The Dark Denialism of the War on Net Zero
As the summer comes to an end, and records suggest that the [UK Summer 2025 ‘almost certainly’ the hottest on record] , consider that it might be the coolest you’ll experience in the future.
The war on Net Zero currently being conducted, is an exercise in denialism and a rejection of reality. It’s the political-climate equivalent of hiding behind the sofa and hoping that the monsters go away. It’s essentially childish, but also engaging in a deep-seated lie that is based on short-term electoral gain at the expense of our collective future.
To be clear, the Net Zero targets are a woefully inadequate attempt by late capitalist societies to manage the inherent contradictions in the patterns of consumption and production, addiction to fossil fuels and perpetual growth, and the extraction and colonialism which are destroying our environment. But even this, the most modest plan to try and decarbonise the economy – whilst not really changing anything – is completely unacceptable to the political class.
These modest proposals, established by Theresa May in 2018 were, until only a few years ago, a consensus among all the mainstream parties.
The writer Sam Bright notes that Kemi Badenoch has today pledged to “Get all of the oil and gas out of the North Sea.” Over the past decade, the Tories have received over £7.2 million from figures connected to the GWPF – the UK’s most prominent climate science denial group.”
The Tory party leader, we’re told, will use a speech in Aberdeen in the coming days to set out her plans to extract as much oil and gas as possible instead of shifting away from fossil fuels. Scottish readers will be surprised at such announcements having been informed by the Conservatives and Project Fear in 2014 that the North Sea was empty as an oil and gas resource.
But now the Tory leader is emboldened by Farage’s rabid anti-Net Zero campaigning and by a glance across the pond where Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ has obliterated all of the Biden-era climate policies. The BBB completely undermines US solar and wind power expansion as well as the sales of electric vehicles and energy efficiency improvements.
The reputable Carbon Brief calculates that President Trump’s dismantling of US climate policy means adding an extra 7bn tonnes of emissions to the atmosphere from now until 2030, and the complete abandonment of the pledges made under the Paris Agreement. Such disastrous extremism is now being mirrored by the British right.
Left Foot Forward’s Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead [The war on net zero: how political climate consensus fell apart – Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK’s progressive debate] writes:
“In Lincolnshire, Reform’s new mayor Andrea Jenkyns, who sits on the board of Net Zero Watch, an anti-climate campaign group, has claimed that carbon dioxide is “not pollution.” Jenkyns campaigns to stop pylons and solar farms from being built in Lincolnshire, even though the county’s net zero industries contribute nearly £1 billion to the local economy and support over 12,000 jobs, as analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) shows. She has also promised to launch a “Lincolnshire DOGE” – a reference to the US’s Department of Government Efficiency, overseen by tech magnate Elon Musk, which has introduced a range of harsh public sector cuts, including to climate agencies.”
Of course, such lunacy comes as the climate emergency accelerates. Only this week, new modelling has suggested the tipping point that makes an Amoc shutdown inevitable is likely to be passed within a few decades [Collapse of critical Atlantic current is no longer low-likelihood, study finds | Oceans]. To be clear, the shutdown of Amoc (the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) would be utterly disastrous for Scotland, and north-west Europe.
Reform’s infantile opportunism follows a path seen in America. Ed Miliband, the energy and net zero secretary, and one of the few to attempt to counter this narrative , has accused the Conservatives of being “anti-science” by abandoning a political consensus on net zero.
Such anti-ecological thinking is pushed more and more in Scotland’s right-wing media. This week Paul Wilson, the Scotsman’s assistant editor, penned a piece railing against the policy writing [How the government’s war on carbon and prosperity is about to enter a new phase]:
“… it must take Nicola Sturgeon-grade levels of delusion not to notice there is much that is badly wrong with the entire net zero misadventure and the assumptions and premises on which it is based.” Wilson bellowed that “as the government strives to decarbonise the British electricity system over the next five years, the economic outlook will only become more grim as the war on carbon and prosperity enters a new phase.”
