Something remarkable has happened of late. Ideas that we thought banished to the fringes have come to the centre once more. Autocrats feed eager ears with untruths. Nationalists, feverish with intolerance, call for their neighbours to be imprisoned, deported, cast out. And across the British political mainstream, commitments to climate action are being questioned.
For as long as anyone has talked about climate change, it has been a focus of disputes. At first, oil companies and their backers denied what they knew to be true: that the burning of fossil fuels was heating our climate, with dangerous consequences. But as the evidence for man-made climate change has mounted, it has become impossible for most people to maintain Donald Trump’s line that it is “a con job”. Instead, policymakers and politicians have argued about exactly how dangerous climate change is to our economies and our lives, what we should do to counter it, and when.
In the UK, this perennial debate has reached a moment of real importance. A few years ago, there was a political consensus around our collective climate goals. In 2008, when Gordon Brown was prime minister, the UK became the first country to introduce legally binding targets for cutting emissions and regular carbon budgets when it passed the Climate Change Act. In 2019, Theresa May’s Conservative government amended that legislation, enshrining in law a target to cut emissions to net zero by 2050. It was “ambitious”, May said, “but it is crucial that we achieve it to ensure that we protect our planet for future generations”—a sentiment that has roots within conservative thinking, traceable back at least as far as Margaret Thatcher’s warnings to the UN in 1989.
Net zero by 2050 positioned the UK as a leader in global climate action, and had the backing of Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and others. But in the seven years since it was set, this target has come under scrutiny, such that today—at the end of a summer defined by heatwaves, wildfires and droughts— it is not clear how committed the Labour government of Andy Burnham is to it.
While the public remains strongly supportive of climate action in principle, that support is being tested
Before we go too far, a reminder of what net zero means: that the greenhouse gas emissions put into the atmosphere are balanced with those taken out. If all the carbon dioxide emissions on the planet did not exceed the ability of the forests, oceans, plants and soils to absorb them, that would be net zero.
For the world, it remains an ambitious goal. Last year, humanity collectively emitted approximately 38.1bn tonnes of CO₂. That was a record high, though growth each year is now slowing, at least. Currently, national plans fall short of what is required to balance emissions by the middle of the century. But the biggest emitter, China (15.5bn tonnes), appears to have passed its peak. The United States (6bn tonnes) and India (3bn tonnes) follow far behind.
The UK is comparatively advanced. Achieving net zero in this country would mean that our emissions had fallen by 100 per cent compared with 1990—the official baseline when tracking of greenhouse gas reductions began. In 2025, our estimated net emissions of carbon dioxide equivalent totalled 367m tonnes—down 54 per cent since 1990. According to the independent Climate Change Committee (CCC), the target is “within reach”. And yet we are faltering, unsure whether to push forwards or pull back.
At the heart of the current uncertainty is one issue: cost. There are concerns, shared by the left and right, about whether the nation can afford to enact the policies needed to balance emissions by 2050, and about how the British public will react to those measures. After all, the cost of living is voters’ number one concern. People are struggling with the legacy of recent inflation: compared with 2021, food prices are 50 per cent higher, housing expenses have climbed, and average annual energy bills are hundreds of pounds more expensive. Taxes are at their highest level since the Second World War. Many who support net zero in principle fear that the pace of change it demands will cause a backlash.
There are also signs that while the public remains strongly supportive of climate action in principle, that support is tested by the reality of climate policies. According to the government’s own opinion tracker, before this summer’s extreme weather, 78 per cent of the public said they were concerned about climate change—a high figure that includes supporters of all parties, but down from 85 per cent since autumn 2021. The same poll shows that 81 per cent of people support the use of renewable energy such as wind, solar and biomass for electricity, heat and fuel, but are notably less positive about renewable energy facilities being built in their own areas than in general.
Speaking at a panel event at the London School of Economics (LSE) this June, Bristol’s Labour MP and former minister for climate Kerry McCarthy noted that green issues had lost political salience. “They’re not top of the agenda in the way that they were even a few years ago,” she said. “When people have been struggling just to meet basic needs… perhaps it is seen as a bit of an indulgence to be talking about broader issues.”
