Ed Miliband is Losing the Fight for Net Zero

The Energy Secretary's confidence in 'green jobs' is misplaced

According to various reports of an offshore wind industry conference this week, Ed Miliband has claimed confidence in “winning the fight on Net Zero” against his critics. His main weapon, says the Guardian, is jobs. Billions of pounds of “investment”, reports the newspaper, will “usher in a ‘green industrial revolution’ for workers in manufacturing heartlands such as Teesside, Scotland, south Wales and East Anglia”. But rather than restoring Britain’s forgotten centres of former industrial prowess, and taking on any kind of fight with Net Zero sceptics, all Miliband is doing is repeating extremely tired promises that obfuscate signals from reality.

The word ‘jobs’ in the mouths of wonkish political hacks such as Miliband is equivalent to gifts dropped from the anointed political class to a starving population, like so many chicks begging for worms. They believe that entire industries come into existence by the strokes of bureaucrats’ pencils, executing the political orders from enlightened politicians. In this respect, Ed Miliband’s conceits are exactly the same as Boris Johnson’s, who proclaimed a “10 point plan for a green industrial revolution” in late 2020.

Then, at the height of the Covid debacle, unemployment had reached 5.3%. This fell to 3.6% in the summer of 2022 as the economy emerged from the chaos that Johnson (and many others) had unleashed. Perhaps the ‘green industrial revolution’ was happening.

But perhaps it was not. From there, the unemployment rate rose to 4.1% by the time of the General Election. And since then it has risen again to 4.6%. Percentages often obscure the reality of the numbers. 1,628,000 people were claiming unemployment benefits in May 2024. In May this year, the figure had risen to 1,735,000. A decade ago, the claimant count was just 795,000.

“We are building this new era of clean energy abundance, helping deliver new jobs, energy security and lower household bills through our Plan for Change,” said Miliband, via the Telegraph. This coincides with reports that the Ofgem energy price cap, which was lowered for the quarter beginning July, will likely rise again in October by approximately 3%. Energy companies are further predicting even more rises in the first two quarters of next year, which, if true, will completely undo the modest fall for the July-September price cap.

Miliband’s promises of “jobs” are as good as his promises for “lower household bills”. Yet he seems to suffer no consequences for the failure of either to materialise. Throughout the course of the green agenda, since Miliband was last in office with the energy brief, the same promises of economic growth, jobs and industrial revolution have been made by all parties of government. And the only way these promises have been given a veneer of plausibility is by conceiving of the ‘green’ economic sector as a distinct thing to the rest of the economy.

Of course, if you force, through law, the closure of conventional generation plants and the requirement that energy retailers supply customers with power generated from renewable sources, then the ‘green sector’ will appear to ‘grow’. By the same logic, if some tyrant were to force the closure of your bakery, and to require customers to come to Ben’s Bread Shop, where I sell lower quality produce at three times the price to hungry people with no freedom to choose, then my business will ‘grow’. Thus, the illusion of ‘green growth’ and ‘green jobs’ is created.

There is no market for electricity. Yes, there are suppliers and customers. But the customers are captives, and the sellers are subject to price controls (the Ofgem price cap), and the wholesalers’ and retailers’ profits are guaranteed by legislation and regulations. Visit any so-called ‘price comparison’ website and you will find very little meaningful difference in the offers. Any resemblance to a market is purely superficial.

As then-leader of the Labour Party, Miliband’s great tactic for his catastrophic 2015 General Election campaign was the “weaponisation of the NHS”. Denied the opportunity to lead the country, but now, in 2025, back in power in a smaller office, Miliband’s strategy for winning a smaller political battle is the weaponisation of jobs – i.e., to make the promise of jobs a political issue. If you’re against Miliband’s policy agenda, then ipso facto, you’re against jobs.

It’s an extremely condescending political strategy that requires people to be dim enough to take such a framing for granted and at face value, and insane enough to believe that Miliband means it and is capable of delivering it.

And he isn’t. The statistics from the last 20 years prove it.

