Every improvement in human prosperity has started with a boost in energy. Escaping the photosynthetic trap, that brutal limit on output based on soil and nutrients, was the first great leap as we swapped today’s wood for yesterday’s forest in the form of coal, generating more heat for lower cost. Releasing that energy allowed our cities to boom and ideas to prosper.
What broke us free wasn’t thrift or virtue, it was price. Coal found at the surface around Newcastle in the reign of Charles II was three times as energy-dense as wood. Abundance let us escape scarcity, as has happened with every transition since.
Sadly the Charles our Energy Secretary studied in history was Marx, not Stuart. Ed Miliband believes only socialism, not freedom will change Britain’s energy mix. He’s wrong and that’s risking our carbon-free future.
Clean, cheap power is a prize worth chasing, but you need energy to reach it and the journey from carbon to non-carbon will be one of the most energy-hungry undertakings in our history. The wind turbines, the electricity grids, the fission and, I hope, fusion reactors and the factories that will install it all demand more power, not less. But instead of freeing our industry and innovators, we’re seeing both hollowed out.
Mountaineers speak of the death zone, the altitude above which your body can no longer sustain itself and slowly dies. Soldiers talk about the killing ground, that area you must pass through where you’re most vulnerable and at greatest risk. In both, the temptation, from exhaustion or fear, is to sit and wait for the danger to pass, but it won’t. It never passes. The only way to survive is to keep moving.
Miliband’s carbon strategy is to stop. Instead of generating the energy needed to succeed, he’s holding us back like a panicked lieutenant in no-man’s land. He’s shutting off our cheap, reliable carbon energy and made it harder and more expensive to deliver the clean power meant to replace it. So we are pinned down, paying the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world and watching jobs die all around us. The latest to go was the Denby potteries, which had survived 200 years of war and peace but couldn’t manage two years of Miliband’s virtuous vanity that mistakes paralysis for prudence.
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised: he’s been a socialist flagellant practically since birth. His father was one of Britain’s foremost Marxist theorists and he led Labour from the hard Left, with policies that look punitive even with the high taxes we see today. He wore the nickname Red Ed with pride.
Socialism doesn’t change, it’s all about power – who controls it, and who directs it. Today that’s energy: which firms will get the subsidy, which the bill?
With the need to build data centres and inject life into our digital economy, energy is only going to be more important and higher prices mean lower growth. And we only have a brief time to get this right, or we won’t just see old jobs go overseas, we will ensure the new ones never arrive.
Many others understand the need for cheap power. Even the German Greens have been in governments that burn lignite, a dirty coal, because they surely know Miliband’s dream of net zero without global agreement is just unilateral industrial disarmament.
This socialist vision of utopia exists nowhere. Norway taps the gas fields we share and sells us the energy, and China builds new coal-fired power plants to help make the steel we’ve effectively forbidden to reduce carbon outputs.
Our real emissions have barely moved, they’ve just moved abroad. Poor Ed, he missed the economics lesson that, while taxes are territorial, carbon is global; so we’re paying with our jobs for higher carbon outputs from dirtier industries with lower employment standards overseas. I’m not sure he’s thought this through.