This conflation of ‘carbon and prosperity’ is Jurassic, and completely anti-scientific, and, indeed, anti-human and anti-future. People like Wilson are pleased that the political consensus that established Net Zero goals has been abandoned, but they don’t make any reference to the scientific facts on which it was based. These haven’t changed at all.
A Champagne Coup
Much of this, it’s true, is the fault of the environmental movement, which has failed to combat the disinformation, and create a story that makes sense to people in which the massive changes we need to make will bring material benefits and socio-ecological security.
Instead, as we can see, the climate crisis is being weaponised by the populist right to manipulate this situation. That is why it is vital that, as Jonathan Watts has said (The Great Carbon Divide):
“We need a political discourse that is class conscious, that recognises that the rich and capitalism are the major drivers of the climate crisis. This is about bringing production – and provisioning systems and energy systems – under democratic control.”
The group Climate Equality have produced research to show that the richest 1% of the population produced as much carbon pollution in one year as the 5 billion people who make up the poorest two-thirds.
The irony is that groups like Reform and the Conservatives, backed by dark oil money and fossil fuel interests, are sustaining this ecocide on the backs of the poor, mobilising people against their own interests, and for the interests of the rich.
Jonathan Watts writes:
“The climate chasm between the world’s carbon-guzzling rich and the heat-vulnerable poor forms a symbolic shape when plotted on a graph. Climate-heating greenhouse gas emissions are so heavily concentrated among a rich minority that the image resembles one of those old-fashioned broad-bowled, saucer-shaped glasses beloved of the gilded age: a champagne coupe.”
“At the top is the wide, flat, very shallow bowl of the richest 10% of humanity, whose carbon appetite – through personal consumption, investment portfolios, and share of government subsidies and infrastructure benefits – accounts for about 50% of all emissions.”
“Just below is the epicure, that narrowing joint of the glass where the dregs collect. This is made up of the middle 40%, whose carbon habit is roughly proportionate to its number but still double the average carbon budget that everyone would need to stick to if the world is to have any chance of avoiding more dangerous levels of climate breakdown.
Going further down is the long, slim, fragile stem comprising the remaining 50% of the world’s population, whose carbon use tapers away along with incomes. At the bottom are the hundreds of millions who live in extreme poverty and barely register in terms of greenhouse gases.”
“The champagne coupe is a fitting image for the great carbon divide that we are living through. The last time wealth inequality was as pronounced as it is now was during that belle époque of the 1920s [Brexit Britain, the Golden Tortoise]. Then, it was bad enough as a cause of social misery and international instability. Today, it is arguably much worse because the gulf between the haves and have-nots extends to their carbon emissions, which heightens suffering from the climate crisis and impedes efforts to find a solution.”
The Science. The Facts.
It may be that under Jack Polanski the Green Party in England or the People’s Party can do something to change this narrative and introduce populist green policies. But whatever the party’s policies, any party’s policies, the facts don’t change, the science doesn’t alter.
2021 seems an age ago, but back then the IPCC issued a statement on the basis of their latest report stating:
“All pathways begin now and involve rapid and unprecedented social transformation.”
These aren’t radicals or activists, these are the most sober, empirical, evidence based scientists from the around the world, explaining in cold hard facts the need for change.
This doesn’t change because a political party wants to activate its base. This doesn’t change because one of the 60+ columnists can’t comprehend the moment or doesn’t have ability to imagine anything beyond the economic system that is destroying our world. It just doesn’t.
The nostalgia for Britain’s industrial past – because that’s what a lot of this about – isn’t on the table. The idea that Britain can abandon its modest commitments to reducing our emissions, because Kemi Badenoch is having a tough time, or because Farage’s reactionary corps/core want to whip up a storm, doesn’t alter the science of our reality.
This idea that we can retreat from the world of climate reality, or from vaccinations, or whatever, is not new. As Robert Burns wrote in 1786: ‘Facts are chiels that winna ding,/An downa be disputed’.
