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| 8-September-2025 |
A basic contradiction runs through UK climate policy. The government accepts that oil and gas extraction will increase, and that domestic uses will increase. It even promotes more airports and roads, thus intensifying climate vandalism. And yet ministers claim that their policy favours clean energy for decarbonisation, and progress towards Net Zero Emissions.
That claim should – and does – provoke suspicion, for many reasons beyond climate issues alone.
To become Labour Party leader in 2020, Keir Starmer promised to extend Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing agenda through his “ten pledges”. He gradually abandoned most of them, even before the July 2024 general election.
That claim should – and does – provoke suspicion, for many reasons beyond climate issues alone.
To become Labour Party leader in 2020, Keir Starmer promised to extend Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing agenda through his “ten pledges”. He gradually abandoned most of them, even before the July 2024 general election.
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| Demonstration in support of Andrew Boswell’s legal challenge to CCUS funding, at the Royal Courts of Justice, May 2025 |
Since then, the Labour government has provided pale versions of its only worthwhile commitments, maintained low-rate taxes for the wealthiest, and imposed welfare cuts on the most vulnerable people, supposedly necessary to avoid a large budget deficit. It has weakened environmental regulations, which apparently are seen as restricting economic growth.
Critics once called the Labour Party “Tory-lite”, but now many call its government “worse than the Tories”. The term “betrayal” now seems a gross understatement.
Despite the government’s wider disrepute and climate vandalism, its dirty-energy policy has hardly been contested by climate campaigns, including NGOs and activist groups. Instead, they focus on specific issues.
They seek to block more airports, roads, nuclear plants and the Rosebank oil field. Positively, they demand more renewable energy, household retrofitting and insulation.
Although all those demands are necessary … why such a narrow, fragmented approach? Given the government’s core policy, why is opposition difficult?
In this article I will argue that the Labour government has lulled some climate campaigns, through a narrative combining three false promises, that: (1) novel decarbonisation technologies plus (2) more renewable energy will (3) achieve Net Zero Emissions (NZE).
These three deceptions together maintain a mirage of a low-carbon, green transition. They warrant critical scrutiny, as a crucial basis to counterpose a true decarbonisation agenda within a Just Transition. Let’s examine each deception in turn.
1. Future technofixes perpetuating fossil fuels
Over the past decade, the fossil fuel industry has largely abandoned its previous denial of anthropogenic climate change, alongside a strategic shift towards promoting carbon-removal technologies. This future scenario provides a rationale to rebrand – and so perpetuate – natural gas as a “transition fuel” for the foreseeable future.
Western governments, among others, have embraced this narrative in recent years, thus postponing efforts to phase out fossil fuels. State research programmes for energy futures internalise and legitimise those assumptions of the fossil fuel industry.
The flagship technofix, Carbon Capture Use and Storage (CCUS), will supposedly break down natural gas into carbon dioxide (CO2), which will be stored, and hydrogen, which can be used as a low-carbon fuel, and be flexibly stored or transported through natural gas infrastructure.
This technological promise lacks a credible track record; it remains to demonstrate feasibility on a large scale. In its most feasible and profitable form to date, CCUS has provided CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery, i.e. it is pumped into oil reservoirs to increase the pressure and make them easier to extract. This method facilitates, and so incentivises, extraction, increasing carbon emissions.
Nevertheless major western governments have allocated massive research and development funds for oil companies to develop CCUS. With its false promise, they have allowed the industry to expand extraction of fossil fuels, even continuing their subsidies. The Carbon Coup, published last year, shows how a fossil fuel agenda has shaped EU policy and its official expert advice.
The UK has undergone an analogous shift. Before the Labour Party gained power, it had promised a £28 billion annual fund for green industries. This included substantial funds to retrofit buildings and install insulation, thus cheapening warm homes and avoiding energy wastage.
After the 2024 election, the Labour government drastically reduced the figure, while allocating most of it to CCUS rather than other uses that would bring people faster benefits.
As George Monbiot soon argued, the UK’s CCUS schemes will impose unlimited financial liabilities and huge environmental costs, while contributing little to decarbonisation. Moreover, it will help dirty energy to marginalise renewable energy, as we argued in 2024.
The Drax power plant is the UK’s largest single source of carbon emissions, which result from burning wood pellets. Their “renewable” status has been much disputed, yet has made the plant eligible for enormous subsidies, which will continue under the Labour government. Moreover it has authorised Drax to fit CCUS technology, which will increase the costs while bringing doubtful carbon reductions, much less a low-carbon energy source. Nevertheless CCUS helps to protect the company’s investment and to justify the subsidy.