It is in this context that the Burnham government is reportedly considering allowing additional oil and gas licences in the North Sea—though this would not bring down household energy bills. It is also reportedly planning to weaken rules around electric car sales: under current plans, just 20 per cent of new cars sold by 2030 should use fossil fuels; the government is considering raising that limit to 50 per cent. And the new energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh, who formerly led the left-wing New Economics Foundation, has hinted that she may push back her predecessor Ed Miliband’s pledge to (almost) eliminate fossil fuels from UK energy by 2030. “My job is to do the transition in a way that works for people’s pockets,” Fahnbulleh has said.
So just how expensive is net zero, anyway?
The estimated net cost to the UK economy of reaching net zero by 2050 is £116bn, according to the CCC’s 2025 carbon budget. It will require £720bn in spending, offset by £604bn in savings. Net annual costs would peak in 2029 at £35bn, although this date was based partly on those same plans to decarbonise the energy sector by 2030 that may now be in question.
This is, in the grand scheme of things, not much. The annual budget of the NHS is £242bn. The UK will spend £68bn on defence this financial year. Most of the investment in the green transition—between 65 and 90 per cent, according to the CCC—is likely to come from the private sector, rather than the state or consumers, and the best estimates from the Office for Budget Responsibility put the cost to the public purse at about £70 per person, per year. That’s a little less than the price of a print and digital subscription to Prospect.
Going slower on net zero—holding on to fossil fuels for longer—would, on the other hand, be expensive. Earlier this year, the CCC found that a single fossil fuel price spike—like the one in 2022 that followed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the Covid pandemic—would likely be as large as the entire net additional cost of climate policies that are in line with achieving net zero by 2050. Price spikes of this size are rare, but in a world of increasingly unstable politics, ecosystems and climate, it is reasonable to assume that “once in a generation” no longer means what it used to. Faster decarbonisation would reduce Britain’s exposure to such risks. “In light of current world events, it’s more important than ever for the UK to move away from being reliant on volatile foreign fossil fuels, to clean, domestic, less wasteful energy,” Nigel Topping, the chair of the CCC, has said.
But the biggest cost to slowing down climate action is visible all around us. As I write, 45m people across the UK are living in drought. Just weeks ago, more than 300,000 people fled fires that tore through Spain and western France; these areas will not recover for years. The Danube river sank so low that Nazi shipwrecks and ancient ruins became visible on its bed, and urgent steps had to be taken to protect nuclear power plants usually cooled by its waters.
This summer, health systems were put under strain: in June alone, there were more than 10,000 heatwave-related deaths across Europe, and in the UK, 2,877 heat-related deaths had been recorded for the year by mid-August, close to the historical record for a whole calendar year. Productivity dropped: the June heatwave alone cost the UK economy £1.15bn in lost working hours, according to the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. And that’s before accounting for the impact of the heat on workers’ health and on the NHS. Elsewhere, train lines buckled, roads melted and more than 200 square km of land was burned by wildfires.
We will continue to feel the effects. Farmers are warning that prices will likely rise this autumn, with staples such as barley, oats and rapeseed set for the worst harvest since records began in 1984. There’s a precedent: in 2023, the effects of extreme weather alone added an average of £192 to each UK household’s food bill, according to the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit.
The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that if the UK sticks to its current net zero policies, climate change will cause physical damage and productivity losses that could reduce national annual GDP by 4 per cent by 2050, deepening to 8 per cent by 2070. Campaign group Global Witness calculates that each UK household is already facing climate damage costs of £3,000 each year across the next decade, based on estimates of the national costs of flooding, crop losses, health impacts and more. If net zero policies are weakened or abandoned, those numbers will only rise.
The slower we decarbonise, the greater the likelihood of worse damage in future. The CCC found that every pound spent in reducing emissions will be repaid between 2.2 and 4.1 times over by mid-century. The most significant benefit comes through avoidance of additional damage caused by climate change: an estimated £40bn to £130bn could be saved by 2050.
Further, one study has even proven that “even without accounting for climate damages or climate policy co-benefits [such as improved health], transitioning to a net-zero energy system by 2050 is likely to be economically beneficial”. Renewable technologies are becoming ever cheaper and, combined with advances in battery technology, could transform the cost of energy if prices were to be freed from gas, which currently sets the UK electricity market price 98 per cent of the time.
