Executive Summary

Britain is being sold a dangerous fantasy.

Opposition parties promise prosperity through fossil fuels. Cheaper bills. More jobs. Getting Britain “back on track” by simply abandoning Net Zero. It sounds appealing, particularly to families whose pay slips show the same numbers but buy smaller lives.

Their specific claims – that Net Zero is the sinister force behind thousands of monthly job losses and a 30% premium on energy bills – are demonstrably misleading or false. But vilifying climate policy is easier than confronting uncomfortable realities: that Britain, like much of the West, has become economically overstretched and needs structural adjustment.

Yet the real scandal isn’t the falsehoods, it’s what a retreat from Net Zero would cost Britain.

In tomorrow’s global economy, wealth and power will flow to nations with cheap, abundant, clean electricity. Key players like China and Europe are accelerating clean-tech investment while America’s policy chaos sends capital fleeing overseas.

If Britain abandons Net Zero, UK firms face five immediate competitive disadvantages: trade barriers through mechanisms like the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment, higher cost of capital as green finance undercuts conventional debt, supply-chain exclusion as major global corporations require climate-aligned suppliers, talent flight to countries signalling innovation over regression, and technological stagnation as competitors capture the clean-tech patents and modern manufacturing techniques that will define the next century.

History offers a stark lesson. Defending fossil fuels in 2025 is like defending whale oil in 1860 or horse transport in 1910. The arguments echo across the ages: the incumbent technology is more affordable, better proven, secure. It still works.

But better alternatives exist, and they’re already winning on economics. In today’s fossil-fuel system, two-thirds of all energy is wasted before producing anything useful - that’s nearly 5% of global GDP, just gone. Renewables are already two to four times more efficient.

The tipping point has passed. Britain can double down on its transition leadership or lose it. It can secure wealth and power in the second half of the century or forfeit it.

This isn’t about polar bears or guilt. It’s about competitiveness. Politicians promising prosperity through fossil fuels are rolling the dice on Britain’s economic future.

Energy is prosperity – on that we agree with Net Zero’s opponents. But where they use it to argue for fossil fuel resurgence, we use it to show that abandoning Net Zero is economic suicide. In the decades to come, prosperity will flow to nations with the infrastructure for abundant, cheap, clean electricity – nations that have rallied quickly behind Net Zero. Not those with outdated, inefficient fossil legacies.

A word from the (co-)author.

The Net Zero debate deserves more than soundbites and political point-scoring. This essay can’t cover everything—we don’t delve into nuclear’s role, consumed emissions, the full complexity of infrastructure challenges, or the strengths on which Britain can build to accelerate towards Net Zero. And truthfully, we don’t have all the answers.

What we aim to do is call a pause in the political wrestling match. To make the case that Net Zero should be beyond partisan campaigning. To make the nuances and implications more accessible to business leaders trying to navigate policy chaos. And to offer some practical direction—incomplete though it is—on how they can plan and act to support Britain’s prosperity into the second half of this century.

Despite our best efforts to remain apolitical, the current landscape has made that impossible. When one side makes Net Zero a campaign weapon, examining the evidence inevitably feels partisan. It isn’t meant to be.

I welcome challenge, alternative perspectives, and deeper questions. Where have we missed nuance? What needs a different lens? Where should we push harder?

I hope you find this useful.

Emma Walford
Co-founder, Perigon Partners

The False Promise of Fossil Prosperity

A decade since the Paris Agreement and – beneath the noise – significant progress has been made. Mark Carney warned of the “tragedy of the horizon” urging policy makers and investors to bridge the gulf between short-term decisions and long-term climate risk and many listened. We have wrestled forecasts for global emissions in 2035 down by a third from earlier projections.[i] And, in Britain, territorial emissions have more than halved from 1990 while the economy grew over 80%.[ii]

Yet just as momentum builds, so too does a transnational narrative that conflates fossil fuels with growth and decarbonisation with decline. In the United States, Donald Trump’s claim that he would not let the Green New Deal “rip your jobs away” cast climate policy as a threat to the working class. In Australia, Scott Morrison’s defence of coal – “I’ll never apologise for supporting Australian jobs” – and his resistance to stronger 2030 targets at COP26 reflected the same jobs-versus-environment binary. Across these cases, fossil energy is equated with prosperity and national strength, while environmental regulation is portrayed as an elitist constraint. This narrows the political and public imagination of energy policy across the Anglosphere.

