Dr Sarah Ingham is the author of The Military Covenant: its impact on civil-military relations in Britain.

As we shivered in sub-zero temperatures this week, the follies and failures of Britain’s energy policy hit home. Or rather hit the homes of many, particularly the elderly and less well-off.

The yearning to turn up the central heating competed with fears about the eventual bill. As they put on more layers and huddled under duvets, many must have wondered about Labour’s manifesto pledge to cut £300 from their energy bills, its zigzagging over the Winter Fuel Allowance and why domestic energy prices are among the highest in Europe.

The UK’s “dash for gas” in the 1980s gave way to “slash the gas” from 2008 as successive governments embarked on their quixotic bid to decarbonise the national power supply.

Demonising fossil fuels, the UK’s carbon net zero fanatics insist that the world will follow Britain’s example. PM Boris Johnson stated in the October 2021 Net Zero Strategy: Build Back Greener: “ … The likes of China and Russia are following our lead with their own net zero targets, as prices tumble and green tech becomes the global norm.”

This hyperbolic tosh came three months before Russia invaded Ukraine, action which further accelerated Europe’s already sky-rocketing energy bills. But Moscow’s “special military operation” provided yet another justification for Britain’s decarbonisation quest: national security.

Wind fan-boy Ed Miliband hits Johnsonian heights in his flights of fancy about how renewables free Britain from being “at the mercy of petrostates and dictators”. Somehow, the Energy Secretary overlooks how Britain is instead at the mercy of China, which in 2024 supplied  68% of the UK’s solar panels – many of them produced with the help of coal.

Hubristic notions concerning the UK’s global leadership, national security and domestic jobs thanks to a “Green Industrial Revolution” have now overtaken the original impetus for Net Zero: the climate.

Today, with even Greta Thunberg more preoccupied by Gaza than greenery, the “climate emergency” seems less pressing than in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord era. Extinction Rebellion is now focusing on dirty water, while Just Stop Oil is concentrating on how “the rich are killing us.”

Dare it be suggested that, like yesteryear’s trend for mullets and perms, the hysteria around the climate crisis might have been a fad? If the planet really is on the brink of extinction, its governments seem oddly relaxed about the prospect.

November’s United Nations’ COP30 climate jamboree achieved very little, with even the EU Climate Commissioner describing it as “chaotic and messy”. Having flown out to Belem in the middle of the Amazon rain forest, the 50,000+ attendees failed to register the irony of haranguing the rest of us about our carbon footprints. After a road was hacked through the jungle for their benefit, these green grifters have no business lecturing anyone else on biodiversity loss.

Last month, cyclones swept across Asia, resulting in severe flooding and landslides in Sri Lanka. Up to 1,000 lives, and many more homes, were lost. A few weeks on, the country has returned to business-as-usual, the roads and railways re-opened.  But like the tsunami which hit the island in 2004, the scarred landscape of uprooted trees reduced to kindling reflects the power of nature.

ITV reported that although cyclones are a regular event, because of climate change these storms are more intense, carrying far greater volumes of water. Sri Lanka does not have the infrastructure to lessen their impact.

If climate change is the problem, is the only solution Britain’s costly decarbonisation? Might an alternative solution be mitigation, such as improved flood defences in places like Sri Lanka, and indeed in this country?

The exact cost of Britain reaching Net Zero is opaque. Figures from the National Energy System Operator suggest it could reach an eye-watering £460 billion by 2029 – about the price of the economy-destroying lockdown. By 2050 costs will halve but remain at 5-6% of GDP every year.

Across the country, businesses are closing daily, with high energy costs a factor. Whole swathes of manufacturing are being sacrificed, including the ceramics industry, which spends £875 million on energy a year, or 70% of turnover, says the GMB. Meanwhile, as British jobs go to the wall, Denmark’s Vestas and the German-Spanish Siemens-Gamesa are doing very nicely thank you, making Britain’s wind turbines.

Britain has already slashed its carbon emissions, but the lower bills promised by cleaner energy remain mirage-like, always just-out-of-reach.

The climate still represents a get-out-of-jail free card.

It precludes any rigorous cost-benefit analysis over reaching Net Zero (including opportunity costs), while enabling government to pile extra taxes on commercial and domestic energy consumers under the guise of numerous “green levies”. It allows Alice-in-Wonderland policy inconsistency, for example, over gas boilers and electric cars, as well as a labyrinthine energy pricing system.  Not least, it is a handy excuse for abject corporate mismanagement, seen this week with South East Water whose boss partly blamed “really extreme weather events” for Tunbridge Wells’ water outage.

Conservatives should of course want to conserve the planet. But we need to remain, er, down-to-earth about the limits of this country’s moral influence and the global impact that further cutting Britain’s carbon emissions will make.

Wednesday morning, 18 years after the first Climate Change Act and billions of pounds later, renewables generated 8.8% of Britain’s energy.

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