TILAK DOSHI
In the belief that atmospheric CO2 is the control knob of ‘dangerous’ impending climate change, Net Zero emerged in the 2010s as the global rallying cry to ‘save the planet’. By the time the Paris Agreement was concluded in 2015, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) established the arbitrary 1.5°C limit on global temperature increase and established the ‘Net Zero by 2050’ policy target for developed countries around the globe.
But a spate of recent headlines suggests that the ‘Net Zero by 2050’ policy is falling apart. There is a growing realisation across advanced economies that the grandiose project of achieving ‘Net Zero by 2050’ is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. What was once heralded as a consensus across the political class, corporate boardrooms and multilateral agencies now looks increasingly like an edifice of ideology built on a vaporous, oxymoronic ‘consensus science‘. The rising tide of empirical reality — the costs of intermittent renewables, the geopolitical consequences of energy insecurity and the sheer scale of power demand growth from artificial intelligence infrastructure — has swept away the carefully constructed narrative of inevitability around the so-called energy transition.
Yet, as David Blackmon reminds us in his well-subscribed Energy Transition Absurdities Substack blog, “climate alarmism is demoralised but it is far from dead”. It would seem that no amount of evidence on prohibitive system costs of intermittent renewable energy and their adverse impact on energy prices can convince diehard climate doomsters otherwise.
The Crumbling Edifice of Climate Orthodoxy
Last week, Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch pledged to “extract every last molecule of oil and gas from the UK North Sea”, as the Tories seek to distance themselves from their previous support for the country’s Net Zero emissions target. She rightly described the abandonment of domestic resources as “an act of economic disarmament”. It may be doubtful whether Badenoch is serious in her intent to carry out a US-style ‘drill, baby, drill’ campaign if the Tories were to achieve office (an unlikely prospect). But the fact that she was led to make the radical pledge to dump Net Zero is evidence of the waning influence of the globalist climate agenda of drastic decarbonisation.
In its ‘Global Outlook’ published last week, ExxonMobil declared what has become increasingly obvious: the world is burning more coal than ever, and global Net Zero goals are “slipping away”. Earlier this year, a poll of British energy industry Chief Executives revealed that a majority no longer believe Net Zero by 2050 is remotely achievable — a stark departure from the optimism of a decade ago. The once-celebrated European climate consensus has fractured, as Hungarian and Austrian MEPs successfully opposed a motion to fast-track the EU’s 2040 climate target (a 90% emissions reduction), which failed in July 2025.
The cracks in the climate industrial complex are no longer hairline fractures; they are gaping holes. Even some former apostles of the green faith, such as former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, now admit that phasing out fossil fuels is “doomed to fail”. Yet for all this, the machinery of climate alarmism keeps churning. Climate activism is not so much a science-based project as it is a secular religion of the globalist Left. It is a belief system too deeply ingrained in the zealous worldview of its adherents to ever be abandoned willingly. The Malthusian spectre that pervades the climate change movement remains to be exorcised.
Trump’s Counter-Revolution and Paul Krugman’s Fictions
Chief among the shocks delivered to the Church of Climate is the re-election of Donald Trump and the energy counter-revolution he has unleashed. Having already withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement for the second time, Trump has now gone further.
His administration has pledged to rescind the Environmental Protection Agency’s ‘endangerment finding’, the bedrock legal foundation upon which much of America’s anti-fossil fuel regulation rests. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin have openly challenged the scientific pretensions of the climate establishment, commissioning a landmark report from five leading scientists that exposes the alarmist assumptions embedded in the IPCC’s climate models. In the Church of Climate, this is apostasy. To ordinary citizens burdened by soaring energy bills, it is common sense.
The Trump administration’s moves have been greeted with outrage by commentators such as the Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who lamented last week what he calls “The Crazy” directed at clean energy. Krugman insists that renewables are now cheap, abundant and inevitable, dismissing critics who point out the problem of intermittency and system costs with sarcasm. He points to falling costs of solar and wind since 2010 and the rise of batteries, claiming a technological revolution is underway.
But in doing so, Krugman unwittingly reveals the hollowness of the green narrative. If solar and wind are indeed as cheap and competitive as claimed, why the desperate need for subsidies, mandates and regulatory interventions to keep them afloat? Why are leading wind developers such as Denmark’s Ørsted teetering on the edge of bankruptcy with its shares accorded a “near junk status” absent government bailouts? Why are electricity prices in jurisdictions most committed to renewables — Germany, California, the UK — among the highest in the world?
Krugman fulminates against Trump’s decision to halt the Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island, calling it the gratuitous destruction of billions of dollars’ worth of investment. Yet he expressed no such indignation when President Biden cancelled the nearly complete $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office. For Krugman, subsidies and mandates for renewables are sound economics, while permitting fossil fuel infrastructure is evidence of “irrational prejudice.” The hypocrisy could not be starker. Krugman’s parable of the energy transition is not an analysis; it is a sermon to the faithful.
