How I got red-pilled on energy policy

We can't afford to be ignorant

“The worst illiterate is the political illiterate. He hears nothing, sees nothing, takes no part in political life. He doesn’t know that the cost of living, the price of beans, of flour, of rent, of medicines all depend on political decisions. He even prides himself on his political ignorance, sticks out his chest and says he hates politics. He doesn’t know, the imbecile, that from his political non-participation comes the prostitute, the abandoned child, the robber and, worst of all, corrupt officials.”

~Bertolt Brecht

In the summer of 2012, I was the Greek delegate to the Foreign Affairs Committee at the European Youth Parliament summit in Tallinn. The topic was the following:

Defence policy making in an energy-dependent Europe: What should be the European priorities in the context of the NATO EU Russia relations?

I was 17 and could not care less about energy policy. I loved debating and politics and had made peace with being a ‘bleeding heart liberal’. In hindsight, I was idiotically oblivious to Europe’s energy policy's role in all the humanitarian causes I was intuitively drawn to.

It took many more years of working on caring for humans in the here and now before I widened my vision. I moved to London in September 2012, studied Law and volunteered in legal advice centres. Before working in Parliament, my first job was at a debt advice service at Toynbee Hall, an anti-poverty community centre in Tower Hamlets. I also represented people in social security tribunals who were appealing their rejected benefits applications amidst Tory austerity and botched privatised benefit assessments. I felt immensely fulfilled every time I received a handwritten note from someone whose life had one less stressor because of me. My political interests remained human-centric.

While YIMBYs made housing policy fashionable during the pandemic, I specialised in human rights, criminal justice, and welfare. Once again, I was a bit bored every time I was surrounded by fellow policy wonks obsessed with building, just like I was a bit bored at 17 talking about pipelines in hostile states.

I came around to its importance as I worked for a homelessness charity. As a fleeced millennial renter in London myself, I could see the direct impact of failed housing policy. Still, planning regulations did not yet keep me up at night.

All of this changed when I got into political commentating.

How I broke into TV is a funny story. A friend recommended me to a producer as someone who could comment on Parliament’s sexual harassment culture when one of the many scandals broke off because I had experience of it. I owe my political commentating career to creepy old men.

Very quickly, producers were asking me to comment on topics that I had, at best, superficial knowledge of. It is a sobering experience when you realise how little genuine expertise makes it to mainstream media. The turning point came during a three-hour, non-stop morning show where I was a ‘presenter friend’, i.e., the person the presenter relies on to reflect on the news items, rebut the guests, and fill any dead space. I had no breakfast and was feeling dizzy from low blood sugar and the hot studio lights when a reporter came to announce breaking news: someone called ‘Navalny’ had been reported dead. The presenter turns to me for a reaction. I have no idea who Navalny is. I pick up keywords, ‘Russia’, ‘Putin’, ‘EU’, ‘gas’, and ‘defence spending’, and go into autopilot about the escalating challenges Putin poses to Western democracies. I survive but feel deep self-loathing for my inability to know everything, everywhere, all at once.

When the show ends, I run out, pick up a bacon sarnie from the canteen, and vow never to be found speechless again. I decided that other people could skim through the news for leisure, only reading whatever caught their eye, but I would read everything. Every time I stumble on a policy area on which I have yet to form an opinion, I will take the time to research it and decide on my own terms what I think about it.

For the first six months of political commentating, I cut out alcohol and restricted socialising to a minimum. My preference was for free weekends so that I could read and write without interruption. I preferred this ascetic life. It meant I would never feel dread and regret live on air. As I forced myself to pick sides on technical policy areas, I realised that all the social issues that animated me depended on getting these right. You care about homelessness; you need to care about planning. You care about human rights; you need to care about defence. You care about wealth inequality; you need to care about taxes and pensions. You care about the cost of living crisis; you need to care about energy.

If you were a young person in politics 15 years ago, you most likely became interested in energy policy because of climate change. This focus meant that I - and many others like me - viewed energy production almost exclusively through a critical lens. We were quick to condemn polluting energy sources, but rarely did we acknowledge the full value of energy production: powering hospitals, schools, housing, and all the services that we wanted to see more of. With this mindset, it was easy to campaign passionately to close down polluting facilities while seldom advocating for energy production itself because, in the West, energy security was taken for granted. The government was expected to ensure that electricity remained constant and affordable, but it was also assumed that they would only address environmental issues when pressured.

If you want to feel depressed about where this mindset has led us, you couldn’t do better than read Dieter Helm. He takes climate change seriously and his central thesis is that the UK's ambition for net-zero electricity by 2030 is a delusion. He contends that this accelerated timeline is unattainable, relying on unproven technologies and underestimating the colossal investments required. He says this reckless pursuit threatens to inflate energy prices, decimate industrial competitiveness, and fracture the political consensus essential for effective climate action.

