Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of Green Tyranny
On Monday, concrete will be poured into Britain’s last two shale gas wells in Lancashire. Cuadrilla Resources, which owns the license at the Preston New Road site, is being forced to destroy the wells by the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), which has ordered that the wells be ‘plugged with cement and decommissioned’ by 30 June.
The government’s net-zero noose draws tighter. At energy questions in the House of Commons on Tuesday, the Conservative MP Charlie Dewhirst asked the Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband if the recent report by the National Energy System Operator (Neso) projected higher or lower bills under his policies. Miliband replied that Neso forecast
In the near three-decade history of the annual round of UN climate conferences, the Baku Cop29 stands out. There have been disastrous Cops before. For those with long memories, there was Cop6 in the Hague after George W. Bush narrowly won the 2000 presidential election, which was disrupted by protestors and the outgoing American climate
Although Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government has been in office less than a month, similarities between this year’s election and Tony Blair’s 1997 victory end with the size of Starmer’s House of Commons majority – just 13 seats shy of Blair’s in 1997. Just four days into Blair’s government, Gordon Brown stunned the country with
The Prime Minister’s pronouncement that Britain needs investment in new gas-fired power stations to keep the lights on is a rare moment of realism in the fog of Net Zero delusion. The government’s analysis shows that ‘we will need gas generation in the immediate term to meet rising demand’, Rishi Sunak wrote in the Telegraph last week. With
If a week is a long time in politics, then 2023 belongs to a different age in the politics of Net Zero. Less than eleven months ago, the government was saying that ‘Net Zero is the growth opportunity of the 21st century. Earlier this week, former IMF chief economist Oliver Blanchard effectively poured water on
The world’s largest offshore wind farm is coming to Britain but there will be only one winner from the scheme – and it isn’t electricity consumers. Wind energy giant Ørsted had raised doubts about the Hornsea 3 offshore project earlier this year. But after securing more generous subsidy arrangements from the government, the Danish firm is pressing ahead
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Rishi Sunak is being attacked by Conservative and Labour politicians for choosing to delay some of Britain’s climate commitments. But is his new approach to policy really a welcome one? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and Rupert Darwall, a senior fellow at RealClearFoundation.
The Bank of England was made independent to take monetary policy away from flighty politicians who are slaves to expediency and fashionable sound bites. Instead, central bankers imbued with objectivity, prudence and, most of all, economic expertise would be in charge. But when it comes to climate change and net zero, the Bank has shown
Environmentalism is the ruling ideology of our times. Forget neoliberalism. That peaked around 2000 and was definitively dethroned by the financial crisis in 2008, the same year Parliament passed the Climate Change Act which paved the way for Net Zero. Since then, environmentalism has won victory after victory, so it might appear paradoxical that one
Kwasi Kwarteng delivered his mini-Budget one week after the thirtieth anniversary of Black Wednesday, when the markets forcibly ejected sterling from the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). There’s one measure that makes recent market turmoil seem modest and even manageable by comparison with Black Wednesday. According to the Bank of England’s database, the pound fell 2.16
‘We’re all Keynesians now,’ Richard Nixon reportedly said in 1971 before ushering in a decade of high inflation. In the twilight of his premiership, Boris Johnson’s chief political legacy to the Conservative party is likely to be cakeism – the political philosophy that denies the existence of trade-offs and asserts you can have it all.
How time flies when there’s a real crisis. Just six months ago at the Glasgow climate conference, the Chancellor Rishi Sunak was pledging to rewire the entire global financial system for Net Zero. Sunak boasted that he was going to make London the world’s first ‘Net Zero Aligned Financial Centre’. It would mean forcing firms to
So far, the big message from the Glasgow climate conference is the role of finance in decarbonising the global economy. It’s a dangerous development. In his speech to COP26 last week, the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, pledged action to ‘rewire the entire financial system for Net Zero.’ Finance has taken centre stage in large part because
‘The climate transition presents a historic investment opportunity,’ says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. ‘What the financiers, the big banks, the asset managers, private investors, venture capital are all discovering is: There’s a lot of money to be made in the creation of these new [green] jobs,’ chimes in presidential climate envoy John Kerry. Fink concedes that
On the face of it, the Labour party conference commitment to bring forward Britain’s net zero greenhouse gas emission target to 2030 is nothing short of reckless. ‘We need zero emissions,’ the economist Paul Johnson and member of the Committee on Climate Change tweeted. ‘Getting there by 2050 is tough and expensive but feasible and
Elton John did his royal pals Harry and Meghan few favours when he revealed he’d bought carbon offsets for the couple’s recent trip to Nice in Sir Elton’s private jet. It was also a mistake. ‘Offsetting is worse than doing nothing,’ according to Manchester university professor Kevin Anderson, one of the vanishingly small number of
Here’s a negotiating gambit that seldom fails. Make a blatantly outrageous demand, and the other side won’t notice they’ve been stitched up in the rest of the agreement. That’s what Brussels did negotiating the Withdrawal Agreement. The backstop got so much attention that Britain’s commitments in the Political Declaration – wrongly thought of as optional
There’s a useful rule of thumb in politics. When Conservative politicians pronounce themselves to be a One Nation Tory, you can be pretty sure they’ve got nothing sensible to say. Instead of addressing voters, they’re conversing with each other in a special form of Tory code. It’s an identifier without substance, a form of ritualistic
For some of those desperate for Britain to stay put in the EU, the Customs Union option functions as a handy obsession. Ministers, too, appear to be rallying behind this as a solution to the Brexit crisis, amid reports that dozens of senior Tories could vote for the UK to stay in a customs union in
