A new pragmatism is entering the climate debate, driven by voters weary of soaring energy bills and annoyed by increasingly hysterical and patronizing climate rhetoric. [some emphasis, links added]
From Washington to Westminster, Berlin to Canberra, the political class is confronting a simple truth: aggressive net-zero mandates are delivering economic pain for unmeasurable and far-off climate gain.
The starting shot might have been the election of Donald Trump, but the clearest warning comes from the United Kingdom, whose net-zero law, enacted in 2019, committed it to zero emissions by 2050.
Hailed as bold leadership, its reality has been economic sabotage. Industrial electricity prices surged 124 percent between 2019 and 2024 — four times the increase in the U.S. — leaving the U.K. with the highest power rates in the western world at (CAN) 49.6 cents per kilowatt-hour.
The Labour government’s renewables-focused plans will only inflate costs further.
At a recent parliamentary hearing, one executive testified that even if wholesale prices fell to zero, consumer bills would remain just as high as today because of escalating policy-driven expenses.
Reform UK, now leading the national polls, has demanded an end to net-zero targets, condemning their design and cost. The Conservatives, staring at electoral oblivion, have followed suit, pledging to repeal the Climate Change Act.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer is reportedly preparing to delay or dilute key green commitments to curb the voter revolt.
Even the Tony Blair Institute, hardly known for climate skepticism, now urges suspending carbon taxes on gas to slash energy prices through 2030, prioritizing cheap power over emission cuts, as the U.S. and China do.
The U.K.’s plight is a harbinger of the retreat from the global net-zero experiment by politicians across Europe, even in Democratic U.S. states, and further abroad.
In Australia, the conservative Liberal Party has abandoned the promise of net-zero in 2050 and will instead prioritize lower energy prices.
Germany’s far-right AfD, now leading national polls, rails against “elitist” green burdens and vows to halt decarbonization. Japan’s new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is prioritizing nuclear revival for energy security over aggressive development of renewables.
Even the EU is rolling back environmental laws and watering down sustainable finance rules amid farmer protests and deregulation drives.
Its climate promises for 2040 have already been relaxed and can be loosened further if there is a negative impact on the EU’s economy, as seems inevitable.
Corporations that sold the world on their green credentials are retreating, too: Wells Fargo abandoned its net-zero promise in March of last year, two months after BlackRock left the Net Zero Alliance, citing political backlash against ESG investing.
This broadening dissent mostly doesn’t dismiss the reality of the climate issue but insists we not deny climate-policy costs, either. Net Zero’s benefits will be only a small fraction of its hundreds of trillions of dollars in costs.
Moreover, the climate models show that even if all rich countries reached zero emissions by mid-century, that would avert less than 0.1°C of the projected warming by the end of the century, while imposing hits to GDP of eight to 18 percent by mid-century.
Rosy claims of “green growth” or only modest economic costs from a forced green transition are no longer plausible.
If green politicians really do believe climate action justifies extreme costs, including making power unaffordable for millions, they must now make that argument openly.
But it’s a losing argument, as the U.K.’s slide from energy powerhouse to high-price energy pauper shows. …snip…
Rather than driving up all energy prices while subsidizing today’s intermittent and uncompetitive renewables, we need to invest in R&D to achieve breakthroughs in nuclear, carbon capture, geoengineering, and far more efficient green-energy generation and storage.
The politicians still trying to peddle painless green transitions must now defend the indefensible: unaffordable energy for negligible impact. The Net Zero era is fracturing. It is time for honesty and innovation
Bjorn Lomborg is President of the Copenhagen Consensus, Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First.”
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