Britain’s Opposition Parties have been quick to hook onto this narrative, pinning hopes of national renewal and economic growth back onto fossil fuels. Pledges focus on ditching the UK’s 2050 Net Zero commitment to “get Britain back on track” by cutting costs, boosting investment, and restoring industrial competitiveness. They rely on a selective presentation of statistics that appear to show decarbonisation has made Britain poorer. But short-term price politics will not deliver long-term prosperity, it will forfeit it.

This binary between cheap energy and environmental responsibility reflects a deeper pattern of either/or thinking that pervades contemporary politics: Innovation or regulation, immigration or integration, pro-business or pro-workers. Such binaries persist not because they reflect reality but because they simplify complex issues into electoral soundbites.

Arguments that Net Zero targets, carbon taxes and wind subsidies have raised bills and cost jobs cast environmental regulation as the enemy of prosperity. Politicians score cheap points with framing like “They believe Britain has a duty to make itself poorer on the altar of Net Zero” (Coutinho, 2025) and “net zero lunacy” (Farage, 2025), obscuring the real causes of energy scarcity: volatile gas markets, policy and pricing frameworks, and chronic under-investment in infrastructure. Portraying these structural failures as technical inevitabilities rather than past, present and future political choices neatly sidesteps responsibility.

The Conservatives’ recent “Energy is Prosperity” speech[iii] situates energy policy within Britain’s myth of progress, invoking Pitt, Peel, and Thatcher as champions of cheap energy to romanticise the fossil-fuel era as a symbol of national strength. Advocates of abandoning Net Zero are quick to proclaim that Britain contributes “only one percent” of global emissions – so action is futile. Yet they simultaneously celebrate Britain’s industrial legacy, built on centuries of carbon-intensive growth. How morally freeing to think Britain’s emissions don’t matter while taking pride in our carbon-built empire.

What is being presented as economic responsibility in abandoning Net Zero is, in reality, incomplete accounting that leaves Britain strategically exposed. While China and the EU align industrial policy with the clean-energy transition, Britain risks chaining itself to industries in decline. “Cheap” energy may offer short-term relief, but it erodes long-term competitiveness by deterring investment, innovation, and integration into low-carbon supply chains. In a global economy where wealth and power flow towards nations with clean, cheap, abundant electricity, dependence on carbon-intensive, inefficient, finite fuels isn’t an asset. It’s a liability.

Beyond the Soundbites 1: Net Zero is losing “thousands of jobs a month” (e.g. Coutinho, 2025). Citing various factory closures, the Conservatives are intent on pinning redundancies on Net Zero. We believe this claim is unsupported / misleading for the following reasons:

1. The closure of Britain’s coal mines – and related c.700,000 job losses – had largely concluded by the 1990s[iv], well before the 2015 Paris Agreement and the UK’s legal commitment to Net Zero (2019). The driver of this was economic: better, cheaper forms of fossil fuels became available, and markets flocked towards them.

2. The UK has been on a cycle of deindustrialisation since the 1960s. Between 1990 and 2015, manufacturing value added as a % of GDP fell from 16% to 9%. Between 2015 and 2024, it fell by a further point to 8%.[v] Attributing recent job losses to Net Zero ignores this broader cycle and is not supported by evidence.

3. Track 1 carbon capture clusters are set to create over 4,000 and support over 50,000 skilled jobs by 2030[vi]. Sizewell C will directly employ around 10,000 workers at peak construction[vii], while the small modular reactor programme – for which Rolls Royce is the preferred bidder – is expected to support 3,000 jobs in North Wales[viii]. Green economy job creation is a critical part of the equation and failure to include is misleading.

4. Research on the labour market effects of the green energy transition finds both positive and negative outcomes with overall effects described as “quantitatively moderate” and tending to cancel out across sectors.[ix]

Lessons from History

History offers a cautionary lens through which to view any argument that equates economic prosperity with the preservation of incumbent energy systems. Earlier transitions certainly suggest otherwise. Much like we see today, the defenders of whale oil in the 1850s and the advocates of horse-powered transport in the early 1900s rationalised incumbency through language of affordability and security. Whaling magnates warned that petrol was dangerous and untested; stable owners insisted that cars were unreliable and that oats, not petrol, sustained national independence. Both positions were, in the immediate context, technically defensible – but they overlooked the deeper structural transformation already in motion.