Even the Guardian’s attempt to inflate Miliband’s credibility falls flat on its face. Citing analysis from green industry lobbying outfit RenewableUK, the Guardian claims that “55,000 people now work in the UK wind industry”, and that “that between 74,000 and 95,000 people will be needed to meet the government’s plan to quadruple Britain’s offshore wind capacity”. By 2030, it claims, 112,000 people will have “green jobs” in the wind power sector. Green jobs at last?

Well, no. Let’s look again at the unemployment figures. Elsewhere in the Guardian, though pinning the blame on Miliband’s colleague, ONS data are revealed to show that “at least 250,000 jobs were lost since Rachel Reeves’s autumn budget”. Even if we took the green lobbyists’ claims as read, it would not undo even a few months of the Labour Government’s bonkers policies.

Moreover, it was Tony Blair’s own analysis that warned of the risks to the jobs of “700,000 people who work in the oil-and-gas, automotive, boiler-manufacturing and steel-manufacturing sectors and their wider supply chains, which could all be considered at risk from the green transition”. As I reported earlier this year, the former Prime Minister’s putative criticism of Net Zero should not be read that way – he wanted to save Net Zero by selling Britain out to Chinese manufacturers – but the point that Net Zero undermines more jobs than it creates is well observed.

Miliband promises “green jobs” but cannot answer the criticism that these jobs will cost employment elsewhere in the economy. This has been a point of controversy for the duration of the climate policy agenda, with critics explaining this very simple fact as far back as the mid-2000s. But it fell on deaf ears in the news media, and met a brick wall in Wesminster’s offices of all parties. They each merely repeated the promises of green jobs over, and over, and over.

But it is very simple to understand. All forms of green generation are more capital-, labour-, land- and resource-intensive than conventional forms of generation. It doesn’t matter what the so-called ‘learning rate’ beloved of green economists actually is, green technology will always be less efficient with respect to these measures than conventional techniques are. No amount of ‘innovation’ can make it possible to produce usable energy from ambient sources for less manpower, less money, less land and with fewer bits of machinery than is required to produce the same from extremely dense sources of energy, such as coal, gas, oil and uranium.

Green lobbyists leant into the fact of green energy being inefficient with respect to labour, to turn it into a virtue: ‘creating jobs’. And that explains why it the myth of green jobs has persisted. Miliband will perhaps one day say, “Look at all these green jobs I made,” citing the shiny new 112,000 wind workforce. But he will omit from his analysis the 700,000 jobs that he destroyed. He will say he got something right, and that there should therefore be more ‘investment’ in the green sector. Another 112,000 ‘green jobs’ will be ‘created’, but another 700,000 jobs elsewhere will be destroyed.

It is the other inefficiencies that count. It should be written on every idiot civil servant’s forehead: jobs are a cost. That might sound like an argument for mass unemployment. But that’s not how it rolls. When people have money to spend, which is not being spent on utilities, then they spend it on other things. And that spending allows the seemingly spontaneous creation of industries and jobs, without Westminster’s help. As I put it previously: “Look after the cakeshops, and the AI data centres look after themselves.” And by “look after”, I don’t mean subsidise them, or incentivise them, or whatever. I mean simply represent energy consumers’ interests in energy policy. Make Energy Cheap Again. Or more precisely: Stop Making Energy Expensive.

But SMEE is not how Westminsterians think, if they think at all. They believe that jobs and industries are created by politicians, acting on data produced by extremely clever and morally unimpeachable academics and think tanks – Green Blob lobbyists. They think that the ‘green industrial revolution’ must be ‘kickstarted’. And consequently, when the myopic intervention inevitably fails, they think it just needs more ‘kickstarting’ to ‘boost’ the sector back into life. Only bad people could disagree. And that is why Miliband’s weaponisation of ‘green jobs’ is doomed to fail: he cannot even hear, much less comprehend, criticism. He’s a coward, not a fighter, and has no answer to critics. His agenda is a wrecking ball, aimed at and in motion towards what remains of our industries and jobs.