#2 Net Zero: Decarbonise First, Ask Questions Later

Electric car sales, we’re reliably told, are the future. And indeed, they are… just apparently not this future. For the past two years they’ve been stuck at roughly 20% of UK new car sales, like a stubborn Windows update that insists it’s “nearly finished” but never quite gets there. The great EV revolution has arrived, it’s just circling the roundabout with its indicator on, waiting for something to happen.

Meanwhile, up in Scotland, wind farms are being paid eye-watering sums not to generate electricity. That’s right: turbines standing proudly in gale-force winds, heroically doing absolutely nothing, because the National Grid, held together with string, hope and PowerPoint presentations, can’t cope. It’s green energy so efficient we now pay for the absence of electricity. Innovative stuff.

Then along comes OFGEM, popping up in August to explain that rising electricity bills are, at least in part, thanks to those same wind turbines. Which is impressive, really. We were promised cheaper, cleaner energy, and instead we’ve achieved the rare hat-trick of higher prices, grid instability, and compensation payments for unused power. A masterclass in joined-up thinking.

And before anyone accuses me of not caring about the planet, let’s remember the inconvenient footnote that the UK produces about 1% of global CO₂ emissions. One percent. Even if we switched everything off tomorrow, unplugged the kettles, sold the cars, and lived by candlelight eating cold lentils, the planet wouldn’t even notice. China, India, and Russia would simply carry on pressing the accelerator while we congratulate ourselves for cycling to Tesco in the rain.

So yes, by all means, let’s keep lecturing ourselves into ever-higher costs and ever-lower impact, while hoping the rest of the world suddenly has a moral epiphany. Until then, poor old Greta Thunderpants, or whatever her name is, is going to be at this for a long while yet. One can easily picture her in a few decades’ time, still giving impassioned speeches, only now from the lounge of a retirement home somewhere in Nova Scotia, shouting at a room full of confused pensioners who thought they were turning up for bingo.

But hey, at least we’ll have done our bit. Won’t we?

I really couldn’t bring this blog to a close without addressing the elephant in the room. Not just any elephant, mind you, but the kind that insists on rearranging the furniture while lecturing you about sustainability. Yes—he who must be obeyed at all costs. The Messiah in black. The self-appointed high priest of Net Zero, squeezing every last drop of virtue from the chalice: Ed Miliband.

Now, there’s an old saying I’ve heard over the years, one I always assumed was a bit harsh, a little unfair, perhaps even cynical: “You have to be mad to want to get into politics.” I stand corrected. It turns out madness isn’t a drawback at all; it’s practically a job requirement.

Enter Mr Miliband, stage left, clutching his Net Zero scriptures like stone tablets brought down from Mount Subsidy. Alongside him is that other complete and utter fruit loop, Zack Polanski of the Green Party, proof, if ever it were needed, that ideological purity can survive perfectly well without any contact with reality whatsoever.

Together, they form a kind of eco-evangelical double act: utterly convinced of their own righteousness, blissfully deaf to dissent, and powered entirely by delusion and good intentions, arguably the most dangerous fuel source known to mankind. Facts are optional. Consequences are for later. And anyone who dares question the doctrine is clearly a heretic, or worse, insufficiently enthusiastic about freezing in the dark.

They are, without doubt, ideological zealots of the highest order, men so intoxicated by their own sense of moral superiority that the possibility of error never even enters their minds. To them, doubt is not a virtue but a weakness, and disagreement is not something to be engaged with but something to be crushed. Their convictions harden into dogma, leaving no room for nuance, humility, or self-reflection.

And history, as it happens, is littered with the wreckage left behind by exactly that kind of certainty: movements that began with grand moral claims and ended in repression, suffering, and ruin; leaders who mistook righteousness for infallibility and dragged entire societies along with them. (re Starmer) Time and again, it is not malice alone that does the greatest damage, but the unshakable belief that one’s cause is so pure it justifies any consequence.

Mad? Oh yes. Dangerous? Quite possibly. But at least they’re saving the planet, right up until there’s no one left who can afford to live on it.