The same lesson applies today: like any major technological shift, there is a period of upfront investment and adjustment before the benefits can be reaped. Historically, these shifts accelerate rapidly when the new technology (or fuel) becomes more efficient than the old. In today’s fossil fuel system, two-thirds of all primary energy is wasted before it has produced any benefit. That is over $4.6 trillion per year – almost 5% of GDP – just gone. Wasted.[x] The same analysis shows that across energy production, transportation and use, renewables demonstrate already double to quadruple the efficiency of fossil fuels.

Defending fossil fuels in 2025 is like defending whale oil in 1860 or horse power in 1910: it still works, but there are better alternatives, so it is, therefore, not where future wealth and power lie. In these historic cases, the technology that once defined prosperity became the anchor that dragged its defenders into decline. Whale-oil barons had fleets, infrastructure, and capital sunk into extraction; horse-dependent cities had roads, stables, and feed industries optimised for a world that was vanishing. So too today: fossil-fuel assets are becoming, or soon will become, stranded as renewable generation undercuts coal, oil and gas on price and scalability.

There is, however, one critical difference between historic fuel transitions and today. We are no longer shifting from extracting and consuming one fuel to extracting and consuming another with better ‘per unit’ economics: today’s transition will move us beyond those limitations. Yes, the technologies required will extract and consume finite materials from the Earth’s crust. But, once installed, these technologies can keep on harnessing renewable – in other words near-infinite – energy converting it to clean electricity without wastage. [xi]

Fossil fuels will simply be outcompeted. The industrial age that funnelled wealth and power to the big hydrocarbon rentiers and industrialisation leaders is over. This isn’t just a shifting of supply and demand – it’s the collapse of a model that massively enriched a few and held everyone else hostage.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that those with the most to lose are fighting the hardest. The U.S., in concert with the petrostates, has been undermining decarbonisation for decades. Threats of tariffs, legal action and other retaliatory measures have stalled international climate agreements and rolled back sustainability reporting requirements across multiple jurisdictions over multiple decades.

The lesson for countries like the UK, which profited early from the industrial era but now has less to defend, is simple. See the posturing for what it is: the last struggles of a dying economic model that benefited a few and actively harmed many. And resist the nostalgic urge to stay tethered to a status quo that’s already dying.

Beyond the Soundbites 2: “Britain has the highest industrial electricity prices in the world” and “the carbon tax increases bills by 30%” (e.g. Coutinho, 2025). It is true that Britain’s industrial electricity prices are the highest of all International Energy Agency member countries^[xii]; however, it appears to be false that 30% of the price is from carbon levies. Carbon-related costs (taxes and renewables supplements) are estimated to be around 16%^[xiii] – less than £12 per month for the average household.

The broader attribution of high electricity costs to decarbonisation policy is, we believe, unsupported / misleading. Such framing ignores – or falsely attributes to Net Zero – structural factors such as gas-driven wholesale pricing, market design, costs of old and underinvested infrastructure, and political choices on where to place the levy (loading costs onto electricity instead of gas) and what industrial exemptions to offer. It also ignores the counterfactual: if renewables had not replaced some of the gas used in UK electricity generation, bills would have been more exposed to surge in gas prices following Russian’s war on Ukraine (see Beyond the Soundbites 4).

The Competitive Cost of Regression

Anti–Net Zero proponents frame the debate purely in economic terms, yet their own metric is incomplete because it counts the costs of transitioning while ignoring the far greater long-term economic costs of fossil-fuel dependence.

Systems do not exist in isolation. The UK’s competitors and trading partners are global. These key economies (with the notable exception of the US) are doubling down on clean-energy manufacturing, carbon border measures, and long-term modern industrial strategy. Despite the best effort of those with vested fossil fuel interests to undermine progress, the tipping point for a low-carbon transition has passed. Withdrawing from Net Zero now would not sharpen Britain’s competitive edge; it would blunt it, exposing UK firms to five structural disadvantages that are already shaping markets:

1. Trade barriers.

The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM)[xiv], effective from 2026, will levy tariffs on high-carbon imports. UK exporters that no longer align with Net Zero standards will face costs their European competitors avoid. Increasingly, trade agreements - e.g. the EU–South Korea partnership[xv], the New Zealand-EU Free Trade Agreement[xvi] and the pending EU–Mercosur deal[xvii] – embed Paris Agreement compliance as a prerequisite for access. A climate-regressive UK would find new trade negotiations constrained and its exporters penalised.

