THE ESTABLISHMENT has just suffered two severe setbacks to its climate change Net Zero narrative in the form of official publications which show unequivocally that Net Zero is a dangerous fraud. These need to be exploited to the full to expose the utter futility and regressive cruelty of the establishment’s economy-wrecking Net Zero agenda.
The first is unexpectedly from the UK government in an announcement which trashes its own past claims on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, predominantly CO2 emissions from the combustion of hydrocarbons (oil, gas, coal). They have probably been forced to come clean because of the impending EU carbon border tax – hoist by their own petard!
First the background.
For many years, Uniparty politicians have parroted the stock boast (with minor variations over the years) that “since 1990 we have cut emissions by 42 per cent while our economy has grown by two thirds”. This has always been a blatant lie of omission because they never admitted that these cuts have been mainly due to business offshoring and deindustrialisation forced largely by sky-high Net Zero energy bills and onerous taxes and regulations, e.g. those now crippling the North Sea oil and gas industry.
The crowning sleight of hand subterfuge (allowed under international convention) has been to not count the foreign emissions expended in the production and transportation of foreign products imported into and consumed in the UK. This includes the foreign emissions used to generate imported electricity, which goes towards explaining why the government has been so keen on trading our national energy security for reliance on undependable international interconnectors.
They have now atoned for their past misinformation by issuing a gov.uk update which admits that from 1996 to 2023, UK net greenhouse gas emissions fell just 15 per cent. A measly 15 per cent reduction, after 27 years of despoiling our landscapes and seascapes and degrading our electricity grid with expensive, weather-dependent, difficult to integrate, instability-inducing and unsustainable windmills and solar panels which have to be expensively duplicated by conventional power stations to keep the lights on! The new data are shown in the following graph.
The data show that the reduction in so-called territorial emissions over the period (the lower three bands) comes to 42 per cent, helpfully matching the stock boast, quoted above. The now-admitted overall net reduction of just 15 per cent comes about from the big increase in the previously-uncounted emissions associated with overseas supply chains (the top band), i.e. the emissions from imports which have increased by 43 per cent over the period as the UK has offshored businesses or otherwise given up on manufacturing and industrial processes.
I asked ChatGPT how this narrative-wrecking 15 per cent government announcement has been reported by the mainstream media. Surprise, surprise, ChatGPT showed that they continue to lie by omission: “my search suggests that this received little or no attention in the major national news outlets, whereas the territorial emissions figures were reported extensively.”
To add to the utter pointlessness of the entire Net Zero endeavour, the UK only generates around 0.8 per cent of global CO2 emissions as shown along the bottom line in the graph below. Even if CO2 were the alleged control knob for the global climate, which it most certainly isn’t (explained here), cutting the UK’s paltry share to zero would make not a whit of difference to the global climate given that the majority rest of the world is carrying on with fossil fuel business as usual as shown by the rising trend of World CO2. This now includes the USA which has seen the light and renounced the climate change hoax in its new National Security Strategy thus: “We reject the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe [UK included], threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries”.
The second severe setback comes from the Energy Institute’s recently published 2026 Statistical Review of World Energy covering data for 2025. It makes for very sorry reading and analysis despite the sad efforts of its authors, including input from the climate propagandist group Ember, to try to put a climate alarmist positive spin on the numbers.
The statistics show that for the world as a whole, 2025 total world energy supply was 86.2 per cent supplied by hydrocarbons (oil, gas, coal), fractionally down from 86.6 per cent in 2024 and clearly an unbridgeable energy chasm away from Net Zero. The only change in all the 2025 world fuel type statistics (to the nearest round number) was the oil share down from 34 per cent to 33 per cent. The renewables share was unchanged at 6 per cent. And they call this “the energy transition”!
For the UK, 2025 total energy supply was 78.9 per cent supplied by hydrocarbons, down a smidgen from 79.0 per cent in 2024 thanks to an unrepeatable drop in coal consumption. The share from renewables (mainly wind and solar) increased from 14 per cent to 15 per cent. Nuclear fell from 7 per cent to 6 per cent.
For UK electricity generation by fuel type, the 2025 numbers with 2024 numbers in brackets were: oil 1 per cent (1 per cent), gas 32 per cent (31 per cent), coal 0 per cent (1 per cent), nuclear 12 per cent (14 per cent), hydro 2 per cent (2 per cent), renewables 51 per cent (48 per cent), other 3 per cent (4 per cent).
Thus the hydrocarbons share was unchanged over the year at 32 per cent despite an increase in renewables, strongly suggesting that the Miliband “plan” of getting the hydrocarbon (gas) share of grid electricity down to 5 per cent by 2030 is pure fantasy. The downtrend in nuclear is worrisome.
If Miliband succeeds in his “plan” to triple solar and quadruple wind, he will only create periods of huge unusable surpluses of electricity with increased risk of blackouts as happened last year in Spain yet will, because of the ignored truism that 4 x 0=0, leave the country seriously bereft of electricity when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, most likely in cold, dark midwinter when power is needed most.
To add a Scottish angle, the SNP fools running Scotland seem to think they can achieve Net Zero by 2045 (it’s in their plan) and that all they need to do is to “decarbonise” the Scottish electricity grid. Scotland has now been reduced to only two remaining aged synchronous generators (Torness and Peterhead) to provide essential grid stability. Thankfully independent energy consultant Kathryn Porter keeps hammering home the unique danger now facing the Scottish electricity grid which will hopefully get through to enough people to force a change of policy before it’s too late to avert catastrophe.
Finally, a plug for Edinburgh-based Richard Lyon who has created two excellent tools for monitoring the unfolding lunacies of UK Net Zero: the Subsidy Clock, currently approaching £228 billion, and the Grid Margin unreliability indicator explained by Richard here and here respectively, handily coinciding with NESO struggling to keep the grid balanced with Electricity Margin Notices.
UK Net Zero is clearly going nowhere other than into very dangerous territory. Our overreaching Uniparty politicians need to be challenged on why on earth they support this self-destructive and pointless endeavour when the majority rest of the world ignores it.
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Photo of solar panel installation in Glasgow forming Scotland’s largest solar development by Richard Johnson via Adobe Stock
