But my experience of the latest heatwave to affect Britain (and especially East Anglia where I live) and Europe brings to the table the elements of lived experience and the personal as political. For sweltering in badly insulated apartments during temperatures north of 35 C (with humidity pushing the felt temperature towards 40 C); being enveloped in literally hot air when venturing out; sleep being virtually impossible and the incapacitating of one’s thinking and tasking resources through the inability to focus and concentrate brings home the reality of climate change generated heat. A reality that climate change ignoramuses such as the Irish far right shitposter David Quinn and the media ecosystem of pundits that he belongs to happily deny. I swore at him on X with even more vehemence than I do at antivaxxers, antimigrant bigots, 9/11 Truthers or any other contemporary conspiracist as I felt that his denials were as gratuitously offensive as those of antivaxxers to the victims of Covid.
For, in the Observer view “It’s the climate, stupid’.[1] Commentating on the meteorological events of the previous ten days; the issuing of three red warnings for three consecutive days, the closure of schools, delayed trains, the malfunction of hospital machines such as scanners causing appointments to be cancelled, the busiest ever day for London Ambulance Service in terms of life threatening emergencies and, as tragicomic irony, the cancelation by climate conference organisers of a session on extreme heat because of extreme heat, the Observer drily points out that the debate should not merely be about hot housing and air conditioning but about climate change in its entirety. For it is tautologous (except to the denial lobby of which more later whose shrill tones are becoming worrying louder) to state that climate change touches everybody and every part of the economy. Because of the urgency of it in terms of a medium-term national challenge and the existential nature of it as an international challenge, a proper strategy for the Prime Minister elect Andy Burnham to address has to be near as possible to the top of his to-do list.[2]
However one particular aspect of a proper climate change strategy is currently set to put Labour on the horns of an acute political dilemma. For as part of Britain’s long-term goal to reach Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050 (the fossil fuel industries being the greatest emitters), Energy Secretary Ed Milliband and others will urge Burnham to rule out new North Sea oil and gas exploration licenses. However, excessively high energy prices for British consumers and industry, even before the Iran war they were nearly 90% higher than the median for the EU’s 14 richest countries, due to the UK power grid’s reliance on imported gas when the wind stops blowing and the severe vicissitudes in prices at times of war, is making the transition unaffordable.[3] Energy is intensely political and has become the latest culture war issue that that the Alt-Right has taken up.
Energy prices have been seized upon with alacrity by Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party. At a right-wing conference in London dubbed the “anti-woke Davos”, she singled out the “villain” responsible for Britain’s economic woes. “His name is Ed Miliband, and he has made our country poorer”, Badenoch proclaimed to applause. This gathering had been convened by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, whose backers include the owner of the Gbeebies (GB News) and an assortment of fossil fuel companies. Among the attendees from the Trump administration was its energy secretary, Chris Wright, himself a former fossil fuel executive, who described Britain’s green policies as a “tragic mistake”. As a piece of comedic irony, as an example of the imitation of art by life in the manner of the film Don’t Look Up, Jonathon Freedland reports that according to those who were there, the thousands of climate sceptics and opponents of multiculturalism and “wokeness” gathered at the conference venue in Olympia, West London were sweltering, fanning themselves against a London temperature that remained stubbornly above 35C while listening to the likes of Wright, using fans distributed in goodie bags and emblazoned with the slogans, “Free speech never felt so cool.”[4]
However beyond the increasingly mainstreaming lunatic fringe of the anti-woke right, the Net Zero consensus has begun to fray. Several trade unions are pushing for the afore mentioned North Sea licences because of the jobs and growth they believe they would generate. Tony Blair made the same case for North Sea drilling in his 5,700 word essay The Labour Party is Playing With Fire Over Its Future and the Future of the Country last month calling for the loosening of Net Zero targets. In Canada, Mark Carney has dismantled numerous multiple green measures and even the European Commission in Brussels is backtracking on its green commitments. But for Freedland, Net Zero is not an optional extra or an unaffordable luxury. It is a lifesaving essential.[5]
To advance Freedland’s proposition, as I wish to do, requires unpacking the question asked by Tony Blair in 1995 “Does our economy need right now the goal of clean energy or cheap energy”. As part of his takedown of Tony Blair’s argument “made using a 1990s map of the UK that no longer resembles the reality of the country in which we live”[6], Nafeez Ahmed gets to grips with what he calls the “Cheap vs Clean’ Fallacy and in the process shows that the North Sea cannot save Britain. He crunches the numbers to prove his case as follows.
