Maurice Cousins is Campaign Director at Net Zero Watch, which campaigns for affordable energy, protecting jobs, and policies that end the UK’s cost of living crisis.
Since his return to the Conservative front bench, Sir James Cleverly has been greeted with relief by some in his party and the wider commentariat. A safe pair of hands. A familiar face. Someone who can help to steady the ship.
But listen closely to his remarks on Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC programme this weekend and you can hear the very weaknesses that have left the Conservative Party – and Britain – broken.
Pressed by Kuenssberg on whether he had abandoned Net Zero, Cleverly insisted he had not. “We don’t have to choose between a strong economy and protecting our environment,” he said. He claimed that the problem was not the principle of Net Zero, but the timetable: “The net zero commitment that was put in place before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine… is not deliverable on the timescale it was originally set.”
Despite there being a cross-party consensus on the climate change agenda, and Conservative Party’s lamentable record on energy over fourteen years, which left the country with the highest energy bills in the developed world, Cleverly went on to attack Ed Miliband. He said Labour’s approach was “dragging British industry to its knees,” “giving us higher energy prices than other European and global competitors,” and “closing off domestic energy generation just at a time when the country should be more energy independent.”
Yet, he argued, Conservatives must not “throw out the baby with the bathwater.” Britain should still “invest in green energy generation, mass battery storage capacity, and electric car technology manufacturing” because they represent “export opportunities” that could underpin future prosperity.
On the surface, this all sounds rather reasonable and pragmatic. But it is wrong. It is also bad politics. Worse, it risks tearing us apart. Cleverly’s case rests on two deeply flawed assumptions and one big political failure that sits at the heart of Westminster’s Net Zero consensus.
First, Cleverly assumes that Net Zero is technically deliverable and that the physics works. It does not.
The physics of renewables make them inherently expensive. Wind and solar are low-density, weather-dependent sources. To produce the same output as a single gas or nuclear power station, they consume vast quantities of land, steel and concrete.
As Sam Dumitriu of Britain Remade has shown, once completed Hinkley Point C will generate 26 TWh of electricity a year on just 430 acres. To match that output would require around 130,000 acres of solar panels or 250,000 acres of onshore wind turbines. That inefficiency sits at the core of a renewable-heavy grid and is the root cause of soaring costs.
Every proposed solution for handling this inefficiency runs into the same wall. Batteries suffer from energy density constraints, which make them too heavy and costly to store energy at the scale or for the duration required to rival liquid or gaseous fuels.
A study by one of the leading experts in the area suggests that Britain would need 175 terawatt-hours of storage. If this was done with batteries, Net Zero Watch has estimated this would cost in the order of £50 trillion. Batteries also would need replacing every 10–15 years. Yes, improvements are happening all the time. But selling them as a solution for powering the grid is snakeoil marketing – not science.
Technological solutions involving “demand-side response”, meanwhile, means households and businesses must adjust their lives to match the weather, making energy serve policymakers and rent-seeking interests rather than the public and national economic interest. Even if either option could be delivered, the system costs of balancing intermittency remain crippling.
That is why countries with heavy renewable penetration, including the UK, have some of the highest energy prices in the world. And it is why Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, only weeks ago, warned that power-hungry technologies like AI are only possible with abundant, reliable baseload power such as gas and nuclear. Yet Cleverly still points to batteries and renewables as the foundation of Britain’s tech economy. It is a fantasy built on physics that does not bend.
Second, the belief that Net Zero only became undeliverable after Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine is not pragmatism but wilful blindness. At every stage when Britain doubled down on its climate ambitions, the international environment was already flashing red.
The Climate Change Act was passed in 2008 – the same year Russia invaded Georgia and just two years after it cut off gas to Ukraine and murdered Alexander Litvinenko in London. In 2015, when Britain signed up to the Paris Agreement, Moscow had already annexed Crimea, launched covert operations across Europe, and was actively manipulating energy markets in the West. By 2019, when Westminster enshrined Net Zero into law and banned shale gas, Russia had spent over a decade reasserting itself and using energy as a geopolitical weapon.
Meanwhile, China had long since revealed its willingness in 2010 to choke supplies of critical minerals such as rare earths and perfect geoeconomics by building up its dominance in clean-tech supply chains, from solar panels to batteries.
These were not unforeseeable shocks. Indeed, many at the time (including Donald Trump in 2018) warned about the risks of European climate and energy policies. They were unmistakable warnings that a domestic energy system built on fragility and import dependence was reckless.
Yet despite rising energy bills and accelerating deindustrialisation, Westminster and the Conservatives pressed on regardless. Most within Westminster continued to treat the “unipolar” moment as if it were permanent, and assumed that global rules, global targets and global trade had replaced the timeless fundamentals of realpolitik.
