Guest Post: Labour's Net Zero triumph

In the face of frenzied right-wing attacks, this government has successfully executed one of the most ambitious climate change projects in the world. It's time to give credit where it's due.

Photo by USGS on Unsplash

Hello and welcome to Striking 13’s latest guest post, this time from climate change expert James Murray. James is the guy I speak to whenever I need to get my head around what’s happening in Net Zero - he’s measured, independent-minded, detail-orientated and unflappable. Here, he outlines a rare areas of unqualified triumph in Labour policy, showing in detail just how ambitious and effective the party’s approach to green issues has been.

By James Murray

Where’s the vision? One of the primary criticisms of this Labour government, and the Tory administrations which preceded it, is that it has no narrative of how to improve the country and no project to accomplish it.

But what if this caricature of a narrative-free political establishment is wrong? What if an epic national project is staring us in the face? What if this project was quietly central to the governments of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Rishi Sunak (the less said about Liz Truss the better) and is absolutely core to Labour’s mission for the country?

The UK has been quietly leading the world in the delivery of a grand project of global significance that is both hugely popular and genuinely era-defining. Governments have been pursuing one of the most inspiring and consequential endeavours in human history. But seemingly no-one in power is comfortable admitting it.

That vision is the delivery of a net zero emission economy within 25 years. The transformation of the world’s first industrial economy into one of the first decarbonised, electrified, and genuinely sustainable economies to ever be built. It is a strategy that promises to catalyse investment, upgrade ageing infrastructure, create rewarding jobs, cut energy bills and curb the cost of living. It also promises to improve health and quality of life, enhance economic competitiveness, usher in a wave of transformational clean technologies, reverse nature loss and bolster resilience in the face of an escalating climate crisis. All that, and it will end reliance on the imported fossil fuels that have just triggered the second economy-shredding energy crisis in five years.

The net zero mission is the defining economic, technological, and industrial story of the 21st century. It will determine whether the climate crisis escalates into a borderline existential catastrophe. It will reshape the global order, as China bets on booming clean tech industries and the US gambles on becoming the last petrostate standing. Closer to home it offers the only credible route for breaking the UK out of the era of flat-lining wages, inflationary spirals, and stagnant growth that has defined the past 18 years. It is what President Joe Biden used to call ‘a big fucking deal’.

It is also a damning indictment of modern politics that this vision is treated as a political football or fatuous attack line targeted at ‘Red Ed’ Miliband, rather than as a complex and essential attempt to transform a modern economy.

In torching the political consensus on climate action, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has repeatedly argued the UK’s target to reach net zero emissions by 2050 is “arbitrary”. To borrow the well-worn Princess Bride meme, Badenoch keeps using that word, but it does not mean what she thinks it means.

The target is a function of the Paris Agreement of 2015 and its headline declaration - still backed by all governments, bar the US - that the world should “achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century”, or ‘net zero’ to give it is colloquial name. That commitment was accompanied by a separate target to limit the increase in global average temperature to “well below 2C above pre-industrial levels”, while “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels”.

The treaty’s twin targets drew upon the most peer-reviewed scientific exercise ever undertaken from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which warned that as temperatures approach 2C of warming there is a serious and growing risk of climatic tipping points being reached. These tipping points - such as tropical forest dieback, permafrost loss, coral bleaching, and ice sheet collapse - are expected to lead to irreversible changes to the biosphere, the collapse of natural carbon sinks, and a sharply increased likelihood of runaway warming that would have truly catastrophic consequences for humanity (if you want to find out more about quite how bad things might get, David Wallace-Well’s The Uninhabitable Earth is the ur-text on this stuff - it is not a relaxing read).

The promise to pursue a 1.5C warming goal was then inserted at the insistence of the most climate vulnerable nations, who not unreasonably pointed out how climate models show they could face nation-destroying consequences - literally in the case of low-lying island states - well before the 2C threshold is reached.

