Green Elites, Not Beijing, Broke Britain

The real threat to Britain isn’t China, it’s its own climate zealotry

As was reported here back in March, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ed Miliband, flew that month to China to “restart meaningful climate change dialogue”. “The global battle against the climate crisis needs China,” explained Miliband at the time. However, reports are now emerging that, as much as the UK’s Net Zero policy agenda requires China in some unstated capacity, the public do not need to know what that deal (and the “global battle”) requires of them. According to the Telegraph, Miliband now “refuses to publish details of green energy deal with China”. This has further inflamed the phoney climate war between the Government and the opposition, and has drawn others into the fray. But it’s a bit late now, to start worrying about how the detail of Net Zero policies are undermining Britain’s security interests.

The Telegraph cites Miliband’s opposite, Claire Coutinho, who fears that “Intelligence services have warned us about Chinese state-sponsored hackers infiltrating Western energy systems” – an allusion to the putative discovery of “Rogue communication devices found in Chinese solar power inverters”, reported earlier this year. Though seemingly shocking, it is very far from unusual for such devices to have online functionality. Moreover, while such designs that were discovered were a potential security risk, that fact is very far from a demonstration of nefarious intent. It may better reflect shortcomings of design specification – sloppy implementation rather than spyware. The pace of China’s industrial development has been phenomenal but unevenly regulated by official bureaucracies and less formal standards.