Competition Can Save The Planet

It is time to let freedom do what it does best: deliver solutions faster, cheaper, and more effectively than any government plan ever could.

For more than twenty years, climate policy has been dominated by central planners, green lobbyists, and political grandstanders. They have promised that huge subsidies, rigid five-year plans, bans and enforced behavioural changes would deliver a low-carbon nirvana. Instead, what we have is the highest electricity prices in the developed world, failing technologies, and a sullen public increasingly sceptical of the entire Net Zero agenda.

The truth is that climate policy has gone so wrong because it has abandoned classical liberal principles. When governments dictate what kind of car we will drive in 2035, or which boilers we are permitted to install in our homes, they are not ‘nudging’ us, they are issuing edicts. This is central planning in its purest form. Just like the Soviet Union’s infamous five-year plans, but far further into the future. All the way to 2050. It failed then and it will always fail.

However well-informed or intelligent our political leaders may be, the conceit that they can predict which technologies will be cheapest and most effective decades from now is laughable. Nobody in Westminster knows what our energy mix will be in 2040 or 2050. To pretend otherwise is arrogance of the highest order. Yet still the political class churns out targets and deadlines as if writing them into law will somehow conjure new technologies into existence or improve existing ones.

At the same time, they reassure us that Net Zero will mean no change to living standards. If only that were so. It has been increasingly painful to watch as energy austerity claws away at our productive capacity, industries wither away, people lose their jobs and struggle to heat their homes. All because of a political choice to increase the cost of energy in the misguided view that it will tackle climate change.

If central planning is one side of the coin, subsidies are the other. Whole industries have grown fat on the taxpayer’s back, lobbying furiously to keep the money flowing. Offshore wind developers, for instance, were once trumpeted as delivering the cheapest power available. The moment subsidies were reduced, their enthusiasm evaporated.

This is not innovation; it is rent seeking. It punishes efficient competitors and rewards those with the best access to political power. The more climate policy relies on subsidies, the further it strays from genuine progress. Ultimately, this delays the decarbonisation of the global economy.

What makes competition such a vital and productive force is not ideology but logical necessity. When people are free to choose, when businesses compete to serve them, technologies improve at lightning speed. Correspondingly, the rising energy costs and reduced productivity Britain is experiencing follow inevitably from interfering with and restricting the vitally important energy sector.

It’s no coincidence that the shale gas revolution and the AI revolution began in the United States. Both have transformed energy economics and our understanding of our future energy needs. The challenge for society is to provide enough cheap, abundant energy to keep up with the pace of human ingenuity. Or at least it should be. Miserabilist Net Zero restrictions aim to limit our energy use and restrict our horizons.

If we truly want rapid and enduring progress, we must stop trying to herd people into government-approved technologies and start trusting them to make their own decisions. People will switch to cleaner products and services, but only when they are affordable, reliable, and clearly superior.

That means government’s role should be restrained: remove barriers to competition, ensure a level playing field, and get out of the way. It should not be setting targets decades in advance or picking winners with taxpayers’ money. The most successful climate policy will be the one that goes with the grain of human behaviour, not against it. Free people, pursuing their own interests, are vastly more effective than bureaucrats with spreadsheets and arbitrary timetables.

Climate policy has gone wrong because it has tried to remake society by decree. It has relied on central planning, subsidy addiction, and political hubris. The result has been higher costs, technological stagnation, and declining public consent. What country would want to replicate the mess that Britain has made?

The great tragedy is that for all the pain imposed by the Net Zero drive, we have done little to nothing to address the problem of climate change. Its advocates had noble intentions, but their ignorance of basic economic principles has had disastrous consequences. To be clear, I believe climate change to be a real and serious threat. That seriousness deserves serious solutions.

There’s nothing at all inevitable about the dominance of fossil fuels in our energy system, but by sheltering alternative technologies from competition you limit their capacity to improve and adapt to meet people’s needs. In this way, Ed Miliband is proving a useful idiot for fossil fuel companies.

If we want to succeed, we must return to the principles that have always delivered prosperity and progress: free markets, individual choice, and open competition. The green central planners had their chance. They failed. Now it is time to let freedom do what it does best: deliver solutions faster, cheaper, and more effectively than any government plan ever could.

Harry Wilkinson is head of policy at the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). He has served as an adviser to Craig Mackinlay in the House of Commons, who chaired the Net Zero Scrutiny Group in Parliament. Harry makes regular media appearances and can be followed on X at @HarryWilkinsonn.