2. Cost of capital.

Green finance is typically 0.1–0.5% cheaper than conventional debt. ESG-aligned assets now exceed US $30 trillion globally, reflecting the extent to which institutional capital incorporates sustainability criteria.[xviii]

In private markets, institutional investors, including pension and sovereign wealth funds, increasingly make ESG integration a prerequisite for investment. 40% of UK pension schemes now have dedicated climate allocations, while 60% regard climate risk as a core fiduciary responsibility[xix]. Insufficient ESG alignment is becoming grounds for divestment.

This is already happening: Dutch pension fund PFZW withdrew €15 billion from Legal & General, €14.5 billion from BlackRock, and €4 billion from AQR Capital Management due to inadequate climate performance.[xx] A jurisdiction perceived as climate-indifferent will face higher financing costs, weaker investor confidence, and reduced deal flow.

3. Supply-chain exclusion.

Major corporations now require suppliers to report and reduce their emissions. Over 11,000 companies, representing 40% of global market capitalisation, have adopted or committed to science-based targets – which require actions across the value chain. This figure is growing fastest in Asian economies and key sectors such as industrials and consumer goods that dominate global value chains.[xxi]

If the UK retreats from Net Zero, domestic manufacturers will struggle to meet these criteria and risk exclusion from the procurement frameworks of multinationals that define global trade.

4. Talent and innovation flight.

Over 70% of millennial and Gen Z workers consider an employer’s climate stance when choosing where to work.[xxii] This figure rises to 80% in engineering and technology, precisely the sectors where the UK faces skills shortages.[xxiii]

The contradiction is stark: the Conservatives themselves identify advanced manufacturing and AI as “industries of the future”. Yet, these are precisely the sectors where climate reputation matters most for talent and the risk of brain drain is highest.

5. Technological stagnation.

Countries using Net Zero as a modern industrial strategy, directing capital into electrification, renewables, hydrogen and sustainable materials are positioning themselves to capture the technologies, including AI, that will define the next century of growth.

China already controls over three quarters of solar and EV battery manufacturing. Outside the US, private investment in AI was highest in China, then in the UK, with Israel, Canada, and European neighbours close behind.[xxiv] If the UK withdraws from the renewables race, it will find itself licensing innovations it could have developed domestically.

This is not a list of obscure future risks. These are present realities already shaping markets. Politically fuelled Net Zero arguments invert that reality. It is not climate regulation that undermines competitiveness, but the absence of consistent, long-term policy. Successful businesses plan on horizons of decades, not parliaments. When governments pivot with every electoral cycle, capital flows to jurisdictions offering clarity and continuity. China, despite its own challenges, provides consistent long-term signals on clean energy investment – something the UK increasingly fails to do.

If Britain is to legitimately compete in this global context, if it really seeks to “get back on track”, it must recognise that climate action isn’t a constraint on competitiveness – it’s a prerequisite.

Beyond the Soundbites 3: “We’re only 1% of global emissions” (e.g. Coutinho, 2025). Whilst true, we believe this claim is misleading.

The one percent today omits the legacy of the UK’s historical emissions and the global exportation of its fossil-fuel-hungry industrial model. Cumulatively, the UK contributed around 3% of emissions since 1850 and adding the emissions generated under British colonial rule brings the contribution to over 5%, making it the fourth-largest global contributor.[xxv]

The bystander logic underpinning the 1% arguments suggests that because we are small in isolation our contribution is irrelevant. A classic collective-action fallacy. If every country emitting around 1% opted out of the transition, over half of global emissions would be unaddressed.[xxvi]

The Changing Global Context

Nostalgia for an oil-powered past blinds leaders to the reality: the trajectory of global power is shifting. China’s high current emissions are often cited in these circles as evidence that decarbonisation is futile. This is short sighted: those emissions are part of an industrial transformation positioning China as the renewable superpower of tomorrow.

