For nearly two decades, Britain’s climate lobby has operated from a position of near-total dominance. It has shaped national policy, set the terms of debate, and enjoyed unrivalled access to ministers and advisers. [emphasis, links added]
Public institutions echoed their priorities, dissent was marginalized, and it was lavishly funded by both the state and Big Philanthropy. Royalty and celebrities endorsed the cause. A technocratic consensus took hold and hardened.
Since 2008, its success lay not merely in claiming that climate action was necessary, but that it would make us richer, healthier, and more secure.
Green policies, we were told, would lower bills, create jobs, and free us from petrostates such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This was Net Zero as a win-win: a moral imperative and an economic opportunity to be seized.
That message mattered. For years, working-class voters saw environmentalism as a luxury belief — the preserve of affluent types who could afford to fret about carbon footprints.
In the 1970s, during an earlier green moment, Labour stalwarts haunted by mass unemployment of the 1930s dismissed such ideas as indulgent. Anthony Crosland called them “morally wrong.” Tony Benn, then Energy Secretary, sneered in his diaries that the environmental movement was “overwhelmingly middle class”.
So the message evolved. By the 2010s, green politics was no longer about hair-shirts or limits to growth. It was about cleaner air, cheaper energy, and energy independence.
You could keep your consumerist lifestyle — just switch to a sustainable version. The transition would be frictionless. The costs would eventually pay for themselves.
For a time, this framing held. It offered cover to politicians and reassurance to voters. It allowed the consensus to entrench.
But that consensus is now rapidly crumbling.
The promises of a painless transition and shared prosperity have not materialized. The UK has some of the highest industrial energy costs in the developed world.
British heavy industry is in retreat, and our prospects in emerging sectors like AI are under threat.
After two decades of record investment in intermittent renewables, energy imports are up and, as the Office for Budget Responsibility recently outlined, the UK was left dangerously exposed when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Wider strategic realities have shifted, too. Great-power competition is back, and placing the West on a prewar footing now matters far more than climate diplomacy.
The idea that Britain can “lead by example,” regardless of what China, India, or the US do, looks increasingly naïve.
And people have noticed. Yes, support for Net Zero in the abstract remains high. But support for its practical consequences — the cost of living and lifestyle constraints — is collapsing.
A so-called “green backlash” is brewing across the West. You can see it in national polling, with Reform riding high. Mainstream political figures and trade unions, from Tony Blair and Kemi Badenoch to the GMB and Unite, are challenging the consensus head-on.
Understandably, the climate lobby is feeling the pressure.
h/t SB
Read rest at The Critic
