The Iran War has exposed the folly of Net Zero

The Strait of Hormuz, one of the most vital shipping routes in the world, has been closed by Iran since the US and Israel began their airstrikes last week. This event might not seem as newsworthy as the assasination of Ayatollah Khamenei and the potential demise of the Islamic Republic – but make no mistake, the consequences could be just as profound. Particularly for the UK.

The impact of the Strait’s closure has already been unprecedented. And no wonder: roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil passes through this narrow, 90-mile stretch of water separating the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Prices for oil and gas have skyrocketed – in the UK, wholesale gas prices increased 100 per cent in the first 48 hours of conflict, the sharpest rise since records began. Adding to the chaos of the Strait’s closure was Iran’s successful strike on Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura, the world’s biggest oil-export terminal, sending Brent crude prices soaring. Ras Laffan, the world’s biggest terminal for exporting liquified natural gas, based in Qatar, has also closed down after it was hit by Iranian drones. Global energy markets are in complete turmoil, with no end in sight.

The UK, which has depended on foreign imports for energy for decades, is in the eye of this storm. In a more rational world, then, one might hope that UK energy secretary Ed Miliband would reassess his longstanding hostility to fracking on British land and drilling in the North Sea. Miliband, you might remember, has banned fracking for natural gas, while slowly strangulating the economic viability of the North Sea oil and gas industry. Surely the crisis around the Strait of Hormuz ought now to force him into some soul-searching about Net Zero, and his unquenchable drive to abandon fossil fuels?

Alas, no. The phrase ‘doubling down’ seems to have been invented for Miliband. ‘To ensure our energy security in an unstable world’, Miliband said on Wednesday, the Labour government will ‘keep driving’ for ‘clean, homegrown power’. What Miliband is saying, with his typical nursery-school level of insight, is that the wind and sun in the British Isles are more reliable and affordable than fossil fuels from the Middle East. The war is further proof, in Miliband’s deluded mind, that his flagship Net Zero target – of 95 per cent of British electricity coming from renewables and nuclear by 2030 – has never been more urgent.

So, we will be asked to forget the higher prices that motorists can now expect for fuel at petrol stations, and the higher bills that households can equally expect for gas-fired central heating. Never mind that Britain will always need gas-fired power stations to back up, at vast expense, its intermittent production of renewable energy. Erase from all memory our Ed vandalising two potential sites for UK fracking by pouring concrete into them – and of him banning the issuing of new licences to drill for oil and gas in the North Sea, in favour of buying supplies from Norwegian drillers.

Instead, look forward to Miliband citing the Hormuz crisis as a vindication of Net Zero, and of his belief that Britain should decouple from Middle Eastern petrostates through home-grown wind and solar. In his typically imperious style, he will go on thinking that the UK’s Net Zero policy shows the way to the rest of the world. In truth, the rest of the world will continue to see Britain as an example of exactly what not to do. Of course, with Britain labouring under the weight of some of the world’s highest industrial-energy prices, they would be right.

Miliband has drawn precisely the wrong lesson from the war in Ukraine. When Russia invaded its western neighbour in 2022, and sent global energy prices soaring, he never even seemed to entertain the idea that oil and gas beneath our soil and seas could be a solution to the inevitable energy shocks of the future. Such was the extent of Miliband’s Carbon Derangement Syndrome that the idea of developing British-based sources of hydrocarbons – the source not just of fossil fuels, but also of lifesaving pharmaceuticals, agricultural fertilisers and plain old methanol – did not even enter his mind.

Speaking at an International Energy Agency summit last year, UK prime minister Keir Starmer conceded that fossil fuels would be part of Britain’s energy mix for ‘decades to come’. He was, for once, right. What a shame, then, that Starmer appears to have done nothing to follow through on this insight.

Britain must take energy security seriously, even if Ed Miliband and Keir Starmer refuse to. The danger of Net Zero – to the UK’s energy security and indeed national security – has never been so obvious. The war in Iran might have been beyond the UK’s control, but our vulnerability to its consequences was not. The coming energy crisis has Miliband’s fingerprints all over it.

James Woudhuysen is visiting professor of forecasting and innovation at London South Bank University. Follow him on X: @jameswoudhuysen.