In response, all environmental campaigns should demand that the UK government cease funding CCUS, including “research” investigating the wrong questions. Such campaigns should also support resistance. In particular, Andrew Boswell has initiated a joint petition to “Scrap CCUS”, with endorsement by Friends of the Earth and the Campaign Against Climate Change. He also launched legal challenges to such schemes.
Those efforts reinforce local resistance campaigns. For many years the HyNet CCUS project in north west England has been opposed by the HyNot campaign. In August 2025 this escalated with a legal challenge:
HyNot is challenging HyNet in the courts because we believe the scheme will lock the country into continued fossil fuel use and undermine energy security through continued reliance on imported gas. HyNet won’t help combat the climate crisis.
Many other countries have likewise been greenwashing their fossil fuel expansion through CCUS technology. In 2024 the Labour government agreed to help Saudia Arabia to do so, in the hope that it will invest some of its vast oil wealth in the UK’s own techno-fixes. For this partnership, the UK deploys its false image of “climate leadership”.
The supporters of nuclear power, a different kind of techno-fix, also portray it as a means to increase low-carbon clean energy supply.
This claim too involves many deceptions. Beyond familiar disputes over safety and waste disposal, the UK civil nuclear programme has always been driven by the nuclear weapons programme (especially the need for plutonium). There is a somewhat false distinction between civil and military uses; see the critique by Andy Stirling and Philip Johnstone.
Given the long timescale before any new energy production from nuclear power, its pretensions likewise serve to perpetuate fossil fuels as the default mode, while arguably diverting investment from truly renewable sources.
This leads us to the second deception.
2. Renewable energy supplementing fossil fuels
Renewable energy (RE) has been expanding in most western countries. Yet it plays a deceptive role in decarbonisation policy, for several reasons. Globally, electricity usage has been rising faster than renewable supply – which largely supplement fossil fuels, rather than replacing them.
Along similar lines, UK energy demand has been rising, especially for electricity. The increase has had several drivers: adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), the electrification of heating systems, energy-intensive industries and especially data centres.
The latter uses extend a profit-driven process whereby capital-intensive technology disciplines and/or displaces human labour. Such energy demand has been stimulating both fossil fuels and renewables, which largely supplement fossil fuels.
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| March for science, 2017. Photo by Les Levidow |
Thanks to the way that the wholesale electricity market is regulated, the UK’s energy prices are largely set in line with the gas price. That in turn is linked to the oil price; both gas and oil prices are kept high to facilitate extraction.
As renewable energy lowers its production costs, it gains higher profits. Meanwhile consumers gain no economic benefit, and fossil fuel extraction retains its incentives. The future promise of lower prices lacks credibility in people’s experience, thus limiting public support for a decarbonisation policy.
Renewable energy installations generally must wait 10-15 years before getting a suitable connection to the grid; this delays the benefits and helps to advantage fossil fuels. Even as the supply of renewable energy increases, the overall system may prioritise fossil fuels, which is more profitable for producers and can less easily be turned off than renewable energy sources, especially given the inadequate storage capacity.
In all those ways, renewable energy provides a mirage of decarbonisation, largely complementing fossil fuels. Meanwhile the overall rising emissions are disguised or excused, leading us to the third deception.
3. Net Zero Emissions (NZE) undermining climate targets
The UK government’s Net Zero Emissions (NZE) target has undergone attack by various right-wing forces. They raise several criticisms, e.g. that NZE would be unnecessarily expensive, make energy costs less affordable for lower-income people, and limit future employment in energy industries. As the government has argued, the criticisms are invalid, especially with appropriate support measures for alternative energy and employment.
However, this narrow debate has helped the government to greenwash its high-carbon version of NZE, partly thanks to official expertise. The prominent climate scientist, Professor Kevin Anderson, referred to the 2015 Paris climate agreement when making this sarcastic comment about expert complicity:
Net Zero is when there’s sufficient silence from the science & expert community, that any old fluff & nonsense can masquerade as Paris-compliant. Just look at the UK; more oil/gas/LNG/airport expansion, all net-zero compliant. The expert (& journalist) community has failed society on the “net” scam.
Worse than silence or failure, the state-sponsored Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has been actively complicit. Its partisan expertise has incorporated the state’s political assumptions, e.g. that lower-carbon behavioural or systemic changes are unthinkable but will be made unnecessary by fantastical technofixes.
“Ultimately, the CCC is deeply conservative on near-term changes to consumption norms, while embracing dangerously optimistic projections of future carbon removal technologies”, Anderson further argues.