Scientists and economists then modelled how quickly economies would have to decarbonise to stay within these temperature thresholds, concluding industrialised nations should aim to reach net zero by around 2050, with the largest emerging economies following by 2060, and the world’s lower income nations reaching the same point by the 2070s and 2080s.

The legally binding net zero target enacted by Theresa May’s government was anything but arbitrary. It was informed by one of the most rigorous scientific exercises ever undertaken and based on arguably the most impressive diplomatic achievement in decades. In recent years it has come to look like a high watermark for both post-war multilateralism.

Far from the UK being some kind of outlier, our decarbonisation efforts form part of a trend that is sweeping the global economy. Badenoch and Nigel Farage have repeatedly claimed the UK is damaging its economy by pursuing net zero goals while other countries fail to follow suit. They are wrong on both counts.

According to the Net Zero Tracker initiative, 77% of the global economy is now covered by national net zero targets. The figure rises to at least 84% if you include states such as California and New York, which have retained their own net zero goals in defiance of the Trumpian climate nihilism that took the US out of the Paris Agreement. The suggestion the UK is out on its own in pursuing net zero conveniently ignores how the whole of the EU, Canada, Japan, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, South Africa, and scores of other nations have net-zero-by-2050 targets. China and Indonesia are signed up to reaching net zero by 2060, while India is aiming for 2070. Net zero is a global project that is being pursued at pace and scale.

Of course, setting a target is only the first step towards building a net zero economy. The number of countries on track to meet their net zero goals is vanishingly small. Global emissions are still rising and investment in fossil fuels continues. But it is too simplistic to argue the Paris Agreement is failing. It led to a series of policies and investments that sparked a global clean tech boom that has driven down clean energy costs and started to destroy fossil fuel demand.

Some of the figures are truly mind-blowing. Global investment in the clean energy transition rose eight per cent last year to a record $2.3 trillion, while fossil fuel supply investment fell for the first time since the pandemic. New wind and solar installations jumped 17% to over 800GW, making the two technologies the “fastest-growing sources of electricity generation in history”, according to think tank Ember. Fossil fuel power generation has now peaked in every OECD country. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts the global market for key clean energy technologies, such as solar panels, heat pumps, and electric vehicles (EVs), is set to grow from nearly $1.2 trillion today to around $2 trillion by 2035, surpassing the size of the global oil market. In terms of both its scale and its impact, the surge in demand for clean technologies is easily the equal of the AI boom, and yet it gets a fraction of the attention.

Clean technologies are often cheaper and better than fossil fuel incumbents. Ember reckons solar plus storage projects now cost below $60 per megawatt hour (MWh) at a global level, compared to gas-fired power plants that can cost nearly three times more. EVs are 60-80% cheaper to run than petrol and diesel models and now compete with them on sticker price in most major markets, including the UK. This long-running trend has been turbocharged in recent weeks, as households the world over have recognised how clean technologies can insulate them against the soaring fossil fuel prices unleashed by the Iran war. Demand for renewables, EVs, batteries, and heat pumps has spiked.

One of the few genuine achievements of the previous Conservative government is that it established the UK as a world leader on climate action. Cameron backed the Climate Change Act, May put the net zero target into law, Johnson hosted the Glasgow Climate Summit and delivered a wave of clean tech investments. As a result of those signals and the policy measures that accompanied them, the UK became the first major economy to force coal off the grid, built the world’s first large-scale offshore wind industry, and established an ecosystem of pioneering green businesses, investors, and research hubs that continue to punch well above their weight. By 2024, the UK had cut its emissions by 53% against 1990 levels, delivering the deepest and fastest decarbonisation of any G20 economy.

Of course, this was all achieved while parts of the Conservative party nursed an intense loathing of wind and solar farms, and a deep ideological scepticism towards the state interventions required to catalyse clean tech markets. Such opposition often tipped over into vigorous flirtation with full blown climate denialism. As a result, successive Tory prime ministers were never able to publicly celebrate one of the few areas where they delivered some actual progress.