As Margaret Thatcher wrote in Statecraft, her last book, foreign and security policy demands that “the far-sighted statesman” considers the full range of risks and uses power to secure national goals. Instead, Britain’s governing class chose the opposite course: binding the country to rigid statutory timetables while ignoring the hard realities of power.
Finally, and most damningly for Conservatives like Cleverly, it is a complete failure of politics. By ignoring the real-world constraints, Westminster has, in the very literal sense, elevated Net Zero into an ideological moral crusade. But in the process it has lost sight of the preconditions of human flourishing: the central purpose of domestic politics.
Conservatives are supposed to understand that the true measure of virtue in politics is not abstract targets but securing the conditions in which people can live well. Affordable energy, secure jobs, and protection against external shocks are the basic foundations of the common good.
But by writing Net Zero into law, Conservatives chose a global goal over domestic material needs. Despite Britain producing less than one per cent of global emissions, Conservative and Labour Ministers bound the country to a path that is both disproportionate and imprudent – sacrificing the national interest to satisfy an abstract universal.
Recent research by More in Common shows the cost of that error. Sixty per cent of Britons no longer believe energy bills will ever become affordable. Seventy five per cent blame the government for high energy bills and only a quarter think the government has any plan to reduce them. Focus group participants speak of lives stripped back to survival: rationing heat and hot water, arguing over who showers first, and feeling powerless.
People may support Net Zero in principle, but they equally understand that expensive energy corrodes the common good by undermining family life, prosperity, and mental health.
History makes the lesson plain: from the Great Unrest of 1911 to the paralysis of the 1970s, whenever domestic energy is destabilised, British politics is destabilised. Today the pattern is repeating. High energy bills caused by domestic policy are fuelling anti-system sentiment, with those hardest hit the most likely to say Britain’s institutions should be allowed to “burn.”
This is the true legacy of the Net Zero consensus: the politics of despair. When households cannot afford the basics, trust collapses, and the system itself begins to lose legitimacy.
By treating Net Zero as a categorical imperative, Westminster ignored the physics that make it unworkable, the geopolitics that made it reckless, and the domestic political realities that make it corrosive. The lesson of the last two decades could not be clearer: when leaders abandon prudence and pursue the wrong ideals, they do not secure virtue – they undermine the very stability on which democracy depends.
Maurice Cousins is Campaign Director at Net Zero Watch, which campaigns for affordable energy, protecting jobs, and policies that end the UK’s cost of living crisis.
Since his return to the Conservative front bench, Sir James Cleverly has been greeted with relief by some in his party and the wider commentariat. A safe pair of hands. A familiar face. Someone who can help to steady the ship.
But listen closely to his remarks on Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC programme this weekend and you can hear the very weaknesses that have left the Conservative Party – and Britain – broken.
Pressed by Kuenssberg on whether he had abandoned Net Zero, Cleverly insisted he had not. “We don’t have to choose between a strong economy and protecting our environment,” he said. He claimed that the problem was not the principle of Net Zero, but the timetable: “The net zero commitment that was put in place before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine… is not deliverable on the timescale it was originally set.”
Despite there being a cross-party consensus on the climate change agenda, and Conservative Party’s lamentable record on energy over fourteen years, which left the country with the highest energy bills in the developed world, Cleverly went on to attack Ed Miliband. He said Labour’s approach was “dragging British industry to its knees,” “giving us higher energy prices than other European and global competitors,” and “closing off domestic energy generation just at a time when the country should be more energy independent.”
Yet, he argued, Conservatives must not “throw out the baby with the bathwater.” Britain should still “invest in green energy generation, mass battery storage capacity, and electric car technology manufacturing” because they represent “export opportunities” that could underpin future prosperity.
On the surface, this all sounds rather reasonable and pragmatic. But it is wrong. It is also bad politics. Worse, it risks tearing us apart. Cleverly’s case rests on two deeply flawed assumptions and one big political failure that sits at the heart of Westminster’s Net Zero consensus.
First, Cleverly assumes that Net Zero is technically deliverable and that the physics works. It does not.
The physics of renewables make them inherently expensive. Wind and solar are low-density, weather-dependent sources. To produce the same output as a single gas or nuclear power station, they consume vast quantities of land, steel and concrete.
As Sam Dumitriu of Britain Remade has shown, once completed Hinkley Point C will generate 26 TWh of electricity a year on just 430 acres. To match that output would require around 130,000 acres of solar panels or 250,000 acres of onshore wind turbines. That inefficiency sits at the core of a renewable-heavy grid and is the root cause of soaring costs.