China already controls around 80% of global solar panel production, 60% of wind turbine manufacturing, and 75% of EV battery capacity.[xxvii] Over 400% more Chinese companies have submitted 1.5°C-aligned targets to the Science Based Targets initiative since 2020.[xxviii] With state coordination and long-term capital flows, China is shaping the next phase of industrial dominance through clean energy, not oil dependence.

For businesses, the implication is clear: a UK retreat from Net Zero will render its firms uncompetitive within the emerging world order. If Britain chooses deregulation, it will not gain competitiveness, it will lose relevance.

The United States offers a timely warning. The Trump administration withdrew from the Paris Agreement and sought to dismantle the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). This generated temporary relief for fossil-fuel sectors but sowed long-term uncertainty across energy markets. The rollback of emissions standards and tax incentives disrupted investment flows and eroded the credibility of U.S. capital markets in pricing climate risk. Meanwhile, the European Union and China consolidated dominance in batteries, hydrogen and renewable manufacturing. Deregulatory shifts may generate short-term output gains in selected sectors, but they undermine the structural transformation necessary for sustained growth in a decarbonising global economy.

The U.S. experience reveals three lessons highly relevant to the UK:

1. Capital flows are accelerating. Renewable energy investment reached a record $386 billion in the first half of 2025[xxix], underscoring that capital is flowing aggressively toward clean energy worldwide.

This momentum is highly sensitive to policy signals: the same source shows investment in the U.S. renewable-energy sector fell by around 36% during the same period, while European investment rose by 63%, a shift attributed to “deteriorating policy conditions” and regulatory uncertainty in the U.S. The lesson: capital gravitates toward jurisdictions offering stable, Paris-aligned frameworks and withdraws from those that politicise or weaken their climate commitments.

2. The gap is widening. During the U.S. policy retreat, the EU and China captured global market share in battery manufacturing, electric vehicles, and hydrogen technologies.

76% of global clean-tech factory investment in 2024 went to mainland China. While the U.S. remains the largest provider of clean-tech subsidies, political volatility has put 25% of its public funding at risk of repeal, jeopardising around $110 billion in planned manufacturing projects.[xxx]

The UK, a current leader in offshore wind and green finance, would risk forfeiting its comparative advantage in emerging clean-tech industries if it signalled policy regression. Once ceded, such industrial leadership is costly, and often impossible, to reclaim.

3. Retreat is bad for jobs and businesses. By rolling back federal clean-energy investment programmes the administration is driving clean-energy manufacturing and jobs overseas, despite clean energy being one of the fastest growing sources of jobs.[xxxi]

Additionally, climate retreat harms US enterprises: by attacking disclosure standards and signalling hostility toward climate action, the administration is forcing companies to hide their transition efforts. High-quality carbon disclosure has been positively associated with higher enterprise value[xxxii]. The administration’s climate retreat, by encouraging “greenhushing”, therefore directly undermines the global valuation, competitiveness and long-term capital access of US companies.

The lesson for the UK is that retreating from climate policy is economically harmful: it destroys jobs and suppresses enterprise value. With UK unemployment already at 5%[xxxiii], the U.S. example shows that stepping back from climate leadership doesn’t protect workers or industry, it leaves them more exposed.

A pattern is emerging across advanced economies: nations that anchor competitiveness in fossil infrastructure trap themselves in declining industries. Those that integrate climate policy into modern industrial strategy secure long-term leadership in the technologies and markets – and therefore the power and wealth – of the future.

Those pursuing abandonment of Net Zero mistake opportunity for obsolescence.

