If you want to know what’s happening in a place, ask a cab driver.
On a Sunday afternoon, during a short ride to the British Museum, I asked our cabbie about his energy bills and what he thinks of the British government. For the next 12 minutes, we got an earful. Our driver, Adrian, who was in his 50s, ranted about the British government and its climate policies.
He explained that over the past four years, his energy bill has gone “from three hundred pounds a month to now a thousand pounds a month...Yeah, a thousand pounds a month just to keep the lights on in my house.” When I asked why the prices were increasing, he replied, “It’s the energy policy on green renewables right? It's not letting the market dictate things. We've got, I think, we've got the most expensive energy in the world now. It’s a suicide policy.”
Adrian isn’t far off. As Matt Ridley pointed out last month on Twitter/X, Britain now has the most expensive electricity in the OECD. “That’s what happens,” Ridley said, “if you try to rely on using the landscape to try to extract useful energy from the thin, weak, dispersed and unreliable source that is wind.”
Adrian, the cab driver, isn’t the only Briton talking about suicide. At the ARC conference on Tuesday, Sir Paul Marshall delivered a scathing assessment of Europe’s infatuation with alt-energy. He said Britain’s push for net zero -- and the staggering energy costs that have come with it -- are “acts of national economic suicide.”
After spending a week in London, the signs of the country’s decline and the frustration of Britain’s citizens are apparent.
Near the entrance to the British Museum is a room that discusses the museum’s future. Near an impressive model of the envisioned additions, a placard on the wall talks about the museum’s “ambitious cultural redevelopments” and notes that among the next steps is to “build a new Energy Centre to make the Museum more sustainable and pave the way to reach net-zero targets.”
While Britain’s elites are talking about net zero, the country’s industry is heading for the exits. And despite massive oil and gas resources, the British government refuses to allow more drilling and continues its idiotic ban on hydraulic fracturing.
Last September, Tata Steel closed the last two blast furnaces in Britain. The shuttering of the Port Talbot steelworks in Wales resulted in the loss of 2,800 jobs. However, the symbolism may be as significant as the job losses. By closing the blast furnace, Britain, the home of the Industrial Revolution, will no longer be able to produce virgin steel from iron, coal, and limestone. Instead, it must now rely on electric arc furnaces that recycle scrap steel. The union that represented many of the workers at Port Talbot called the closure of the blast furnaces “industrial vandalism.”
In mid-January, INEOS closed the Grangemouth synthetic ethanol plant in Scotland, which resulted in the loss of several hundred jobs. The facility was one of only two in Europe that produced synthetic ethanol, which is used in the production of numerous pharmaceuticals. Here’s how one trade publication described the closure:
High energy prices and high carbon taxes have forced the closure of this strategic UK asset. The UK, which used to be a major force in chemicals, employing a large and highly skilled workforce, has seen the closure of ten large chemical complexes in the last five years alone and, in complete contrast to the USA, has not had one new chemical plant built for a generation. Energy prices have doubled in the UK in the last five years and now stand five times higher than those in the USA. The UK cannot compete with such a huge disadvantage.
When the plant closed, the chairman of INEOS, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, said, “We are witnessing the extinction of our major industries as chemical manufacture has the life squeezed out of it.”
Britain has enormous oil and gas resources and could quickly reduce its energy prices if it began drilling. Earlier this month, Deloitte published a study commissioned by Egdon Resources, which estimated that the shale formations in Lincolnshire, in a formation known as the Gainsborough Trough, could contain 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough fuel to supply all of Britain’s gas needs for several years. Deloitte estimated the gas field could generate some $180 billion in GDP for Britain and dramatically reduce its need for imported gas.
The Labour government quickly pooh-poohed the idea of producing domestic shale gas. A spokesman for the government said, "We intend to ban fracking for good and make Britain a clean energy superpower to protect current and future generations. The biggest risk to our energy security is staying dependent on fossil fuel markets and only by sprinting to clean power by 2030 can the UK take back control of its energy and protect both family and national finances from price spikes.”