The term NZE originally meant phasing out fossil fuels as far as technically possible, while also cancelling out residual emissions with carbon-removal measures or carbon credits. But western countries have stretched the original meaning to accommodate a much larger “net” figure, significantly expanding the future emissions that will supposedly be swapped or removed.
This wider change underlies the UK government’s dirty-energy plans, which thereby undermine the decarbonisation commitments of the Climate Change Act 2008.
The dirty-fuel expansion involves a false dual narrative: that countries can “overshoot” the earlier timetable for decarbonisation targets and then catch up later. How? Through hypothetical technoscientific solutions such as CCUS or geo-engineering. As Kevin Anderson argued many years ago, such false solutions have become the problem.
Likewise, in 2021, three climate scientists raised the alarm:
We have arrived at the painful realisation that the idea of Net Zero has licensed a recklessly cavalier “burn now, pay later” approach which has seen carbon emissions continue to soar. It has also hastened the destruction of the natural world by increasing deforestation today, and greatly increases the risk of further devastation in the future.
Consequently, the Net Zero concept has helped kill the aim to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees, as further argued by James Dyke, one of those three scientists.
Rather than count on a compensatory catch-up, an international network has demanded real solutions to achieve “real zero” emissions. This perspective opposes techno-optimist carbon-accounting with its false solutions.
4. Conclusion: technocratic greenwash versus system change
A couple of decades ago, climate campaigners raised the slogan, “System change not climate change”. They demanded promptly phasing out fossil fuels, while changing the economic system that drove them.
As such a phase-out became widely advocated, the fossil fuel industry devised ways to protect its financial assets from being devalued. In particular, it rebranded natural gas as a “transition fuel”. The industry gained government partners for this deceptive high-carbon agenda, marginalising efforts towards decarbonisation, much less system change.
Along such lines, the UK government policy facilitates expansion of fossil fuel extraction and use, thus promoting a high-carbon climate vandalism. As I have argued above, it has been greenwashing the effects, by combining three deceptions: future techno-fixes reducing carbon emissions, renewable energy replacing fossil fuels, and NZE justifying a later catch-up.
Why is opposition difficult? Here are three plausible reasons.
□ First, the three deceptions together reinforce the mirage of a green or climate transition. Perhaps all this has lulled some climate campaigners (and supporters) to miss the big picture of the government’s dirty-energy agenda.
□ Second, climate campaigns have demanded that government policy should “follow the science”, a misnomer for the official expert advice that has been ignored or questioned by right-wing agendas denying anthropogenic climate change. So climate campaigners may be reluctant, or unable, to challenge “the science”, even when it is complicit with techno-optimistic deceptions.
□ third, a narrow political focus may help to avoid despair. For many years, climate campaigners had expected significant decarbonisation efforts by a future Labour government. Instead, it developed a sordid partnership with the fossil fuel industry for a dirty-energy future (among other harmful policies). Facing such strong forces, effective opposition may seem difficult and even dangerous, especially given the sweeping criminalisation of climate activists.
Rather than despair, it is more comfortable to miss the big picture by focusing on specific demands, which may seem safer and more winnable.
Yet this fragmented approach remains politically weak. A true decarbonisation agenda would address those limitations and deceptions.
In this spirit, we should focus on demands that government policy must differentiate energy prices according to their production cost, connect new renewable sources more rapidly, and prioritise renewable sources over natural gas and cease support for CCUS.
Furthermore, the government must promote and incentivise reductions in total energy usage. For example, it could deter energy-intensive installations (such as AI centres), while incentivising lower-energy systems (with more skilled labour) to substitute for higher-energy ones.
More fundamentally, governments could favour partnerships and critical expertise for such real solutions rather than for deceptive evasions.
To achieve those aims and policies, a political movement for system change will need to confront the systemic profit-driven forces which perpetuate fossil fuels, their false disguises, their government sponsors and their expert apologists.
“The choice is not between populist denial and technocratic greenwash. The real choice is between deep transformation or ecological and social collapse”, as Nicolas Beuret and Peter Bloom argue.
We have a responsibility to provide political education about the big picture, namely: as the UK government perpetuates climate vandalism, prominent experts collude through politically partisan advice, while other experts contest the deceptions.
We need to counterpose true solutions for a socially just, low-carbon transition beyond fossil fuels. Progress will depend on building a politically informed, mass counter-power. Our discussions should focus on how to do so.
□ Thanks for helpful comments from: Nicolas Beuret, Anne Gray, Nils Markussen and Simon Pirani.
□ Les Levidow is a Senior Research Fellow at the Open University. He is author of Beyond Climate Fixes: From Public Controversy to System Change(Bristol University Press, 2023). The publicity page has links to several blog posts on specific aspects.
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