For nearly two decades, Britain’s climate lobby has operated from a position of near-total dominance. It has shaped national policy, set the terms of debate, and enjoyed unrivalled access to ministers and advisers. Public institutions echoed its priorities, dissent was marginalised, and it was lavishly funded by both the state and Big Philanthropy. Royalty and celebrities endorsed the cause. A technocratic consensus took hold and hardened.
Since 2008, its success lay not merely in claiming that climate action was necessary, but that it would make us richer, healthier, and more secure. Green policies, we were told, would lower bills, create jobs, and free us from petrostates such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This was Net Zero as win-win: a moral imperative and an economic opportunity to be seized.
That message mattered. For years, working-class voters saw environmentalism as a luxury belief — the preserve of affluent types who could afford to fret about carbon footprints. In the 1970s, during an earlier green moment, Labour stalwarts haunted by mass unemployment of the 1930s dismissed such ideas as indulgent. Anthony Crosland called them “morally wrong.” Tony Benn, then Energy Secretary, sneered in his diaries that the environmental movement was “overwhelmingly middle class”.
The promises of a painless transition and shared prosperity have not materialised
So the message evolved. By the 2010s, green politics was no longer about hair-shirts or limits to growth. It was about cleaner air, cheaper energy, and energy independence. You could keep your consumerist lifestyle — just switch to a sustainable version. The transition would be frictionless. The costs would eventually pay for themselves.
For a time, this framing held. It offered cover to politicians and reassurance to voters. It allowed the consensus to entrench.
But that consensus is now rapidly crumbling.
The promises of a painless transition and shared prosperity have not materialised. The UK has some of the highest industrial energy costs in the developed world. British heavy industry is in retreat and our prospects in emerging sectors like AI are under threat. After two decades of record investment in intermittent renewables, energy imports are up and, as the Office for Budget Responsibility recently outlined, the UK was left dangerously exposed when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Wider strategic realities have shifted too. Great-power competition is back, and placing the West on a pre-war footing now matters far more than climate diplomacy. The idea that Britain can “lead by example,” regardless of what China, India or the US do, looks increasingly naïve.
And people have noticed. Yes, support for Net Zero in the abstract remains high. But support for its practical consequences — the cost of living and lifestyle constraints — is collapsing. A so-called “green backlash” is brewing across the West. You can see it in national polling, with Reform riding high. Mainstream political figures and trade unions, from Tony Blair and Kemi Badenoch to the GMB and Unite, are challenging the consensus head-on.
Understandably, the climate lobby is feeling the pressure.
Tony Benn once predicted that environmentalists would be “drawn into the mainstream of establishment opinion”. So it has proved. But now, confronted with scepticism and declining trust, the climate establishment is reaching for its oldest reflex: double down, deflect blame, and pathologise dissent. Rather than reflect on its failures, it clings to technocratic authority, shuns debate, and recasts criticism as conspiracy.
One recent example is a video fronted by online science communicator Simon Clark, featuring Dr Simon Evans of Carbon Brief — a platform funded by the European Climate Foundation. The video purports to address public concerns about Net Zero. But its real function is clear: to reassert elite control over the terms of debate.
It pretends to engage in dialogue — acknowledging that energy bills have risen, that the UK is responsible for only 1 per cent of global emissions, and that it is “reasonable” to question costs. But this is nothing more than rhetorical window-dressing. The framing isn’t “let’s debate the trade-offs,” but “let us explain why your concerns are misinformed.”
Dissent isn’t engaged with. It’s managed. Scepticism is presented not as a response to lived experience — high bills and job losses — but as the product of dark-money, fossil-fuel propaganda, misinformation and populist manipulation.
One moment in the video borders on self-parody: we are told that Britain is “lucky” to have the “independent” Climate Change Committee. Only in elite circles is a group of unelected technocrats prescribing national policy seen as a stroke of fortune.
It doesn’t name the green backlash. But it drips with fear of it. What’s striking isn’t the message, it’s the tone: defensive, controlling, desperate to hold the line. In no sense can this be described as a confident defence of a settled agenda. Instead, it feels like a rearguard action.
If this all feels familiar that is because it is. None of it is new. We’ve seen this playbook before — during the Brexit revolt, the backlash against globalisation and mass migration, and even the Iraq War. In each case, the establishment responded, not with humility, but with control. Not by listening, but by lecturing. And each time, it deepened the crisis of legitimacy facing our political institutions.
Net Zero was sold as painless and profitable. The reality is higher bills, grid instability, and deindustrialisation.
This isn’t a communications or messaging problem. It’s an SW1 establishment delusion that’s finally colliding with the laws of physics and economics. Low-density and unreliable sources of energy cannot support a modern industrial economy without massive and permanent state subsidy.
For now, the climate lobby still holds sway in official circles. But it is losing the wider argument. With their energy bills rising, the public can see with their own eyes the promises were false and they are prepared to vote for change.