Beyond the Soundbites 4: Offshore wind is expensive and “wind farms are being paid £8 billion not to generate electricity” (e.g. Coutinho, 2025). Claims of inflated wind costs are misleading and tend to cherry-pick auction prices to imply that wind power is driving up bills. Research by UCL estimates that wind energy delivered a net financial benefit of £104.3 billion to consumers between 2010 and 2023: £14.2 billion from lower electricity prices, £133.3 billion of avoided natural gas costs, partially offset by £43.2 billion of wind energy subsidies.^[xxxiv]

On the second claim, whilst wind farms are sometimes paid “constraint” or “curtailment” payments to reduce or stop generation when the grid cannot accept the electricity produced, 2024 figures suggested these were in the region of £393 million. The £8 billion figure is therefore false and has been taken out of context from a study commissioned by Octopus Energy to assess the impacts of retaining a national grid pricing system rather than moving to zonal pricing: “Zonal pricing has been shown to save at least £55 billion on energy bills and up to £27 billion in unnecessary grid build. In contrast, retaining the national pricing system locks in higher costs for bill payers, with constraint payments forecast to remain between £2bn and £5bn a year from 2030 onwards, potentially soaring up to £8bn if there are minor grid delays.”^[xxxv]

What Business Leaders Can Do

For British businesses, the implications are clear. Don’t wait for policy clarity—it may not come in time. Instead:

Plan for decades, not parliaments. The five competitive disadvantages outlined above—trade barriers, capital costs, supply-chain exclusion, talent flight, technological stagnation—are already shaping markets. Businesses that position for a decarbonising global economy will outcompete those betting on temporary policy reversal.

Understand your own transition and adaptation. Map where you face costs, disruption, or growth opportunities. Assess your exposure to physical climate risks—extreme weather and ecosystem degradation will intensify before improvements arrive. Identify where policy clarity would help and where volatility hinders.

Use your voice. Business leaders have agency in this debate. When policy creates uncertainty that threatens long-term investment or competitiveness, say so. Make the case for stability and long-termism. Support policies that enable transition, oppose those that create chaos. Your voice matters more than you think—capital flows follow credible commitment, and governments respond to business confidence (or its absence).

Use long-term thinking to create competitive advantage. In an era of policy volatility, the businesses that maintain strategic clarity while others pivot with each election will capture market share, attract talent, and secure cheaper capital. Others might see sharper gains (and falls) but long-termism allows you to prepare for corners we don’t yet know are there and ultimately emerge stronger and more prosperous.

Reframing ‘Energy is Prosperity’

Britain stands at a tipping point—not between the (false) binary of climate action and economic growth – but between economic leadership and obsolescence.

The Opposition has titled their retreat from Net Zero “Energy is Prosperity.” They argue this means protecting fossil fuels, cutting climate regulation, getting Britain “back on track”. Their promise: cheaper bills, more jobs, prosperity restored.

It’s a fantasy built on selective statistics and convenient scapegoats. Net Zero isn’t the cause of job losses or high bills—those stem from decades of deindustrialisation, infrastructure underinvestment, and policy frameworks designed to protect gas over electricity. Blaming climate policy is politically expedient and economically illiterate.

Yet the Opposition is right about one thing: energy IS prosperity. They’re just catastrophically wrong about what that means.

In the industrial era, prosperity flowed to those who – by geographic accident or military might – controlled scarce sources of fossil fuels. That model concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. But renewable energy shatters that scarcity model. What matters now is building infrastructure to convert abundant natural flows into cheap, clean electricity. Tomorrow’s prosperity won’t come from controlling energy but from what can be built on top of it—AI, advanced manufacturing, industries we haven’t yet imagined.

The tipping point has passed. Renewables already undercut fossil fuels on economics. China controls 80% of solar production. Global clean-tech investment hit $386 billion in six months. Trade agreements embed decarbonisation. Pension funds divest from climate laggards.

Britain faces a (true) binary choice. Retreat from Net Zero and expose UK firms to trade barriers, higher capital costs, supply-chain exclusion, talent flight, and technological stagnation. Or double down on transition leadership, building on its successful halving of emissions to date and strengths in renewables, green finance, engineering, carbon capture, nuclear, and AI.

British business leaders don’t need to wait for political clarity that may never come. They can plan for decades while politicians think in election cycles. They can use their voices to demand the long-term policy consistency that enables rather than undermines investment. They can make strategic foresight their competitive advantage while others pivot with each election.

One path leads to managed decline. The other to renewed leadership.

Energy IS prosperity. Which is precisely why abandoning Net Zero condemns Britain to become this century’s whale oil barons and stable owners—clinging to declining industries while competitors capture the technologies, the talent, and the trillion-dollar markets being built on abundant, clean electricity.

The choice is Britain’s. But delay is also a choice, and history rarely offers second chances to nations that choose nostalgia over transformation.

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