This familiar trope persists in the right-wing media - reduce climate policy to sneering attacks on Ed Miliband and avoid engaging with the substance of the argument.
They couldn’t let the year end without one last swing at Ed Miliband.
“Ed Miliband plan is so stupid no sane country would consider it – and now the truth is out,” splashed the Daily Express this week.
The newspaper’s personal finance editor, Harvey Jones, branded the energy secretary a “total liability” who “shouldn’t be in government,” accusing him of pursuing a “lunatic net zero charge” that is “destroying jobs and businesses.”
The criticism quickly turned personal. Jones compared Miliband to a “nerdy teenager reading Spiderman comics in his bedroom,” fantasising about saving the world while ignoring the warning “great power comes great responsibility.”
According to Jones, the energy secretary’s irresponsibility lies in restricting North Sea oil and gas exploration. Anyone unfamiliar with the wider context might conclude that Miliband is acting alone, heedless of reality.
But as we know, he’s responding to the warnings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body convening the world’s leading climate scientists, which has made clear that governments must slash emissions this decade to avoid catastrophic damage to lives, food systems, wildlife and economies.
If that’s “lunacy,” it’s shared by the global scientific consensus.
This is not to deny that how fast the UK should move, and how the transition should be funded, are legitimate political questions.
A recent, first-of-its-kind report by the National Energy System Operator (NESO) sets out several scenarios for reaching net zero by 2050 and estimates their costs.
Predictably, parts of the press seized on claims that households could save around £500 a year under a slower transition.
But those headlines rely on two major omissions. First, they largely ignore the cost of carbon, treating climate damage as if it were free. Second, they gloss over the complexity of how energy system costs are actually passed on to consumers.
Critics argue that abandoning the legally binding 2050 net-zero target could save the UK around £14bn a year by adopting NESO’s “falling behind” scenario. Yet the report itself cautions that this approach merely delays costs rather than avoiding them, and that beyond 2050 the bill would likely be higher due to increased fossil fuel prices and escalating climate damage.
Much of the projected “cost” of net zero is not about energy bills at all. It includes investments such as replacing ageing petrol cars with electric vehicles or swapping gas boilers for heat pumps, costs households incur anyway as old equipment wears out.
A slower transition would also mean forfeiting the non-financial benefits of net zero, including cleaner air, better public health, a more resilient natural environment, and stronger trade relationships with economies moving faster on decarbonisation.
As the report itself states: “It would be wrong to interpret a delay in this cost as implying that the cost is avoided entirely.”
Still, this familiar trope persists in the right-wing media – reduce climate policy to sneering attacks on Ed Miliband and avoid engaging with the substance of the argument.
The irony is that most people are concerned about climate change in the UK, and more than six in ten support the government’s commitment to net zero by 2050.
And if Ed Miliband really is the “lunatic” the headlines insist he is, one question remains: why has the right-wing media spent years so obsessively attacking him? Just maybe it is because he is that rare thing – a politician who believes in the policies he advocates and has taken the trouble to establish their validity. That makes him different and if we have learned one thing from the recent Farage schooldays revelations, right-wing politicians and their media allies cannot abide difference. They are far happier with the lying, cynical politicians whom they recognise.
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