In the land of Ed Miliband, the climate is changing

Ed Miliband must have thought this would be his vindication. In recent years scarcely a week has gone by without him intoning — or tweeting — that “as long as Britain remains exposed to the rollercoaster of global fossil fuel markets, we will be vulnerable to energy price rises over which we have no control. Our clean energy mission is the only way to take back control.”

So when Iran closed the straits of Hormuz, retaliating against President Trump’s hubristic war of choice, and global hydrocarbon prices soared, the secretary of state for energy security and net zero presumably expected public acclaim for his policy of ostracising the oil and gas industry, while developing wind and solar power at breakneck pace.

Far from it. Polling conducted in the last week of March by Merlin Strategy for the campaigning organisation Looking for Growth shows the public mood has actually hardened against Miliband’s agenda. Only 15 per cent of voters expressed themselves as “opposed to drilling for oil in the North Sea”. Even among Labour voters, over half said they supported more North Sea drilling, with just 21 per cent opposed. Most strikingly, more of those identifying as supporters of the Green Party backed new North Sea oil and gas exploration (38 per cent) than opposed it (33 per cent).

What of our entirely undeveloped onshore gas and oil reserves? These — thought to amount to the equivalent of up to 50 years of domestic demand — could be extracted by means of “hydraulic fracturing”. This was stymied by the last Conservative government because of public opposition. Yet the poll for Looking for Growth, when asking “Do you support or oppose fracking, also known as hydraulic fracturing, in areas of UK land?” found not just overall majority support, but even Labour voters much more likely to support than oppose it (49 per cent to 30 per cent). It posed the obvious follow-up — would you support or oppose fracking in areas near you? — and found that, still, marginally more were in favour (36 per cent to 35 per cent).

When you think how “fracking” for onshore oil and gas was not so long ago about as welcome as root canal treatment, this is quite a turnaround in the public mood: a political climate change, no less. Any conventional account for this switch would assert that concerns about “the environment” diminish at times of economic hardship, especially among the least well-off: something along the lines of what the furious gilets jaunes said to President Macron during the 2018 protests against his taxes on petrol and diesel — “You are worried about the end of the planet. We are worried about how to get to the end of the month.”

Yet I think something else has become clear to millions in this country. They have now grasped what some of us have been saying ever since, in his first stint as energy secretary, Miliband introduced the 2008 Climate Change Act: that a policy which penalises, through carbon taxes and “climate change levies”, all domestic industrial energy users, while much larger countries such as China place no such burden on their own industries, is a recipe for the extinction of our manufacturing base.

The latest victim is the 217-year-old Derbyshire pottery firm Denby, employing 600 people, which last week went into administration, its boss blaming in part our industrial energy prices (the highest in the world). In the field of commodities, by replacing, for example, aluminium or steel once made here with the same products from countries that still have coal as their dominant source of energy, the policy increases rather than reduces global carbon emissions.

That, however, is the perverse logic of the UN’s carbon accounting convention, of which this country has been an unquestioning acolyte. As the paper Premeditated Industrial Destruction, whose lead author is the economist Catherine McBride, last week encapsulated it: “The sum total of the UK’s pursuit of net zero CO2 emissions has been to offshore energy intensive industrial production at the cost of hundreds of thousands of jobs [and] billions of tax revenues”.

That last point is what stirred the chancellor last week to urge Miliband to change his implacable stance and licence the development of two oil and gas fields in the North Sea (Rosebank and Jackdaw), from the second of which, the company running the project told The Times, “we could technically be ready to start producing gas from this October”. Neil McCullough, its chief executive, pointed out: “Jackdaw is a straightforward proposition: bring more North Sea gas onshore through existing infrastructure and onwards to UK homes and businesses.”

Yet in Milibandland, it’s not just more virtuous to import the gas from the Norwegian sector of the same hydrocarbon basin, where exploration is booming: even the much more carbon-intensive business of importing liquified natural gas (frozen to minus 150C and shipped here by diesel powered tankers) is preferable. He has classed it as “zero carbon” because that whole industrial process occurs outside the UK’s borders.

Even if Miliband does back down, it’s actually not straightforward. After the Jackdaw and Rosebank fields were approved by the then Conservative energy secretary Claire Coutinho in 2022 and 2023, Greenpeace helped mount an appeal claiming the developments were not compatible with our annual “carbon budgets” statutorily enforceable under the Climate Change Act. In 2025, the Court of Session in Edinburgh agreed. This was on the basis of so-called “Scope three” emissions — that is, the court said the government had taken account of those generated by the North Sea development but failed properly to do so over the emissions when the gas was burnt in our homes and factories (the vast majority of UK North Sea gas is used domestically).

This debacle is, in part, why Kemi Badenoch has now said the Conservatives would revoke the Climate Change Act. It is a far cry from what happened in 2008, when only five Tory MPs voted against the measure. My father, the former chancellor Nigel Lawson, the following year founded the Global Warming Policy Foundation, in an effort to challenge the overwhelming consensus: he did not deny the greenhouse effect of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, but was scandalised by the failure of the British state to assess the merits of adaptation rather than attempted prevention.

He said to me then, “It is only because my political career is over that I can do this.” He recognised how at Westminster it was sacrilegious to question the Act. Those (such as Theresa May) appalled by Badenoch’s apostasy pronounce, à la Miliband, that this would forfeit the UK’s “global leadership” in the fight against climate change. Yet no countries look at what’s happened in the UK and say: there’s an example we should follow.