This is national insanity. As seen above, 20 years ago, thanks to drilling in the North Sea, Britain was self-sufficient in gas. Since then, production and consumption have been falling, and the country now relies on imports for nearly half of its gas needs.
Further, the idea of “sprinting to clean energy” is not working. As I reported here on February 5 with the launch of the Global Renewable Rejection Database, rural Britain is in an uproar over the encroachment of massive alt-energy projects. Local regulators rejected four solar projects in January alone, including ones in Wakefield, Springwell, Norfolk, and Kelham.
At the ARC conference on Tuesday, Marshall, who owns GB News, The Spectator, and Unherd, said Britain and Germany are “the patsies of Net Zero.” (My speech at ARC on energy humanism was also on Tuesday. The video has not been posted on YouTube yet.)
Marshall noted that electricity prices for British industry are five times higher than those in the US and seven times China’s. He said renewables are “essentially a parasitic form of energy.” In the 1990s, he said, nuclear energy provided a quarter of Britain’s electricity, “but now Britain only has five remaining plants, four of these are slated for closure in the next five years.” And this: Britain and Germany, he said, are “the patsies of Net Zero.”
Britain, he noted, has “enough gas reserves in the North Sea to cover 35 years of consumption, yet since 2019, the UK has refused to grant any new oil and gas licenses and we’ve even levied a specially designed windfall tax on the existing producers.” He concluded that net zero is immiserating and its main victims are the poor...Cheap and abundant energy is the foundation that underpinned our prosperity. Industry knows this. America knows this. Nations in the Gulf know this. And China knows this.” He went on, saying that unless Britain changes course, it will “simply continue down the path to unilateral economic disarmament.”
During our stay in London, I have asked numerous people about energy costs. In nearly every instance, the response has been a shake of the head or a raising of hands in despair. A bartender at the pub across from our hotel said his energy bill has doubled over the past four years, Our friend, Maddie, who is in London studying journalism, told us she is paying $150 per month to heat her tiny flat.
British citizens understand what is happening to them but feel powerless to do anything about the situation. They have been betrayed by the current Labour government and the Tories. In November, the Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, traveled to Azerbaijan to the UN climate meeting to declare that Britain would aim to cut its emissions by 81% by 2035. The BBC noted that the new “target updates a 78% pledge by 2035 under the previous Conservative government.” Starmer claimed that the British government would not “tell people how to live their lives” and that the “race is on for the clean energy jobs of the future.”
What total and utter bullshit.
While the rest of the world is awakening to the disaster that is alt-energy, Starmer continues to push the discredited notion that “clean energy” creates jobs. It doesn’t. It destroys jobs. Britain is now losing jobs at the fastest rate since the 2008 financial crisis.
While at the British Museum on Sunday, I struck up a conversation with an American who lives in Britain. He runs a private equity firm and splits his time between New York and his place in the English countryside. I asked him about Britain’s economy. He replied, “The last place people are putting money these days is in central Europe. The second-to-last place they are putting it is in Britain.”
London, of course, is as charming as ever. The pubs and shops seem busy, and there appear to be plenty of tourists on the streets, even in the gray days of February. The manager at our hotel told me that 90% of his rooms are booked. But tourism doesn’t create durable, high-paying jobs.
Britain became a world power by making ships, steel, and automobiles. Today, it’s becoming a place that has to rely on sales of pub grub and hotel beds. Short of a massive course correction on energy – that exceeds what President Trump is doing in the US -- it’s clear that Britain’s days as an industrial and economic power are finished.
‘Tis a pity.
This piece first appeared at Robert Bryce Substack.
Robert Bryce is a Texas-based author, journalist, film producer, and podcaster. His articles have appeared in a myriad of publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Time, Austin Chronicle, and Sydney Morning Herald.
Photo: courtesy Robert Bryce Substack
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