For anyone struggling with Scots the English translation is ‘But facts are fellows that will not be overturned,/And cannot be disputed’.
We can either move, rapidly, to a vast transition away from fossil fuels and decarbonise our economy, and play our part in the global effort to make a viable future, or we can abandon hope and consign our children and our grandchildren to mayhem.
None of this is optional.
Well said ! Listen to the science. Hasten the reform of all curricula where we have the opportunity to raise understanding of the climate and nature crises. Celebrate the work of Education Scotland’s Curriculum Improvement Cycle, in association with the International Baccalaureate, to implement and build on the Royal Meteorological Society’s detailed proposals as to how this can be done:
https://www.metlink.org/curriculum/a-curriculum-for-climate-literacy/
I think people forget that achieving ‘net zero’ involes the entire planet and all the countries therein, not little bits of it. eg. Dehli has at least five times the population of Scotland and achieving ‘net zero’ there is way more difficult, and we’re not helping, and neither is anyone else, and Delhi is as relevant to climate change in Scotland as Scotland is.
True true, it will take the whole world.
China is interesting in this respect. While its emissions (and use of coal) is still expanding, it is also investing massively in renewable energy and is on course to reach net zero by its target date of 2060. Perhaps this is helped by the fact that China plans for the long term and is not subject to the same manipulations of public opinion as are proving to be so toxic in Western democracies. This is not an argument against democracy, but it is an argument for restricting the power of the oil companies and their ability to influence political parties and public opinion in the UK, and in Scotland as well.
I no longer know whether to post comments on here anymore.
Last week the latest science on what’s happening in Antarctica was released. As a hardened collapse-acceptance observer of 10 years, I was still shocked.
There is an equivalence of AMOC around the south pole, which feeds into the northern AMOC. It, just like the northern Atlantic one, has slowed by at least 30%. Antarctica has lost as much ice in the last decade as the Arctic has in the last 40 years. That’s an unimagineable number. 2015 was clearly a tipping point for the Antarctic.
That is the trouble with tipping points, we don’t know we’ve tipped them until well after the event.
For those that want to delve deeper, Paul Beckwith discusses it in depth here: https://youtu.be/kz_MilyXkk0?si=zxRpb-Idtt9IpVPb
That and Hansen’s latest work clearly shows the rate of change in warming is in itself speeding up.
Focusing on net zero is, as Derrick Jensen once said, “solving for the wrong variable”. It won’t matter one iota if we reach “net zero” by 2050 or not. It makes great sound bites for, well, either side really, especially for the Faragian monster raving loony parties, but yet again, it is the limits of the Overton Window, reducing everything to a binary debate (you’er either for or against net-zero) when the issues we face as a species are far more nuanced and complex. I highly recommend B The Honest Sorcerer over on substack for an overview:
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/
and Richard Crim’s latest overview is pretty good:
https://richardcrim.substack.com/p/the-crisis-report-113
Nowhere in these binary arguements about net-zero is touted the much easier-to-implement-idea of just using less energy. No, it’s all about saving our current level of civilisation, about those with privilege running in absolute terror of losing their existing and potential future privilege. You can substitute the word profit for privilege if you like.
Even if we did “decarbonise” the energy system acheiving net zero by 2050 (or any other random year a thinktank chooses to pick) it would not alter the trajectory of ecological overshoot, bio-diversity loss, the sixth mass extinction and eventual collapse of global industrial civilisation.
It is in fact, just distraction. Those in charge of this sh*tshow we call civilisation must be aware of the fact that we can no longer maintain the current level of civilisation, never mind improve upon it, and they’ve no idea what to do or say, because if they did say something approaching the truth the economy would collapse overnight, and more importantly to them, they would be thrown out of power and replaced by another bunch of CFMs.
It is good to call out the Faragians and Trumpists, but we must not lose sight of the bigger picture, and look to more meaningful solving of variables.
The IPCC quote above, ‘all pathways begin now and involve rapid and unprecedented societal transformation’ is indeed correct, but to the average Daily Fail reader/BBC viewer, no one actually appears to know what that means or involves.
