Politics Home Article | Our ideological approach to net-zero is doing more harm than good

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What was the purpose of net-zero? It was to reduce our carbon emissions and ensure Britain plays its part in a global challenge. 

However, net-zero had a fatal flaw. Its myopic focus on domestic emissions does not punish us for the emissions that are offshored. Yet for every business or industry that leaves the country and sets up elsewhere, we are increasing global emissions. That’s because the UK has one of the cleanest energy systems in the world. 

For every chemicals plant or manufacturer we lose, it is almost certainly going to a country with a dirtier energy system. If those products – whether it be steel or glass or ammonia – are imported back into this country, then they will also have the additional emissions of being shipped back to this country, likely in a diesel-chugging tanker. 

This is exactly what is happening in Britain. We are losing refineries hand over fist because we impose carbon taxes on our own industry that are not imposed in Asia, the Middle East or India. The result? Our reliance on imported fuel with twice the emissions is rising. 

In the North Sea, every drop of gas that we don’t get from our own supply increases our reliance on imports of liquefied natural gas, with up to four times the emissions. Our chemicals industry is facing a similar decline. Who has been helped by the closure of the cleanest ammonia factory in Europe, weighed down by our unilateral taxes? Certainly not Britain, which now relies on countries with much lower environmental standards for a vital product. 

We must reject decarbonisation by deindustrialisation

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This will keep happening because our legislative framework mandates one objective – domestic decarbonisation – but not a stronger economy or improved living standards. That means the hand on the tiller will always tilt towards decarbonisation, even when there are egregious trade-offs to the quality of life. 

We can see that too in our electricity prices. The net-zero mindset insists we must race to renewables even though increasingly respected voices, like the Institute for Fiscal Studies, are pointing out that this has been adding huge expense to the electricity system through subsidies and grid balancing costs. As much as Ed Miliband likes to say a wind farm is cheaper than a new gas power plant, what he can’t get away from is that in his system, you have to build all of those gas plants as backup anyway. A system with more and more parts that are used less and less often will be less productive and more expensive. That much is clear. 

And here’s the problem. If we deindustrialise, if we keep making our electricity more expensive, if we block AI, if we keep making ourselves poorer and weaker in the name of net-zero, we will not be an example of ‘climate leadership’, we will be held up for decades as an example of a country that committed economic suicide. We have already become a warning to the rest of the world. As our politicians talk about going further and faster, Asia is piling on ever more coal power stations – desperate to avoid our fate. It is time for a reset that puts growth and living standards first, with decarbonisation only when it doesn’t harm the country. 

That means we should double down on nuclear, make electricity cheap for electrification, axe the carbon tax and back the North Sea. We must reject decarbonisation by deindustrialisation. 

Under Kemi Badenoch’s and my leadership, our approach would be better for the environment and for our economy. That is how we strengthen our economy, secure our energy future and deliver a serious energy policy for the world as it actually is, not as we wish it to be.