic delusion. Or deliberate sabotage.

Worse, the policy is actively counterproductive even on its own deranged terms. High UK energy prices, among the highest in the developed world, are driving energy-intensive industries offshore. Household electricity prices sit at the top of IEA rankings, often 80% above the median and double or triple those in the US or Canada, and up to ten times higher than China. Industrial users face the same penalty. Steel, chemicals, fertilisers, glass, ceramics: these sectors are fleeing to China and India, where they are powered overwhelmingly by coal. The emissions do not disappear; they increase because those countries have dirtier grids and less efficient plants. This is “carbon leakage” on an industrial scale. Britain de-industrialises, loses high-paid jobs, imports finished goods with higher embedded emissions and global CO₂ tally rises. The only other measurable outcome is poorer British households and a hollowed-out economy. Pensioners choosing between heating and eating. Families in fuel poverty. Manufacturers closing factories. All to appease a cult that insists the weather in 2100 will be 0.01°C cooler if we just suffer enough today.

Net Zero is the perfect tool for control. When energy is scarce and expensive, the state decides who gets it via smart meters that can ration usage, carbon taxes that punish the poor, and regulations that strangle enterprise. Wind and solar cannot power a modern industrial society; they require the very hydro-carbon infrastructure they claim to replace, plus vast subsidies extracted from the same citizens who are told to “do their bit” by shivering in the dark. The intermittency demands ever more grid balancing costs, ever more interconnectors, ever more battery farms requiring rare-earth minerals mined by child labour in Congo. The whole system is a parasitic wealth transfer from the productive to the rent-seeking green lobby and their political enablers.

Britain once led the world in energy. We had cheap, abundant coal, then North Sea gas and oil, and the technical expertise to build nuclear fleets. Instead we, or more accurately our masters in government, chose the path of self-flagellation. We closed coal plants, delayed nuclear new-build, carpeted the countryside and seascapes with bird-chopping, landscape-ruining turbines that work when they feel like it. We became dependent on French nuclear and Norwegian hydro while pretending we are “world leaders” in climate action. The result? Some of the highest unit electricity prices on the planet, industries relocating to authoritarian regimes with higher emissions, and a public being gaslit into believing this is virtuous necessity rather than ideological insanity.

This is not policy; it is economic masochism wrapped in green piety. It impoverishes the British people, exports jobs and emissions, and achieves nothing measurable for the climate that wasn’t going to happen anyway. CO₂ is plant food, not poison. The climate has always changed. Water vapour dominates. Britain’s contribution is negligible. The only people who benefit are the subsidy farmers, the bureaucrats, and the control freaks who see energy rationing as the route to power.

Miliband and his Net Zero disciples are not misguided; they are dangerous. Their fanaticism is destroying the industrial base, raising bills, and handing sovereignty over our energy supply to foreign grids and weather gods. The British people deserve cheap, reliable, abundant energy – the foundation of prosperity and freedom and civilisation itself. Instead, we get blackouts, subsidy addiction, and lectures from zealots. It is time to call this what it is: the greatest act of national self-harm in modern history. Scrap Net Zero. Build nuclear. Drill our own resources. Let the market, not Miliband’s messianic delusions, deliver the energy Britain needs. Anything less is surrender to a lie that is quite literally turning out the lights on a once-great nation.