Until that understanding enters the Overton Window, all European countries are doomed to a rotating bunch of selfservatives promising anything but delivering nothing, until the pitchforks come, the nukes fly or the truth emerges and universal adaptation is undertaken.
I’m not holding my breath.
Powerful post.
As you say, net zero by such and such a date is somewhat arbitrary and people see that. But what they do not see (or want to see) is that we should simply be using / consuming less all round. No amount of ‘efficiency’ and ‘greenness’ can alter this basic fact but no serious politician says this – I don’t even hear it from the Greens these days (they used to say it). It has been obvious for many decades that we cannot go on consuming like we do and expect no concequences; we have many finite resources on this planet that we rely on and only a total fool would say they can last forever as it is a contradiction in terms. Even ‘renewables’ rely on finite things to work.
So what you end up with is politics, politcs, politricks and the very important issues become party political footballs. Even those who recognise the seriousness of the bigger picture fall into this trap, and arguably focussing endlessly on net zero becomes counterproductive as it gives ammuniton to the deniers and comes across as too arbitrary and remote, rather than say, a major worldwide campaign for lower consumption by all those places and people in them where it is clearly excessive.
“a major worldwide campaign for lower consumption” – this is called the degrowth movement.
I suppose it is now. The old Ecology Party was talking about in the very early 1980s which was when I heard first about the idea. Back then the argument was more about the basic idea that continual growth as a basis for economic stability, but with finite resources fuelling it, was impossible. ‘De-growth’ is a logical consequence of that though I think their ideas were more based around not even think about economic growth but sustainable ways of living based on small scale local production and autonomy. It was the opposite of what we now call globalisation.
Thanks Mark, I agree with you.
You say: “Nowhere in these binary arguements about net-zero is touted the much easier-to-implement-idea of just using less energy.” I repeat this idea of an ‘energy descent plan’ till I’m blue in the face but people just look at you as if you’re mad. Energy is considered as a commodity to be sold and therefore the use of less of it would be bad because it would be less profit for the companies that own it. The logic of this means, for example that we need to build pylons and substations in the highlands to connect turbines to ‘The Grid’ to ‘sell’ our energy. The logic is impeccable.
One problem for our governments is that they require GDP growth to meet future spending commitments- all that government and private borrowing is borrowing from the future and assumes a growth in the use of energy and materials to pay back.
Inflation fixes the problem, but we can see how popular that is. People are furious about energy and food bills, they increasingly see immigrants as competing for local resources, nobody wants to accept the bad news that they have to live within their means.
We could cut consumption very rapidly by doubling VAT to 40% and restricting bank credit but who’s going to vote for that? Nobody anywhere on Earth.
The degrowth movement may be right but few will listen.
@Mark Bevis, which is why AMOC and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current should be represented in planetary-scaled government as vital Earth systems. I guess this Wikipedia page will do for a starter explanation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_system_governance
I’d be interested to read any reflections on the recent critique from community councils in the Highlands in response to the proliferation of windfarms and associated infrastructure. It feels to me that our move towards a greener economy is being compromised by the way in which much is haphazard and fails to take community interests into account. With the split in responsibility – with Westminster controlling energy policy and Holyrood planning responsibility there is a struggle to maintain coherence. And I feel that we must understand this grassroots rebellion if we are to keep moving constructively towards net zero.
Hi Cathie – I wrote about this elsewhere, I wonder if I should re-post here?
Yes please I did read it with interest but would do so again!
The community councils in the highlands are correctly pointing out that the massive, unlimited, unregulated industrialisation of the highlands is not a ‘Green’ economy at all but simply more destruction and exploitation for corporate greed. Nobody seriously questions the supposed need for all this, or the need to generate it here and then export it to London and its surrounding area. Scotland is just being ransacked to support techno-fascism.
Highlanders, given the history, are sensitive to this.
We cannot ‘save’ the planet by destroying it.