In contrast, Labour was handed a landslide victory by a bloc of left-leaning and centrist voters who repeatedly tell pollsters they support bolder climate action. But since then, No.10 has seemed, if anything, embarrassed by what energy security and net zero secretary Ed Miliband has achieved. Many people who supported Labour have been left feeling disappointed and even betrayed by Starmer. But the reality is that the government has spent the past two years quietly delivering on much of the green mission at the heart of its manifesto.

The tone was set within days of the election result, with the lifting of the de-facto ban on new onshore wind farms in England. Miliband then immediately pulled every policy lever he could find to accelerate the roll out of clean technologies and curb the UK’s fossil fuel reliance. Unlike many of his colleagues, he knew how to identify those levers and had the political muscle to seize them.

Guidance hampering solar farm development was axed, the budget for clean power contracts was increased, the timetable of auctions was accelerated, record numbers of new renewables projects were secured, sweeping planning reforms were unveiled to allow the accelerated delivery of those projects, grants for heat pumps skyrocketed, and a new National Energy Systems Operator (NESO) was launched. That was just the first few months. Other departments followed suit with subsidies for electric vehicles, budgets for tree-planting, and new rules to crackdown on water pollution.

All these policies were aligned with Labour’s wider economic strategy, which tweaked the UK’s fiscal rules and hiked taxes to quietly enable more investment in the modern low carbon infrastructure the country desperately needed after a decade of under-investment. This plan may have been undersold by chancellor Rachel Reeves and overshadowed by rows over taxation, but it enabled a new industrial strategy which has pumped funding into wind turbine factories, rail upgrades, EV factories, charging networks, green steel plants, carbon capture hubs, energy storage systems, sustainable aviation fuel plants, and myriad clean tech R&D projects.

Great British Energy was launched and quickly began inking deals to fund everything from solar arrays on schools and hospitals to the next generation of nuclear projects. The Conservative government talked a lot about nuclear, arguing it offered a route to decarbonising without the need for all those ‘ugly’ wind farms. But after 14 years the Tories delivered half of one nuclear power project and even that was massively delayed and over budget. The new government got the funding for the Sizewell C project over the line, secured a site for the UK’s first small modular reactors (SMRs), and appointed Rolls-Royce to build it.

In recent months, even as the Number 10 operation seems to wobble on the brink of extinction, the government’s net zero vision continued, undeterred. The £15 billion Warm Homes Plan was launched with a promise to deliver energy efficiency upgrades and clean technologies to millions of homes. The Future Homes Standard was confirmed, meaning almost all new homes will feature solar panels and heat pumps or district heating systems as standard. New rules governing the energy efficiency of rented properties were introduced. A new £115 billion water infrastructure upgrade programme was unveiled. Simpler recycling rules were introduced, alongside a new levy on packaging and plans for a deposit return scheme. Reforms to tackle the queue for grid connections and fast-track the most strategically important projects were approved. This list is not comprehensive, but you get the idea. It’s impressive stuff.

All this activity meant that when Trump’s misadventure in the Middle East triggered a fossil fuel shock, the UK was at least somewhat better protected than it would have been. Unlike after the invasion of Ukraine, there was a growing fleet of EVs and renewables projects to rely on. Further interventions will inevitably be required as the terrifying scale of the economic tsunami that is brewing in the blockaded Strait of Hormuz becomes obvious. But right from the start of the crisis, Miliband, Starmer, and Reeves have correctly diagnosed how this is a fossil fuel shock that can only be tackled by ending fossil fuel reliance. They have pulled forward the next clean power auction to this summer, fast tracked the sale of plug-in solar panels, increased heat pump grants for households reliant on heating oil, and signed off on a host of smaller policies all focused on getting the UK off the “fossil fuel rollercoaster”. Every heat pump, solar panel, or roll of insulation installed has become a patriotic act.

