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July 13, 2024 - 8:00am
In terms of both domestic and international politics, the logic of Labour’s “securonomics” policy is unassailable. Like other advanced Western economies, only more so, decades of privatisation and globalisation have rendered Britain vulnerable to geopolitical shocks and increasingly hostage to the whims of foreign tyrants. We produce little of use and import much that is vital: arresting this perilous situation would, at a stroke, make the country both richer and more secure.
However well-intended, Labour’s manifesto commitment, reaffirmed by Ed Milliband earlier this week, of refusing new oil and gas licences in the North Sea achieves the precise opposite result. Labour inherited Boris Johnson’s objective of achieving Net Zero by 2030, a strikingly ambitious goal in good times, but one manifestly unsuited to a country at the brink of major international conflict. If we believe Defence Secretary John Healey’s assessment that Britain faces a “generational threat” derived from a “decade or more of Russian aggression”, then well-meaning Net Zero aspirations must, for the time being, be deferred.
Britain has already led the world in reducing carbon emissions — essentially by offloading production of vital goods to geopolitical rivals such as China — and as a result, our 1% global share is negligible for a major economy. Yet China emits carbon at more than 30 times Britain’s level, and its 1.1% growth in 2022 alone already renders Britain’s self-sacrifice an entirely pointless exercise. Indeed, observation of China’s energy policy reveals what preparation for war, undertaken by a serious actor ruthlessly focused on its national interest, looks like.
Hardening its energy security measures, in what observers view as a clear combat indicator, China is amassing a vast strategic stockpile of oil while granting permits for two new coal-fired power plants every week. Britain’s keen watchdogs of international obligations should note that China has legally committed itself to decarbonising by 2060, but its actions reveal the superpower to be moving in precisely the opposite direction. In the long term the results for the global climate will no doubt be disastrous; but in the short term China, like Russia, is preparing itself for a major conflict, while Britain is not.
Though China is also undertaking a vast expansion of renewable energy, it is doing so by underwriting its grid’s basic security through the use of coal. In the Chinese version of securonomics, Beijing is making sure it has new sources of energy ready to go before switching off the old supply, and Britain would do well to match this outbreak of common sense. The goal of decarbonisation is genuinely good, and Britain should strive to achieve it as soon as practical.
Yet until then, it makes no sense to continue to import £45 billion of foreign fossil fuels each year from geopolitically dubious sources, while sitting on our own untapped energy security stockpile.
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SubscribeIt’s mindnumbingly shocking that people still haven’t grasped the fundemental principles of this concept.
‘Deferring net zero aspirations’ is like admitting one has a chronic disease but the medicine is just too inconvenient and expensive, so better to just ignore the fact that your extremely ill and getting worse.
Now, where will that lead?
Net zero fueled by wind and solar is the ultimate luxury belief – until you actually travel down that road and make everyone so impoverished they can no longer afford luxury beliefs.
Ridiculous statement, as usual. Has it not occured to you that this is a global necessity being undertaken by all countries and governments? No – because you are too stubborn to let get of your biasses.
It has indeed occurred to most of us. But we’ve tested the proposal against our experience and knowledge and found it wanting.
The article itself notes that not all countries and governments are “undertaking” these things. China is increasing emissions even as its population declines.
There’s this rather strange sect of people in the West who believe at the same time that every problem in the world is caused by people (other people are fallible) and yet that they have the knowledge and power to infallibly correct all these problems (they are infallible). The lie at the root of socialism amongst other delusions.
In reality, some things just are. They’re bigger than people and what we do. The majority of climate change is in that category. It’s a natural phenomenon that happens regardless of what we do. And we’re just not as important as some people like to think.
So no. I’m not signed up for this quasi-religious cult. Nor any others.
And I don’t see a few degrees C increase in the UK temperature as being a disaster. It might even be beneficial for most of us. The average UK temperature has been both higher and lower in the past and we’ve survived. Why on earth would we assume that the current value is the “right value” and that we should spend huge amounts of money trying to fix it at that value ?