Helm is one of the few prominent energy communicators (and highly credentialed Oxford professor) who are both genuinely alarmed by climate change and believe net zero is a damaging policy. There are others, usually from the pro-nuclear milieu, like Michael Shellenberger, a controversial figure, who concedes climate change needs to be tackled but disagrees it is as bad as climate activists would have you think. The vocal and overwhelming majority of campaigners believe that net zero is the right goal, and its efficacy has scientific backing.

The main argument is not about whether net zero should be achieved but how and when. In that, Helm correctly identified in his ‘Net Zero’ book that illusions about the economic impact of climate change policies have left the door open for climate change-denying populists to frame net zero policies as elitist and anti-growth. It is precisely what is happening in the UK right now, with Nigel Farage declaring he will tax renewables and Kemi Badenoch reacting to Reform’s electoral threat by u-turning on the Tory flagship net zero policy.

Many people have lost faith in net zero, and the consensus on climate change is starting to crack because we have failed to produce enough energy to prevent the death of British industrialisation. As a result, we have created an economy almost entirely based on things both meaningless and easily wiped out by AI: consumption and services. While the UK is becoming poorer, other countries who don’t share our values, like China or Russia, have continued to invest in the worst polluting energy production, like coal, to power their industries and produce more consumer goods to export to eager cash-strapped Europeans.

While we may have closed our mines, we still depend on exports produced in coal-powered factories. It is true that now we produce more energy from renewables than we used to, but it is optimistic to think that renewables are rapidly replacing fossil fuels. Our energy needs are cumulative, as Fressoz argues. Renewables depend on gas and oil when supply is intermittent. If they aren’t in the future because of technological advancement, other materials like rare minerals may be needed in huge quantities, as Tooze says in his response to Fressoz. The exact degree to which this is true is disputed (see here for

Adam Bell

’s rebuttal to the Foundations essay by

Sam Bowman

,

Ben Southwood

and

Sam Hughes

, which sounded the alarm on renewable’s dependence on fossil fuels), but the fact that we need gas and oil to transition to renewables at all is not.

The other thing every energy policy nerd will rant to you about if you let them - and this essay argues you must - is the difference between unit pricing and systems cost. In simplistic terms, we shouldn’t just look at how much each unit of energy costs to assess which source is better; we should also look at how much the whole system costs: transmission, distribution, balance and reliability. For example, if you have an offshore wind farm that produces cheap electricity but then you have to fork millions to carry that energy where it is needed and then billions more to, for example, defend its pylons from attacks from hostile states as Helm gloomily discussed in his latest depression-inducing podcast then wind energy is not as cheap as you said.

I am simplifying many of the points above, but this is what the average dopamine-depleted, politically switched-on person needs to engage. Energy policy is complex, and people only grasp the bits that affect them: voters look at their wallets, politicians look at their cash-strapped electorate and donor class, and journalists look at the most simplistic communicators who will make the best headline. Most people have a semi-informed position on policy areas like health, education, justice, welfare, transport and tax because they come in direct contact with its main mechanisms throughout their lives. With energy, all they know is their bills, which fall under the cost of living/business. We take the lack of blackouts for granted, but their return is more likely than ever. Perhaps because politicians, journalists and activists have been wilfully ignorant of the unglamorous technical details of our energy choices, we have reached the breaking point we have.

To that end, I recently discovered

Ed Hezlet

, a buy-side equity analyst who is critically analysing wind energy policy and, as far as I can tell, has no ideological bias. For example, in one post, he sets out to analyse offshore wind revenues per megawatt-hour (MWh). To do that, he sources revenue figures from Companies House. He combines them with electricity generation data from the Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin (REGO) scheme to calculate revenue per MWh for each wind farm. This is comprehensive stuff I have not found anywhere else, not for free anyway- God’s work.

Energy in the UK has a communication problem because those who understand its nuances and face its trade-offs are unlikely to pull off the simplistic populist narratives dominating. Climate change campaigning is unsuited for populist political times and empty treasury coffers, so more people must get curious about how different policy areas interact and what happens under the bonnet to achieve our goals. But if we learnt one thing from the YIMBY movement, it is that you can bring people from both sides of the political spectrum together to create an unstoppable policy consensus. You just need to tell the right story.

P.S. Tomorrow, I will be joining

Lawrence Newport

and Joe Reeve’s Looking for Growth policy summit in London. If you see me come say hi and tell me your burning niche policy concern rent-a-gobs like myself need to be highlighting on our rage-baiting telly rants.