Every proposed solution for handling this inefficiency runs into the same wall. Batteries suffer from energy density constraints, which make them too heavy and costly to store energy at the scale or for the duration required to rival liquid or gaseous fuels.
A study by one of the leading experts in the area suggests that Britain would need 175 terawatt-hours of storage. If this was done with batteries, Net Zero Watch has estimated this would cost in the order of £50 trillion. Batteries also would need replacing every 10–15 years. Yes, improvements are happening all the time. But selling them as a solution for powering the grid is snakeoil marketing – not science.
Technological solutions involving “demand-side response”, meanwhile, means households and businesses must adjust their lives to match the weather, making energy serve policymakers and rent-seeking interests rather than the public and national economic interest. Even if either option could be delivered, the system costs of balancing intermittency remain crippling.
That is why countries with heavy renewable penetration, including the UK, have some of the highest energy prices in the world. And it is why Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, only weeks ago, warned that power-hungry technologies like AI are only possible with abundant, reliable baseload power such as gas and nuclear. Yet Cleverly still points to batteries and renewables as the foundation of Britain’s tech economy. It is a fantasy built on physics that does not bend.
Second, the belief that Net Zero only became undeliverable after Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine is not pragmatism but wilful blindness. At every stage when Britain doubled down on its climate ambitions, the international environment was already flashing red.
The Climate Change Act was passed in 2008 – the same year Russia invaded Georgia and just two years after it cut off gas to Ukraine and murdered Alexander Litvinenko in London. In 2015, when Britain signed up to the Paris Agreement, Moscow had already annexed Crimea, launched covert operations across Europe, and was actively manipulating energy markets in the West. By 2019, when Westminster enshrined Net Zero into law and banned shale gas, Russia had spent over a decade reasserting itself and using energy as a geopolitical weapon.
Meanwhile, China had long since revealed its willingness in 2010 to choke supplies of critical minerals such as rare earths and perfect geoeconomics by building up its dominance in clean-tech supply chains, from solar panels to batteries.
These were not unforeseeable shocks. Indeed, many at the time (including Donald Trump in 2018) warned about the risks of European climate and energy policies. They were unmistakable warnings that a domestic energy system built on fragility and import dependence was reckless.
Yet despite rising energy bills and accelerating deindustrialisation, Westminster and the Conservatives pressed on regardless. Most within Westminster continued to treat the “unipolar” moment as if it were permanent, and assumed that global rules, global targets and global trade had replaced the timeless fundamentals of realpolitik.
As Margaret Thatcher wrote in Statecraft, her last book, foreign and security policy demands that “the far-sighted statesman” considers the full range of risks and uses power to secure national goals. Instead, Britain’s governing class chose the opposite course: binding the country to rigid statutory timetables while ignoring the hard realities of power.
Finally, and most damningly for Conservatives like Cleverly, it is a complete failure of politics. By ignoring the real-world constraints, Westminster has, in the very literal sense, elevated Net Zero into an ideological moral crusade. But in the process it has lost sight of the preconditions of human flourishing: the central purpose of domestic politics.
Conservatives are supposed to understand that the true measure of virtue in politics is not abstract targets but securing the conditions in which people can live well. Affordable energy, secure jobs, and protection against external shocks are the basic foundations of the common good.
But by writing Net Zero into law, Conservatives chose a global goal over domestic material needs. Despite Britain producing less than one per cent of global emissions, Conservative and Labour Ministers bound the country to a path that is both disproportionate and imprudent – sacrificing the national interest to satisfy an abstract universal.
Recent research by More in Common shows the cost of that error. Sixty per cent of Britons no longer believe energy bills will ever become affordable. Seventy five per cent blame the government for high energy bills and only a quarter think the government has any plan to reduce them. Focus group participants speak of lives stripped back to survival: rationing heat and hot water, arguing over who showers first, and feeling powerless.
People may support Net Zero in principle, but they equally understand that expensive energy corrodes the common good by undermining family life, prosperity, and mental health.
History makes the lesson plain: from the Great Unrest of 1911 to the paralysis of the 1970s, whenever domestic energy is destabilised, British politics is destabilised. Today the pattern is repeating. High energy bills caused by domestic policy are fuelling anti-system sentiment, with those hardest hit the most likely to say Britain’s institutions should be allowed to “burn.”
This is the true legacy of the Net Zero consensus: the politics of despair. When households cannot afford the basics, trust collapses, and the system itself begins to lose legitimacy.
By treating Net Zero as a categorical imperative, Westminster ignored the physics that make it unworkable, the geopolitics that made it reckless, and the domestic political realities that make it corrosive. The lesson of the last two decades could not be clearer: when leaders abandon prudence and pursue the wrong ideals, they do not secure virtue – they undermine the very stability on which democracy depends.