I’m fully on board with limiting pollution and economising on scarce resources like oil and gas. These are things we can control and where we can move the needle in improving our lives.
Staggering ignorance.
Would you care to comment in detail on anything then ?
If you’re going to make such claims, I think you need to back it up.
Are you disputing that there’s natural long term climate change over which we have no control ?
Are you asserting that there is a “correct” average UK temperature we should be attempting to lock in – even if it’s impossible to do so – and if so why ?
Are you disputing that countries like China are still increasing emissions ?
Are you disputing that for many, many campaigners and activists this has become a quasi-religious cult and that these are often people who’ll latch on to any cause simply because having a cause is more important to them than the cause itself ?
Robbie, your comments on this subject are becoming an embarrassment!. Talk about an emperor wearing no clothes! If you are going to abuse people by calling them “staggeringly ignorant”, you ought to provide some arguments and evidence of your own. But you never do! You clearly have absolutely no idea on this subject.
The globe literally burns more oil and fossil fuels today than it did 2 years ago, or 5 years ago, or 10 years ago. After 35 years of histrionic alarmism, nothing has changed – except Europe and Britain have completely abandoned producing their own energy and now have the highest energy costs in the world. But guys like Milliband claim they will become a renewable energy superpower while they import everything from China.
No, Net Zero is simply NOT being pursued by all countries and all governments in anything like the way that the United Kingdom is doing, for example by banning the production of hydrocarbons. CO2 emissions are rising because of the industrial development of what we used to call the third world, although this also fuels a great deal of the imports that the Western world makes.
Instead we have vague long-term aspirations – actually the only countries that have signed up to binding legal targets are Germany and the United Kingdom. Do actually think that China is going to beggar its economic development by forcing its industries to use technologies that are not there yet? We can see the answer in plain sight – it is currently greatly increasing the use of its most polluting forms of energy, coal. Almost certainly also, it now realizes that net zero is a big weak spot for the West and will exploit this ruthlessly.
In addition, a great proportion of the reduction in emissions that has taken place in western countries has simply been achieved by offshoring production. As well as hugely damaging at industrial base this is is fundamentally dishonest even from the point of view of achieving “Net Zero”.
We are not going to achieve these targets – I would wager a bet with you!
Robbie I have news for you. The world is just as dependent on hydrocarbons as it was 20 years ago. Exactly why did putting restrictions on gas exports cause such a problem for European countries I wonder – we have so much wind!
The overwhelming increase in CO2 emissions is due to the developing world getting richer which relies on cheap energy. I’m not going to hobble their economies China leads to all by signing up to completely arbitrary and in fact unachievable targets.
80%+ is currently exported and UK energy prices are determined by the international price. The economics of further extraction are dubious – the price overall is only heading one way as there is already worldwide over-supply and everyone is gradually decarbonising at varying pace. Security is aided by less reliance not more. It’s also a necessary market signal – we’re very serious so adapt. Uncertainty is paralysing.
What perhaps should happen is we rebuild our strategic reserves, run down under the Tories with likes of Centrica decommissioning it’s Yorkshire Rough facility. This is where British Energy as a new entity may be able to help. And but for planning law delays we’d be much further ahead on renewables.
‘Get’ the point Author is making but one can discern a clear strategy on part of Govt and we haven’t had that for sometime.
Yes, the marginal cost of extraction has increased around the world making new energy sources desirable. But the shift is not binary – like all good DJs governments need to phase in the next track to keep the.dance floor moving. And – in context of current technology – nuclear has to be a major contributor (although there are fascinating ideas emerging). I would have had more respect if Labour’s first announcment had been emergency planning for 5 nuclear power stations and fracking as a short term option (less vulnerable in current geopolitical context). Sadly I think we face higher and higher energy costs, yet energy (human or mechanical) is the underpinning of growth – Labour’s #1 objective. Yet another of their many contradictions. I would be delighted to be wrong, of course. .
