Ditching Net Zero would deliver the biggest Brexit dividend of all, an energy consultant has said, ten years after the historic referendum to leave the EU. Rupert Darwall believes the former consensus on climate targets has been shattered and says the race to power AI will further widen these fault lines. Staying in the EU would have left Britain “trapped by green politics”, he says. But, on the outside, the country would be able to ditch Net Zero targets with a single Act of Parliament. This means that while Europe is doomed to a “self-inflicted decline”, the UK still has options, the former energy adviser to the Treasury argues.
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Energy prices in both Europe and the UK are high, partly due to carbon taxing measures, which increase the price of fossil fuels to discourage their use. The Emissions Trading Scheme is one of the EU’s most powerful weapons against climate change. It requires factories and power plants to pay for permits for every tonne of CO2 they produce. The UK has its own version of the scheme. But the Tories have pledged to scrap these carbon levies altogether, with Reform also vowing to row back on Net Zero.Mr Darwall, who served as a special adviser to the Treasury under the John Major administration, says such a move would not have been possible while we were an EU member.He believes it is needed, not least to deliver the cheap power required by AI.He said: “I think being able to dump Net Zero is probably the biggest single win from Brexit, because all it needs is one election, one new Act of Parliament, and Net Zero is gone.“That’s not the case in Europe. Institutionally, it is locked in. They are trapped by green politics.“You’ve got the head of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, giving the absurd quote, ‘the least expensive energy is the energy we do not use’.“They are believers in that. So much of it is part of the EU’s institutional identity – you just can’t get rid of this stuff. Well, that is dead in the world of AI.“And what Europe is doing is weakening its economy, and therefore making Europe weaker, and that’s the big geopolitical picture over Europe – it’s in self-inflicted decline.”Powering AI is causing heated debate and the Government has set up an AI Energy Council to discuss how to approach it. It has been argued that Net Zero targets and embracing AI are both possible, with a decarbonised grid providing clean electricity.The AI sector has already attracted more than £100billion in private investment under the current Government, which has pledged to “create the right conditions” for investment to continue.It has created AI Growth Zones across the UK and is launching a consultation on discounting energy costs in areas such as Scotland and Cumbria, where there is an excess of electricity supply.LATEST DEVELOPMENTS:Huge fire rips through industrial site near Liverpool with billowing plume of smoke seen for milesLabour candidate and youth worker among three brothers jailed for grooming abuse crimesBird species on ‘brink of extinction’ sees three hatchlings born at Blackpool ZooIt has previously said it is looking into accelerating investment in the development of low-carbon technologies, including nuclear Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).AI itself could play a role in running a modern, efficient and sustainable energy system, it says.But critics say that the power needed to run the tech is incompatible with the intermittent capabilities of wind and solar.Tech firms behind data centres have already signalled an intent to look for alternatives. Planning documents for Britain’s first proposed “nationally significant” data centre in Wapseys Wood, Buckinghamshire, include a gas-fired power station to provide “a resilient and reliable power supply” for the £2billion project.Shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho has said that cheaper bills are needed it the UK is to maximise domestic tech investment, Mr Darwall agreed cheaper electricity was the key to AI success and argued Net Zero was holding this back.He said: “You are not going to be at the forefront of the AI revolution with the most expensive electricity in the Western world, it’s as simple as that.“If Britain is going to have a portion of the AI revolution, it needs cheap energy. Net Zero could be binned on those grounds alone. I think that’s a tectonic shift.”Mr Darwall said that some tech companies – previously enthusiastic backers of climate goals – were reassessing what was achievable. He said: “The tech oligarchs recognise that AI requires prodigious amounts of energy. But, most of all, it requires incredibly reliable energy. They talk about the ‘five nines’, which means 99.999 per cent reliability.“Quite obviously, you can’t get that from wind and solar. That in turn means they need other sources, such as nuclear or a lot more gas-fired electricity.“That is a huge shift. Essentially, Silicon Valley, which used to be signed up to the climate agenda, and which used social media outlets to censor ‘climate disinformation’ – that’s all over.”The senior fellow at Washington think tank, the National Center for Energy Analytics, also highlighted Sir Tony Blair’s intervention last month.The former PM called for a ‘rethink’ on energy policy and believes that cheap power should be the goal.Mr Darwall, author of Green Tyranny, said: “I think it’s an incredibly important intervention. It gives permission for people to talk about what they talk about in private, in public.“It wasn’t an intervention from the right – it was from what Tony Blair calls the radical centre. “In his essay, he asks what power is derived from. He says, from the strength of a country’s economy and the strength of its military capacity. He goes to say that nothing should get in the way of growth.“What he doesn’t say is that doing that requires repealing the Climate Change Act. The act imposes on the Government of the day a legal duty to pursue the decarbonisation target.“That means that the government can’t do the sensible things that Tony Blair wants them to do with energy policy, because then they get taken to court by green NGOs and vested interests and so forth, and the courts would overrule ministers.”Mr Darwall further pointed to comments made by Bill Gates last year, in which the Microsoft founder appeared to row back on the threat posed by climate change.Mr Gates wrote: “Although climate change will have serious consequences – particularly for people in the poorest countries – it will not lead to humanity’s demise.“This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives.”Mr Darwall said that these interventions demonstrated there was no longer a fixed consensus on how to deal with climate change. This opened the door to wider discussion, he said.Previously, to argue against the consensus had been to invite criticism or be labelled a “climate denier”.Mr Darwall explained: “It’s a form of moral blackmail.“Catastrophism is essential to the moral blackmail, and that is that if you oppose or question any of these measures, you are on the side of destroying the planet.“That is an immensely powerful gambit.” But, while many politicians remained in a “renewable bubble, Mr Darwall said: “It is fast bursting elsewhere.”A spokesman for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said: “Through building unprecedented amounts of low-carbon generation at home, our Clean Power Action Plan will enable the development and growth of new energy-intensive industries such as data centres.“Data centres are a vital part of our economy and our everyday lives – helping us interact with the services we need, while driving growth and renewal for communities.”The Government has maintained that shifting to clean energy would not just be better for the climate but would take the UK off the “rollercoaster” of volatile fossil fuel prices.It says renewables are also better for energy security, pointing to events such as the Iran war as examples of geopolitical energy shocks.
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