Between 2010 and 2024, 14 years of Conservative drilling policy issued approximately 400 new exploration licences. Twenty fields were built which at full exhaustion over their total lifetime production will yield the equivalent of six months of UK gas demand. Au contraire, the most recent renewables auction will offset 50 times that, every year, indefinitely. The Office for Budget Responsibility has calculated a £364 billion fiscal hit from the UK’s continued reliance on global gas markets through 2050. Thus modelled across every realistic price scenario, the Treasury loses money on a typical new North Sea field.[7]
Thus for decades, every barrel of oil or cubic metre of gas pulled from the ground returned many times the energy it took to extract. This ‘energy return on investment’ (EROI) is collapsing for fossil fuels and rising for renewables. The UK’S national EROI peaked in 2000 at 9.6:1 and had fallen to 6.2:1 by 2012. An industrial economy of Britain’s complexity requires a ratio of at least 10:1 to function comfortably. The UK has glided below that threshold for almost two decades, concealing the deficit with more expensive imports from geopolitically problematic regions such as Russia and the Middle East and which are vulnerable to sudden acts of disruption such as the current closure of the Strait of Hormuz.[8]
When researchers reframe the ‘Cheap vs Clean’ energy false dichotomy in terms of what happens if enough solar and wind capacity is built to meet demand on the worst days – the cloudiest weeks of winter when wind drops off – as opposed to average demand, the result is an enormous surplus of generation for the rest of the year. With roughly 800GW of wind, 600GW of solar and approximately three days of grid-scale storage, the UK could become a clean energy superpower – producing two to three times what it currently consumes, at near marginal cost, for most of the year and exporting the surplus into a Europe that needs it.[9] The ideal prospectus for a Chancellor Ed Miliband.
If any there is any idea or policy whose time has come it is surely Miliband’s net zero transition agenda. If ever there was a time for active government to shake off the dead hand of the Treasury in the service of the greater good, it is now. However an unholy alliance of the Unite and GMB trade unions who fear Miliband’s agenda will lead to major job losses in the oil, gas and utilities sectors; leading City figures who fear that Miliband’s desire for expansive public investment to fund the green transition will cause higher borrowing imperilling the UK’s public finances and figures on the political Right such as Badenoch and Farage who see the green agenda as another front in the culture war waged by the liberal metropolitan elites against the plain people of Britain.
While the latter can be dismissed as populist but dangerous froth, the first and second of this trilogy of oppositional arguments need to be addressed which the economist Josh Ryan-Collins does convincingly. He responds to trade unionist concerns by pointing out that as Chancellor, Miliband would control the very fiduciary levers – public investment, industrial strategy, retraining programmes and social protection – which would ensure that workers and communities would not be left behind in the transition. Rather than ambitious climate change policy per se, Ryan-Collins claims that the problem resides in the reluctance of the Treasury to mobilise resources to support affected workers and regions.
For, in the Observer view “It’s the climate, stupid’.[1] Commentating on the meteorological events of the previous ten days; the issuing of three red warnings for three consecutive days, the closure of schools, delayed trains, the malfunction of hospital machines such as scanners causing appointments to be cancelled, the busiest ever day for London Ambulance Service in terms of life threatening emergencies and, as tragicomic irony, the cancelation by climate conference organisers of a session on extreme heat because of extreme heat, the Observer drily points out that the debate should not merely be about hot housing and air conditioning but about climate change in its entirety. For it is tautologous (except to the denial lobby of which more later whose shrill tones are becoming worrying louder) to state that climate change touches everybody and every part of the economy. Because of the urgency of it in terms of a medium-term national challenge and the existential nature of it as an international challenge, a proper strategy for the Prime Minister elect Andy Burnham to address has to be near as possible to the top of his to-do list.[2]
However one particular aspect of a proper climate change strategy is currently set to put Labour on the horns of an acute political dilemma. For as part of Britain’s long-term goal to reach Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050 (the fossil fuel industries being the greatest emitters), Energy Secretary Ed Milliband and others will urge Burnham to rule out new North Sea oil and gas exploration licenses. However, excessively high energy prices for British consumers and industry, even before the Iran war they were nearly 90% higher than the median for the EU’s 14 richest countries, due to the UK power grid’s reliance on imported gas when the wind stops blowing and the severe vicissitudes in prices at times of war, is making the transition unaffordable.[3] Energy is intensely political and has become the latest culture war issue that that the Alt-Right has taken up.