That’s the thing – they don’t want fossil fuels or nuclear so you’re left with nothing.
growth – Labour’s #1 objective
More a pipe dream than a real objective. Growth requires cheap energy and deregulation. Labour will deliver the opposite. Meanwhile Trump will create a cheap energy, high growth economy in the US which will suck every spare penny available for investment into the NYSE and NASDAQ.
If they understood economics they wouldn’t be socialists.
Oil prices are $80+ a barrel. If you can’t make profit on that, you’re doing something wrong. Fossil fuels made up 80% of the global energy mix 20 years ago and is still 80% today.
Careful now, don’t let some facts and common sense get in the way of the Unherd sceptic narrative.
Except he didn’t provide any arguments against the premise of the article – or “facts”. And you don’t either!
Even if your assumptions are correct (which is doubtful – certainly about oil and gas oversupply – I wish home heating oil prices really were coming down, but they aren’t), it does make a difference whether we produce oil and gas locally or import it. Most of us are old enough to remember the phrase “balance of payments”. The fact that the politicians and media have “moved on” and forgotten about this doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter any more. Frankly, our balance of payments has been awful for decades and anything that increases exports and reduces imports should be welcomed.
Pretending that it doesn’t matter whether we produce our own or import is as economically illiterate as denying that a rising population doesn’t increase house prices. But people keep doing it.
one can discern a clear strategy on part of Govt
Only on planet JW could acts of extreme self-harm carried out in the name of utterly pointless virtue-signalling be considered evidence of a ‘clear strategy’.
Yes, but it’s a clearly stupid strategy! Storage of electric power is enormously expensive. It’s a complete delusion we can get to Net Zero with solar and wind power alone. And unless we are going to ban the import of fuels, steel, fertiliser, even grain, it’s fundamentally dishonest as well – we should be counting emissions from everything we consume.
China is expanding ALL energy sources – they actually have a very sensible focus on getting rich and powerful first, which as Bjorn Lomborg convincingly argues, is what strategy we ought to be following in response to climate change.
Let us hope Starmer has a board at the front of his work desk ( do people have work desks any more ? ) which says ” It’s about Britain, Stupid “.
I am afraid Starmer is in favour of stupidity. Without stupidity on the part of the Conservatives he would not have got his feet under the metaphorical government work desk on the basis of a 33% vote of those who actually bothered to vote. He relies on stupid voters who are unworried that he pretends not to know what a woman is. He relies on stupid voters who believe exporting the production of anything that produces carbon will save the world. He relies on stupid voters who believe his policies will actually produce prosperity.
‘reaffirmed by Ed Milliband earlier this week, of refusing new oil and gas licences in the North Sea achieves the precise opposite result’
Why on earth are they trotting miliband out again. He was hardly a resounding success last time.
This is a ridiculous decision, they are putting national security at risk.
The last energy crisis, which we have only just stabilised, contributed to the highest number of cvls since records began and has cost over a trillion pounds across Europe and the UK, the global situation is still unstable, having access to our own oil and gas should be the number one priority, nothing works without energy, lng is expensive and supplies could be unreliable if any of the conflicts going on at the moment escalate.
Have they forgotten that they only just managed to keep the lights on after the imposition of sanctions on Russian energy?
It looks like they have a not so hidden agenda, and it’s bad news for patriots, British patriots, that is.
This is such a sensible essay that the author may be rewarded with a place in DeSmog.
Excellent article.This is as an equally ill-conceived a policy as the recent decision to halt primary steel production in the UK, by merely preventing the indigenous production of essential materials for any modern industrialized economy which then have to be imported from other sources which use the exact same production technology involving the same, or even greater, CO2 emissions. It’s invariably unfashionable industries in unfashionable regions employing equally unfashionable people who pay the direct cost of this, but the indirect costs to the nation are huge.