The climate alarmists in the US, under the onslaught of President Trump’s energy dominance agenda which seeks to dismantle the previous administration’s radical climate policies, have not given up. In a LinkedIn post, commentator Dough Sheridan observes:
Greens aren’t taking no for an answer. Quite the opposite. The plan post-Trump is to implement an even more radical effort to fix the climate — and turn society on its head in the process. It’s what they’ve wanted all along. … European-style gov’t ownership and control over large swaths of the US economy. In their minds, free markets are the problem — and must be stamped out.
Europe and the Return of Fossil Realism
The European Union has long prided itself as the global leader in climate virtue, championing the Paris Agreement and legally binding its members to ambitious decarbonisation timelines. Yet the internal contradictions are mounting. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Europe’s dependence on cheap Russian natural gas was laid bare. Gas shortages, spiralling household bills and the collapse of industrial competitiveness forced policymakers to confront the perils of over-reliance on intermittent renewables and imported fuels.
It is in this context that Hungary and other dissenting voices in the European Parliament have broken ranks, torpedoing Net Zero proposals that once seemed inevitable. Badenoch’s dramatic pivot to ‘drill, baby, drill’ in the North Sea can be seen in this light. After years of Conservative complicity in climate dogma, she now articulates a doctrine of energy sovereignty: to leave resources untapped while neighbouring Norway reaps the benefits is economic madness.
Meanwhile, Europe’s industrial backbone is fracturing under the strain of climate mandates. German automakers, once eager to boast of their electric vehicle futures, are now openly resisting Brussels’s diktats. Last week, Europe’s leading automotive executives pressed Brussels to rethink its car and van CO2 rules, warning that rigid 2030 and 2035 targets are no longer realistic amid rising costs, import dependence and trade barriers.
The existential crisis in the German car industry mirrors the wider unravelling of the green agenda. Renewable champions like BP and Shell, after years of dabbling in unprofitable forays into solar and wind, are now executing a U-turn back to their core business of oil and gas.
The notion that Europe could phase out fossil fuels within two decades or so, replacing them with wind, solar and batteries, has been exposed as a fantasy. Yet the Brussels bureaucracy clings to it with a zeal that would impress the most committed of religious cults.
Why the Fantasy Persists
If the evidence is so damning, why does the Net Zero agenda persist? The answer lies in the unique nature of the climate movement. As Blackmon notes, climate alarmism is not merely a set of policy prescriptions. It is the ideological glue binding together a powerful coalition of Left-leaning activists, media organisations, corporations and billionaire philanthropists. For them, climate policy is not about energy, science or the environment. It is about social engineering, wealth redistribution and global governance.
This explains the imperviousness of the climate movement to empirical reality. No matter how often its promises fail — whether in the bankruptcy of solar firms, the grid crises of California or the skyrocketing bills of British households — the solution is always more subsidies, more mandates, more central planning. Failures are never attributed to the policies themselves but to insufficient zeal in their implementation.
The AI revolution offers yet another nail in the coffin of Net Zero. The surge in electricity demand from data centres and AI-related infrastructure renders the fantasy of zero emissions impossible. Yet this, too, will not shake the faith of the Church of Climate. Like all millenarian cults, it thrives on the perpetual deferral of salvation, forever promising that utopia is just around the corner if only we sacrifice a little more.
Beyond Net Zero Illusions
The Net Zero project is unravelling. Its economic contradictions, technological limitations and political unpopularity are now impossible to ignore. From Trump’s counter-revolution in Washington to Badenoch’s embrace of North Sea oil, from Hungary’s defiance in Brussels to the entreaties of European carmakers, the tide is turning. Even the prophets of the old order — such as Blair — now quietly admit what was once heresy: the energy transition as envisioned is doomed to fail.
Yet we must not underestimate the resilience of the climate industrial complex. Like all ideologies, it is sustained not by evidence but by belief and, of course, money. The billions in subsidies, the vast networks of Left-wing billionaire-funded NGOs and media outlets, the careers and reputations staked on ‘saving the planet’ — all ensure that that the ‘climatistas’ will fight to the last to preserve its illusions.
The task of our time is to expose the hollowness of these illusions, to insist on energy policies grounded in reality rather than ideology and to affirm the indispensable role of fossil fuels in powering human prosperity. Net Zero is not merely dead-on arrival; it was always a fantasy. The sooner we recognise this, the sooner we can return to the serious business of ensuring affordable, reliable energy for all.
This article was first published in The Daily Sceptic [ https://dailysceptic.org/2025/09/06/the-tide-is-turning-decisively-against-net-zero/ ]
This article (The Tide is Turning Decisively Against Net Zero) was created and published by Tilak Doshi and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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