Climate change: an expensive myth or a question of survival?

The fight against climate change in the UK is facing a serious challenge from parties and politicians threatening to undo decades of climate action. The UK’s flourishing net-zero financial sector would suffer at a time when countries around the world are rushing to adopt renewables. More importantly, it would make our world even warmer and more dangerous for future generations. 

Climate change is here

Climate change endangers all, whatever one’s wealth, identity, class or politics. Its existential threats – severe weather events and the collapse of the natural world being the obvious – are now so beyond question, have been repeated so often, that they have become almost normalised. It is easy to take a quick glance at the headlines and move on.

Even though it has a notoriously temperate climate, the UK will not be immune. Not only will the ripples of faraway disasters end up reaching our shores, climate change will directly afflict our island. A recent report predicts that by 2050 the number of English properties at high risk from flash flooding could increase by as much as 66%. London, Yorkshire and here in the East of England and are due to be hardest hit, with ballooning insurance costs poised to make some towns uninhabitable.

Climate sabotage

In the face of such perils, the policy positions of some read like explicit acts of sabotage.

Kemi Badenoch recently pledged to abolish the 2008 Climate Change Act (CCA), saying it has become “nothing more than a slogan”. On North Sea oil and gas, Badenoch and Reform UK urge to fast-track drilling, bemoaning a missed opportunity for cheap energy.

Reform pledge to tax renewable energy companies and axe green subsidies. The party’s leaders spread doubt and misinformation – writing that scientists “disagree as to how much” impact humans have on global warming and questioning whether carbon dioxide should be considered a pollutant.

Elsewhere, Farage recently launched the UK–EU affiliate of a US-based climate-denial think-tank, the Heartland Institute, a group which boasts of its influence inside Reform UK. As highlighted in the New York Times, Reform is funded by many multi-millionaires who openly dispute climate change and who are financially tied to fossil fuel interests.

Misleading narratives

The 2008 Climate Change Act (CCA) was not, as Badenoch claims, a partisan waste of time. It was passed with support from across the aisle, the public and businesses, and for 17 years it has committed successive British governments to an unchanging climate policy. The CCA has given certainty and security to investors in the UK’s climate sector. To renege on the act would scupper existing climate projects and scare off future investment.

Research shows that North Sea drilling would not particularly alleviate household bills. Gas wells are heavily depleted and almost all oil reserves are sold on international markets. Fresh drilling or not, the UK will be heavily reliant on imports well into the future.

The continuing promise of renewables

Reform UK claims that the green sector is “crippling our economy”. In fact, it has been an ever increasing economic success story. In 2024, as the national economy grew by just 1.1%, the net-zero sector surged by 10.1% and generated around £83.1 billion in Gross Value Added to the UK economy, according to a report from the CBI. Employment levels grew by 10.2%, supporting 951,000 full-time jobs. From 2019, the sector attracted £23 billion in private investment.

Another recent study published by University College London found that between 2010 and 2023, wind farms resulted in electricity bills being £14.2 billion lower than they would have been had gas generated the equivalent energy. A reduction in gas prices attributable to wind production saved a further £133.3 billion. With £43.2 billion in subsidies levied on consumer electricity bills taken into account, wind power’s net benefit to UK consumers over the period was £104.3 billion.

As the cost of renewable energy continues to decline, a growing number of countries, particularly in the developing world, are eagerly adopting cheap Chinese technology to decarbonise their economies, achieve greater energy independence and reduce energy costs.

A matter of how, not if

The transition to a net-zero economy will undeniably produce a hefty bill, and will prove a serious headache for lawmakers, scientists and engineers. There is broad consensus that decarbonisation and net-zero is the way forward, less on exactly how to proceed.

Dieter Helm, a leading energy economist at the University of Oxford, highlights some harsh truths about renewable energy supply. Above all, where gas is reliable, wind and solar are intermittent, relying on notoriously changeable weather. “No modern economy could rely solely solely upon them,” he says. Especially not an economy that plans to ramp up carbon-intensive defence production and host data centres that require enormous amounts of energy all the time. Backup networks powered by gas and diesel, Helm contends, will be needed to pick up the increased energy demand when renewable supply falls short, particularly during winter periods.

The cost of cutting climate action

And yet no one, not even the UK’s largest fossil fuel trade association, is arguing that we should turn our backs on renewable energy.

Reform UK’s climate strategy is flawed across the board. Its strategy to spend less money “more wisely, for example on sea level defences where needed” is naïve. Granted, the UK will need better flood defences, but adaptation cannot be the centrepiece of a climate strategy. Towns and cities that are critically exposed to flooding cannot “adapt” by relocating to higher ground. Little can be done to “adapt” to mega-fires other than tearing down surrounding forests. Humans cannot simply “adapt” to temperatures beyond our tolerance.

Thwarting climate action now and allowing unmitigated global warming would entail enormous downstream costs. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research calculates that the effects of climate change could cost in excess of $38 trillion a year by 2049. First Street, a climate risk financial modelling organisation, estimates that by 2055 climate change will be wiping away $1.47 trillion in annual real estate value in the United States alone. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries contends that if immediate action is not taken on the climate crisis, “the global economy would face a 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090”. This is not recession, but comprehensive global economic collapse. How will we “adapt” to such costs and their consequences?

Moving forward, not backward

Action must be taken now. Not only is the net-zero economy the right way forward for environmental reasons, it also stands to create jobs for the public and attract investment. Tearing up the foundations that give investors the confidence to pour money into the UK would do irreparable harm to an invaluable economic bright spot. The UK needs to continue investing in renewable technology and strive to reduce carbon production and consumption, not revert to fossil fuels.

MPs in 2008 recognised that climate change was coming and put partisan politics aside to pass a constructive piece of legislation; they knew that the prospect of climate change was bigger than them. Now climate change is here, and politicians threatening to undo years of progress and cripple the UK’s role in the global climate effort are betraying future generations and abandoning their duty.

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