I agree with pretty much everything Aris is saying in this piece. But there’s more – from my perspective the zinger is that, as the author says, the UK is blessed with everything it needs to be totally energy self-sufficient, including huge reserves of shale, and yet we are on the verge of turning our back on this luck, and instead plunge our population into further dependence and make them poorer, to absolutely no purpose.
If Labour think they can deliver growth in the UK economy (outside of services) without cheap energy, they are deluded. What they are effectively doing is taking a gamble that alternative energy sources will take up the slack at the same or lower costs going forwards, and the evidence that this will work is not there.
The first consequence of rolling back on north sea oil is to add towards guaranteeing a high inflation/high interest rate environment for the foreseeable (yet another brick in that wall). A knock-on of that is, high interest payments on existing government debt for the foreseeable, and a precarious dependence on the markets who buy that debt, who will then de-facto dictate the terms of UK economic policy. And, as the Covid years demonstrated, those markets are capricious, essentially fashion and sentiment driven: governments world-wide borrowed whatever the hell they liked with no immediate consequences, but the minute Truss/Kwateng tried to alter the course of the UK economy, there was a run on the economy and they were brought to heel. Labour may not think so, but they are equally vulnerable to this capriciousness – they have no idea when (or why) their ideas will fall out of fashion and the markets turn on them.
“Labour inherited Boris Johnson’s objective of achieving Net Zero by 2030…”
Well done, Boris. (You idiot)
This article, alongside today’s other offering by AR on British housing, are seemingly written with the specific purpose of disproving my previous assertions that he doesn’t “get” the UK.
I’m massively over-egging myself here, of course, but nevertheless – praise where it’s due.
Your last sentence is rather ambiguously phrased – is it yourself that you are praising here, despite your over-egging of yourself, by yourself?
Where does the obvious solution of gen 4 modular nuclear fit into the proposed Lab strategy?
The only party seriouslytalking about this seems to be Reform….
What’s the point of Unherd writing about net zero and then deleting more than half the comments? Pathetic.
It’s always the same. It’s impossible to have a reasonable debate on here.
Yeh the comparison between the UK and China is something that even a child could understand, so the simplest explanation for policy moves like this is that the current Labour government is simply not very bright.
More to follow…
I don’t always agree in every respect with Aris Roussinos but on this is absolutely spot on. I would actually go further and say that government mandates to arbitrarily stop using particular fuels on a particular date are a stupid thing to do. This isn’t how the Industrial Revolution happened! Yes there will eventually be an energy transition, but this will be many years after the Net Zero dates. Hydrocarbons are going to be essential for the foreseeable future, whether Ed Milliband likes it or not. Governments forcing us to use technologies which are most respects still inferior – EVs, heat pumps, is not the way to go. The only countries foolish enough to put this into law are the UK (Theresa May!) and Germany.
We would also have no energy security at all, however many wind and farms we install on a calm cloudy days, a not exactly unknown combination of weather conditions. The only possible way out of this conundrum might be to have a very large international grid including North Africa, which could balance potentially balance out the demands and supplies of renewable energy. However this would be the absolute opposite of providing energy security!
The arguments for not pursuing “Net Zero”, and certainly not banning new oil and gas exploration, are therefore so overwhelming you wonder what the motivations of the politicians and bureaucrats are in pushing it. Are they so naive that they think China actually gives a toss about what Britain is doing and is going to copy us in due course? Or more likely it’s a kind of pandering to an extremist almost quasi-religious activist base. Unfortunately these people are much more impassioned on the issue than anybody opposing them are. Most people probably it’s a generally “good” thing to do until they pay the bills! But is a complete derogation of any kind of leadership. I actually don’t dislike Ed Milliband but he seems to be a kind of enthusiastic, naive puppy more than anybody who could possibly address the real challenges of a world in which the West in general is losing relative power and Britain declining seemingly inexorably.