In this context, the row over whether the UK should permit new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea is a distraction at best. It is a debate over whether the country should double down on the declining and inherently volatile industries of the 21st century or pursue the growth model being pioneered by the ‘electrostates’ that are all but certain to dominate the 21st century. Fossil fuels will still have a role to play as the transition plays out and there may be an energy security case for some continued drilling in the UK waters, but such projects cannot reduce the UK’s exposure to soaring oil and gas prices set by international markets. They are destined to become an increasingly marginal concern as each new wind turbine and EV charger serves to destroy future fossil fuel demand. It should be obvious by now where the bulk of our attention should be.

Net Zero is an economic triumph. Figures from the Confederation of British Industry show the green economy grew ten per cent in 2024 and delivered over £83 billion in gross value add, even as the rest of the economy flatlined. The Office for National Statistics similarly confirmed revenues across the low carbon and renewable energy economy rose almost 12% in the same year to £77 billion. The sector employs hundreds of thousands of people, often in roles with above average salaries and with employment distributed right across the country. These trends are certain to have accelerated in 2025 and have now been boosted further by the Iran war.

Meanwhile, clean energy records are being toppled every month with the UK recently coming within a whisker of operating the grid without any fossil fuels for the first time. The cost implications of running a grid that now sources over 60% of its power from clean sources are the subject of an intense and complex debate, but a recent analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) suggested wind farms helped push down UK wholesale power prices by around a third last year, while offshore wind farms are estimated to have cut the country’s fossil fuel import bill by at least £30 billion, Spain and Portugal have demonstrated how you can massively enhance energy security and enjoy some of the cheapest power prices in Europe with a commitment to renewables and the right market design.

This is one of those situations where it doesn’t pay to overthink things. Fossil fuels are polluting, dangerous, and expensive, and their supply is controlled and constrained by some of the worst people in the world. Renewables are cleaner and cheaper. They come with their own supply chain and security challenges, but none are as severe or immediate as those faced by the oil and gas market. As the US climate campaigner Bill McKibben noted recently: “Sunlight has to travel 93 million miles to reach the Earth, but none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz”.

The assault on climate policies from the Conservatives and Reform is an attempt to curtail one of the UK’s only growth industries. They would argue that if you rolled back support for clean technologies, energy bills would miraculously fall and the UK economy would suddenly boom through a revival of fossil fuel-based technologies. But such claims stretch credulity. If you scrapped the Climate Change Act and deliberately slowed renewables, energy costs would simply end up being even more exposed to volatile international gas markets. Meanwhile, the structural decline of carbon intensive industries would only continue as global demand for clean technologies accelerates. Where is the long-term value in protecting internal combustion engine manufacturers when the rest of the world is going electric? Badenoch and Farage want to build a typewriter economy five years after the launch of the PC. They want to turn UK industry into a heritage railway.

In contrast, for all its myriad faults, the Labour government has quietly got on with delivering one of the world’s boldest climate policy and investment programmes. It is in the nature of the climate crisis that such progress is never fast enough. It is also true the government continues to make mis-steps that undermine its decarbonisation efforts - for example, the idea airport expansion can be made compatible with net zero relies on a very large dose of techno-optimism. But there is now ample evidence Labour’s commitment to climate action is starting to pay off from an economic, security, and environmental perspective.

Even now, amidst all the in-fighting and leadership challenges, ministers are poised to sign off on one of the most ambitious climate targets in the world, which would see the UK cut emissions by 87 per cent against 1990 levels. Meeting such a target would transform the UK, enabling a near complete transition to renewables, clean energy, electric vehicles, and green buildings. Our bills would be lower, our energy supplies more secure, our air cleaner, and our communities healthier - and we’d be doing our bit in tackling a climate crisis that threatens to overwhelm us all.

There is a vision. It is a proud one, involving rare cross-party cooperation between Labour and the Conservatives, combined with genuine foresight and delivery. It’s time politicians celebrated it.

James Murray is the editor-in-chief of BusinessGreen, having launched the site in 2007. He is responsible for BusinessGreen’s award-winning news, opinion, and analysis on the green economy, climate change, and the global clean technology transition. He also leads the development of the brand’s expanding events programme. You can follow him on Bluesky at: https://bsky.app/profile/james-bg.bsky.social.