The new Keir Starmer Labour government’s energy secretary Ed Miliband, former leader of the party (2010-15) has overruled his officials to ban offshore North Sea energy drilling, sued to stop a coal mine project to which the Tories had given the go-ahead, announced the resumption of new onshore solar and wind projects and promised greater investment in Britain’s attempt to reach Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050. By pushing Britain’s climate change mania so vigorously, he will ensure that the disasters to which it will lead will hit Britain first.

Much of the blame for economic disaster should of course be laid at the feet of Britain’s inept “Conservative” governments of 2010-24. It has been obvious for decades that the only way in which Net Zero sums can be made to add up is through a massive expansion in nuclear power capacity. Solar and wind power are intermittent, and thus require backup by coal-fired or natural-gas fired plants which are by definition carbon-emitting. If the Net Zero policy were economically serious, which it is not, nuclear power construction and eliminating the obstacles thereto should have been a matter of the utmost priority.

In October 2010, the incoming “Conservative” government announced eight new potential sites for nuclear power stations, one of which was at Hinkley Point in Somerset – little seems to be happening in respect of the other seven. Even with a firm go-ahead decision for that project in 2012, Hinkley Point like all British infrastructure projects in recent decades has been bedeviled by astronomical cost overruns and inexplicable delays. Over the intervening years, the cost estimate for its completion has risen from £15 billion to £46 billion and the completion date has been delayed from 2023 to “2029-31” – needless to say, with the estimated completion being still 5-7 years away, completion on even the expanded budget by the new projected date is vanishingly unlikely.

The contractor, Électricité de France, is perfectly capable of completing nuclear power stations on time and on budget in its own country; the additional costs and delays are thus entirely due to British bureaucracy and the feebleness of British resistance to crazed environmentalists. It is yet another example of the utter ineptitude of the “Conservative” government that Britain has just thankfully got rid of.

As for Labour, much has been made of the party’s jettisoning of its past leader Jeremy Corbyn (2015-20) for anti-semitism — Corbyn has now been elected in Islington North as an Independent MP. From the viewpoint of the welfare of the British people, Labour has jettisoned the wrong ex-leader. The occasional lunatic voice down the bottom of the Cabinet table bellowing “It’s the Jews” would have had no discernable effect on the policy or efficiency of the government. Conversely Miliband, now appointed Energy Secretary, is a serious menace to the British economy and the welfare of the British people (as well as to the long-term survival of the government once the appalling effects of his Net Zero mania become clear).

Whether or not there is some modest anthropogenic climate change taking place, further evidence since the start of the panic in the late 1980s demonstrates quite clearly that any effect is quite modest and very long-term. Claims by Al Gore in 2007 that the North Polar icecap would have disappeared by 2015 have been disproved by the simplest of methods: waiting past 2015 and discovering that it hasn’t happened. As for catastrophic rises in ocean levels, they haven’t happened either – you can compare various photographs of sea-level artifacts from the late 19th century with recent photographs and you will see that those artifacts are situated precisely similarly with respect to the ocean level as they were a century ago.

It therefore follows that, even if it is desirable to reduce our carbon emissions, there is no hurry in doing so – there will be little adverse effect on climate or sea levels from achieving “Net Zero” carbon emissions by 2100 rather than 2050, and delaying attempts to do so will bring new technologies that reduce costs, operate more effectively and achieve additional benefits. The “Net Zero by 2050” campaign is thus bunk, as is the 2015 Paris Agreement (which in any case does not restrain India and China, the countries whose carbon emissions are increasing fastest). Both commitments should be scrapped and the innumerable overpaid bureaucrats attempting to enforce them should be made to find alternative employment, at a blissfully large saving to the world’s taxpayers.

Should Miliband be given full rein, several unpleasant economic consequences would follow. With Britain’s inability to build nuclear power stations, and the increasing senescence of Britain’s existing nuclear power stations, the country’s nuclear power generating capacity will decline over the next decade. Since oil-fired, gas-fired and coal fired power stations are not going to be built because of their carbon emissions, that will throw an increasing generation burden on the unsteady limb of new wind and solar power capacity, with vast amounts of state capital thrown at it by the new Great British Energy. The burden on power supply will increase further from three factors:

• the inexorable increase in Britain’s population from legal and illegal migration, with population rising at least 1% a year and maybe more – these surplus people will consume substantial amounts of power without generating any, since power generation capacity is not increased by extra unskilled labor
• the electric car mania, encouraged by government not only through subsidy, but under the iron hand of Miliband by increasingly ferocious coercion. Electric automobiles require to be recharged from the grid; that recharging can take place at night and at off-peak times, but at night, on a calm day, there will be no power resources from which to recharge them
• (not the government’s fault, to be fair) the increasing power demand from artificial intelligence systems and electronic commerce; unlike electric car battery recharging, this demand will arise throughout the day and at peak times, thereby draining the already weakened power grid further.

Some of these problems can be relieved through imports of natural gas, through which Britain’s natural gas power stations can be fueled, but those imports depend on the willingness and capacity of foreign exporters and are likely to become ferociously expensive in a world where many traditional sources of energy have been cut off. Even more uncertain are imports of power from EdF’s wonderful French nuclear reactors; any surplus capacity from them will be directed by EU apparatchiks towards the yawning power deficits in Germany, where the economic Stalinist Angela Merkel has forced the closure of the country’s nuclear reactors, while the Ukraine war has shut off the two Nordstream gas pipelines.

German power supplies are in real trouble, quite likely as soon as next winter. The bureaucrats of Brussels will take delight in diverting French supplies to fill the yawning German chasm, while forcing naughty Brexit Britons to freeze. A quisling Labour government could of course beg and plead with Brussels to allow Britain to grovel back into the EU, but the Brussels bureaucrats will be none too keen to allow reentry to such an ungrateful populace, which might again demand to quit – in case, even a reentered Britain would be placed at the back of all lines, notably for power supplies. As for complaining, the Brussels bureaucracy is already planning to censor X/Twitter to ban criticism of itself – though in extreme circumstances imprisonment in a jail with a generator may be an improvement on life at home without power supplies.

The modern world has not experienced power cuts that last more than a day or two. They occurred from time to time during World War II, but that is now almost completely beyond human memory. In any case, most of us are today far more dependent on reliable power supplies than were our grandparents – they got information from the newspaper and had a dense network of local shops when they needed to buy something. Especially in the big cities with large transient populations, lengthy power cuts would quickly bring a return to savagery, as deliveries of food and other supplies became impossible and much of the populace reverted to starving barbarism.

Our industrial civilization is an enormously complex and rather fragile plant. Endangering the roots of its existence for a petty ideological crusade is one of the most destructive things a government can do – if the ill-effects spiraled it could reduce everybody to Neanderthal living standards, in overcrowded conditions without the land or ability to support themselves. The price of ideological purity pales in comparison to the cost of societal collapse.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)