‘Net Zero’ was always an accountant’s con-trick, because it depends entirely on what you put on each side of the balance. It was a ridiculous idea when it was being promoted by Big Tech and the Great Reset people because it was very obviously never going to be of any use at all in countering the current environmental catastrophe. It was just an excuse to build out vast infrastructures of surveillance and control and to keep grabbing the world’s resources. Remember, ‘You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy’? Anyone who spoke out against this nonsense was accused of being a mad ‘conspiracy theorist’. But it was surely obvious to anyone who stopped to think for a minute that you cannot ‘save’ the planet by destroying it. Carbon credits, new-found enthusiasm for nuclear power, automation of jobs – it was all a lie.
The world’s economy ( including the development and deployment of renewable energy) continues to depend on oil, and the oil industry aims to extract the last drop of short term profit from its reserves. The idea of ‘stranded assets’ is unthinkable to them. So they have attacked ‘Net Zero’ as a way of attacking the very idea of an environmental crisis. It is just a distraction.
The uncomfortable truth is that the environmental crisis is real and all the richest and most powerful can think to do is to try to protect and even grow their wealth in the hope of continuing their ridiculous lifestyles and buying themselves survival in some way. Their techno-fascism is failing, and their so-called ‘4th Industrial Revolution’ is a complete disaster for people and planet alike, not least because it utterly destroys democracy, human rights and the rule of law, and it requires vast amounts of energy to implement which it cannot source. So they have to present themselves as all-powerful, with performative cruelty and fearmongering. And they now have to pretend that the crisis their philosophy has created does not exist. Because there is no limit at all to their need for energy, or to their utter recklessness in trying to get it. For example, Gaza is sitting on gas reserves which the Israelis have already sold to a consortium of companies, including BP.
There is no such thing as ‘Net Zero’. But to conflate that with a denial of the current ecocide is just a bit of psychological warfare.
The elephant in the room is the belief in the supremacy of shareholder (or rather now ‘stakeholder’ ) value. Trump, Starmer and co wish to make it clear that people and planet have no stake or share in the future. But this is simply madness. They cannot head off to Mars and start again, or live for generations in bunkers on private islands. When they destroy the planet’s life support system, they destroy themselves too. A super-rich, even an affluent western lifestyle, is no longer sustainable, however fascist your philosophy. However much you practice the Edward Bernays textbook of lies and manipulation, it is already all falling apart. The only future now is to reject the techno-feudalism. Remember ‘Nuclear Power, No Thanks’? I had that sticker on my car for many years. There is an alternative: change your thinking, your clinging to an obsolete lifestyle, and to fascist politics. Small is beautiful. So is basic respect and consideration for other and the realisation that people are planet are not just ‘resources’ to be exploited and destroyed at will. We are all Palestinians now.
Humans are a problem for the living planet which will not be solved by humanist worldviews, humanist discussions (like here) and humanist governance.
#biocracynow
The Conservative Party is not well named- they don’t seem to want to conserve anything, even as a future strategic resource. Imagine if Badenoch had insisted that we need to get every last fish out of the North Sea?
That said, anyone who believes that there is a global energy transition taking place is ignoring the reality that global fossil fuel consumption is higher than ever. Renewables and EVs are mostly just an attempt to keep the party going in energy-importing China and Europe.
There is also zero evidence that moving away from fossil fuels will make us richer- yet politicians continue to promote this falsehood.
All the indications are that our civilisation is not going to walk away from fossil fuels willingly because they have made all of us massively better off over the past century and more, despite our numbers quadrupling. (At a cost of a degraded natural environment)
It’s a good idea to do what we can to minimise the ecological impact of Scottish economic activity and try to build some (probably expensive) local resilience, but ours is a global predicament. That 10% you refer to represents 820 million people!
For the avoidance of doubt, without cheap, fossil fuel powered ammonia, the world starves.
While we should condemn outright the infantile behaviour of the Tories and Reform, we barely grasp the nature of the problem and certainly nobody is spelling out the reality of life without the current levels of fossil fuels use
We’re doomed.