And according to the CCC, in an energy system where renewables dominate, less energy will be lost. In our present fossil fuel-dominated system—coal, oil and gas still account for 76 per cent of our energy—“more than half of energy inputted… is wasted rather than transformed into useful energy output”. This loss is worth around £60bn each year, or £2,000 for every UK household. In contrast, systems built around electricity generated by renewables are forecast to waste around half as much: £30bn, which would save every household £1,000 a year.
Across the world, other nations have read the signs: solar and wind now make up 80 per cent of additions to power capacity worldwide. As Simon Sharpe, managing director of the non-profit S-Curve Economics, tells me, “developing countries are not doing this to meet climate goals.” This is an economic choice.
The problem for the government, of course, is that net zero is not an economic dilemma. It has become a political one. To some extent, it always has been. And in that dilemma, concerns about affordability or cost have always been present.
As Genevieve Guenther notes in The Language of Climate Politics, these concerns have often originated with those who are against decarbonisation altogether. “Oil and gas interests use the word ‘cost’ so often partly because the term has a remarkably implicatory power to make people feel poorer,” she writes. But that language has gained a particular salience now, including among mainstream politicians who would broadly support climate action, as the decarbonisation process reaches a moment of real friction.
Despite the UK’s progress to date, decarbonising the rest of the economy by 2050 will be no small feat. The bits that few people would notice—phasing out coal, initial deployments of solar and wind—have been done. But when people are asked to change their cars or their boilers, or when their jobs and businesses have to adapt, the burden on individuals feels greater. “We are no longer at the very beginning of the energy transition, where clean technologies are being developed in labs or deployed in niche applications by a few enthusiasts,” says Sharpe. “We’re at the point where in a few sectors, clean technologies are beginning to spread widely across society. That means that more people will encounter the effects of the transition in their lives, and may find aspects of it that they dislike.”
Among the most pressing political challenges is that of jobs. To balance emissions by 2050, around 150,000 jobs that are supported by the oil and gas sector may be lost before new jobs are created. These roles account for less than 0.5 per cent of all jobs in the UK, but as Michael Lerner, an assistant professor at the LSE, noted at the panel event, they are concentrated in particular places. When those jobs are lost, the communities around them—the businesses where those workers spend their wages—also suffer. Meanwhile, the promise of new green jobs is yet to be fulfilled and, when it is, it is likely to benefit different areas and communities. “You won’t go from the North Sea oil rig, necessarily, to the wind turbine. Most of the green jobs will be [for] other people. And that’s tricky,” said Lerner.
This moment of friction has created a political opportunity for the parties not in government. Last year, Kemi Badenoch falsely declared that the UK’s target of reaching net zero emissions by the middle of the century was impossible. She was building on the legacy of Rishi Sunak, who as prime minister pushed back commitments on phasing out fossil fuel-powered cars, on boilers and on energy efficiency, and was criticised by scientists for “politicising” the CCC, and for branding climate experts and campaigners alike as zealots.
The answer may be to talk less about net zero and more about the climate policies already improving lives
This summer, Badenoch announced that the Conservative party would reject candidates at the next election who support the UK’s climate goals. “If someone still believes in net zero targets that make energy more expensive and are destroying industry, they are not coming back,” she wrote. For the Conservatives, not only in opposition but well behind Reform UK in the polls, net zero is now to be used as a wedge issue.
The challenge for the Burnham government is to rebuild the consensus that has, in less than a decade, been lost. The answer may be to talk less about net zero and more about climate policies—and how they are already improving people’s lives, such as through EVs and new train lines helping to clean up urban air.
“When people hear net zero on the right, they don’t assume that it’s a meaningful agenda to tackle climate change. They hear oh, it’s that thing that brings with it all those bans and taxes and regulations that runs counter to the political instincts and philosophy of most people on the right,” said John Flesher, of the Conservative Environment Network, speaking at the same LSE panel event. But as Lerner said, net zero is in fact “a very pragmatic idea rather than an idealistic one. It says cut emissions where you can, and then try to clean up, suck out of the air, whatever emissions you can’t.”
This may present Burnham with his greatest challenge as prime minister. Climate change is a policy area where his party is deeply uncomfortable and, as yet, he shows no signs of bucking that trend. But if he can reclaim climate change as a consensus issue—if he can tell the right story about its costs and benefits, the political rewards could be impressive. In 1989, Thatcher warned the UN against the kind of economic growth that would “plunder the planet today and leave our children to deal with the consequences.” That remains a notion that everyone can get behind.
