The Net Zero High Priests Are Backing Away. Britain Is Trapped by Law.

After a decade of browbeating governments, investors and industries into abandoning reliable power, the architects of the green transition are finally starting to admit what many engineers warned from the start: you cannot run a modern economy on intermittent energy alone.

Larry Fink of BlackRock has now said the quiet part out loud. Rushing headlong into solar and wind risks global power shortages. That is not a fringe view. It is a belated confession from one of the most powerful cheerleaders of Net Zero finance.

The implications are devastating – especially for Britain.

Because while global financiers quietly row back, the UK is legally locked in. Our energy policy is no longer a strategy that can be adjusted when it fails. It is a statutory obligation, hard-wired into law by the Climate Change Act and enforced through binding carbon budgets.

At the heart of this sits the Climate Change Committee , a body with no democratic mandate that now functions as a shadow government for energy, transport, housing and industry. Ministers come and go, but the CCC’s assumptions remain untouched, even as they collide with physical reality.

Ed Miliband is merely the latest custodian of this system. His task is not to ask whether Net Zero is working, but to accelerate it regardless of cost, consequence or feasibility. Grid warnings, spiralling bills, transformer shortages and mounting curtailment costs are treated as inconveniences, not red flags.

The results are already visible. Electricity bills have exploded. Heavy industry is quietly leaving. Grid stability has deteriorated. Consumers are paying billions in hidden subsidies and constraint payments just to keep the lights on , and this is before the mass electrification of heating and transport has even begun.

This was sold as a green industrial renaissance. In reality it is a de-industrialisation strategy enforced by statute.

Now comes the most grotesque irony of all. The very institutions that drove this agenda , asset managers, global banks, ESG evangelists ,  are beginning to talk about “balance” and “pragmatism”. They will pivot. They will rebrand. They will deny responsibility.

Britain cannot.
We have placed energy policy beyond democratic correction. Parliament has bound future governments to a single pathway, based on assumptions about technology, cost and grid physics that are increasingly untenable. When those assumptions fail, the law demands we press on regardless.

This is not how a serious country governs itself.

Energy systems are among the most complex machines ever built. They require redundancy, resilience and realism , not ideology enforced by courts. No nation should be legally forbidden from changing course when evidence turns against it.

Yet that is precisely where Britain now finds itself.

The question is no longer whether Net Zero was rushed.

It is whether any democracy can survive locking itself by law into an energy experiment that its own architects are quietly abandoning.