Energy prices have been seized upon with alacrity by Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party. At a right-wing conference in London dubbed the “anti-woke Davos”, she singled out the “villain” responsible for Britain’s economic woes. “His name is Ed Miliband, and he has made our country poorer”, Badenoch proclaimed to applause. This gathering had been convened by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, whose backers include the owner of the Gbeebies (GB News) and an assortment of fossil fuel companies. Among the attendees from the Trump administration was its energy secretary, Chris Wright, himself a former fossil fuel executive, who described Britain’s green policies as a “tragic mistake”. As a piece of comedic irony, as an example of the imitation of art by life in the manner of the film Don’t Look Up, Jonathon Freedland reports that according to those who were there, the thousands of climate sceptics and opponents of multiculturalism and “wokeness” gathered at the conference venue in Olympia, West London were sweltering, fanning themselves against a London temperature that remained stubbornly above 35C while listening to the likes of Wright, using fans distributed in goodie bags and emblazoned with the slogans, “Free speech never felt so cool.”[4]
However beyond the increasingly mainstreaming lunatic fringe of the anti-woke right, the Net Zero consensus has begun to fray. Several trade unions are pushing for the afore mentioned North Sea licences because of the jobs and growth they believe they would generate. Tony Blair made the same case for North Sea drilling in his 5,700 word essay The Labour Party is Playing With Fire Over Its Future and the Future of the Country last month calling for the loosening of Net Zero targets. In Canada, Mark Carney has dismantled numerous multiple green measures and even the European Commission in Brussels is backtracking on its green commitments. But for Freedland, Net Zero is not an optional extra or an unaffordable luxury. It is a lifesaving essential.[5]
To advance Freedland’s proposition, as I wish to do, requires unpacking the question asked by Tony Blair in 1995 “Does our economy need right now the goal of clean energy or cheap energy”. As part of his takedown of Tony Blair’s argument “made using a 1990s map of the UK that no longer resembles the reality of the country in which we live”[6], Nafeez Ahmed gets to grips with what he calls the “Cheap vs Clean’ Fallacy and in the process shows that the North Sea cannot save Britain. He crunches the numbers to prove his case as follows.
Between 2010 and 2024, 14 years of Conservative drilling policy issued approximately 400 new exploration licences. Twenty fields were built which at full exhaustion over their total lifetime production will yield the equivalent of six months of UK gas demand. Au contraire, the most recent renewables auction will offset 50 times that, every year, indefinitely. The Office for Budget Responsibility has calculated a £364 billion fiscal hit from the UK’s continued reliance on global gas markets through 2050. Thus modelled across every realistic price scenario, the Treasury loses money on a typical new North Sea field.[7]
Thus for decades, every barrel of oil or cubic metre of gas pulled from the ground returned many times the energy it took to extract. This ‘energy return on investment’ (EROI) is collapsing for fossil fuels and rising for renewables. The UK’S national EROI peaked in 2000 at 9.6:1 and had fallen to 6.2:1 by 2012. An industrial economy of Britain’s complexity requires a ratio of at least 10:1 to function comfortably. The UK has glided below that threshold for almost two decades, concealing the deficit with more expensive imports from geopolitically problematic regions such as Russia and the Middle East and which are vulnerable to sudden acts of disruption such as the current closure of the Strait of Hormuz.[8]
When researchers reframe the ‘Cheap vs Clean’ energy false dichotomy in terms of what happens if enough solar and wind capacity is built to meet demand on the worst days – the cloudiest weeks of winter when wind drops off – as opposed to average demand, the result is an enormous surplus of generation for the rest of the year. With roughly 800GW of wind, 600GW of solar and approximately three days of grid-scale storage, the UK could become a clean energy superpower – producing two to three times what it currently consumes, at near marginal cost, for most of the year and exporting the surplus into a Europe that needs it.[9] The ideal prospectus for a Chancellor Ed Miliband.
If any there is any idea or policy whose time has come it is surely Miliband’s net zero transition agenda. If ever there was a time for active government to shake off the dead hand of the Treasury in the service of the greater good, it is now. However an unholy alliance of the Unite and GMB trade unions who fear Miliband’s agenda will lead to major job losses in the oil, gas and utilities sectors; leading City figures who fear that Miliband’s desire for expansive public investment to fund the green transition will cause higher borrowing imperilling the UK’s public finances and figures on the political Right such as Badenoch and Farage who see the green agenda as another front in the culture war waged by the liberal metropolitan elites against the plain people of Britain.
While the latter can be dismissed as populist but dangerous froth, the first and second of this trilogy of oppositional arguments need to be addressed which the economist Josh Ryan-Collins does convincingly. He responds to trade unionist concerns by pointing out that as Chancellor, Miliband would control the very fiduciary levers – public investment, industrial strategy, retraining programmes and social protection – which would ensure that workers and communities would not be left behind in the transition. Rather than ambitious climate change policy per se, Ryan-Collins claims that the problem resides in the reluctance of the Treasury to mobilise resources to support affected workers and regions.
References
[1] The Observer View. 27 June 2026.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Jonathan Freedland Britain burns – and still the climate sceptics refuse to look Guardian Journal 27 June 2026 pp.1-2
[5] Ibid, p.2
[6] Nafeez Ahmed, The Real Radicalism the Moment Requires is at the Level of How the World is Seen. Byline Times July 2026 pp.25-28
[7] Ibid, p.26
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid.
[1] The Observer View. 27 June 2026.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Jonathan Freedland Britain burns – and still the climate sceptics refuse to look Guardian Journal 27 June 2026 pp.1-2
[5] Ibid, p.2
[6] Nafeez Ahmed, The Real Radicalism the Moment Requires is at the Level of How the World is Seen. Byline Times July 2026 pp.25-28
[7] Ibid, p.26
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid.
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
