Net Zero Is A Big Fat Zero For Economic Growth

By Issues & Insights Editorial Board | March 10, 2025

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions was going to save the planet at no cost. Turns out it’s an economy wrecker, which is more feature than bug for many a climate alarmist.

Kallum Pickering, chief economist at Peel Hunt, a London-based investment bank, took on the claim of Labour Party British Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who said that pursuing net zero greenhouse gas emissions didn’t require a deceleration of economic growth. What he found was “sad to say,” but he stands by the facts.

“The result of the UK’s decarbonization efforts appears to be weak economic growth, stalling living standards, high energy prices and deindustrialization – without denting rising global emissions,” he wrote last week in the Telegraph.

“Net zero is strangling our economy,” says the headline over Pickering’s column, because “limiting available electricity has stifled productivity.”

On the Peel Hunt website, Pickering explained that data from 189 countries indicated there is “a strong positive correlation between living standards and energy consumption – showing a clear link between falling energy capacity and weak productivity in the UK.” He notes that “the decline in UK electricity supply, which started in 2006, coincided with the start of structural weakness in productivity growth.”

Bluntly put, without cheap and reliable energy, which is what we get from fossil fuels, an economy turns sclerotic. Which is why the political left works so feverishly to end gas and oil. As we have said so many times before, the agenda behind cutting greenhouse gases is in actuality an assault on capitalism, which, as the legendary Milton Friedman famously said, is the only economic system that has enabled the masses to escape from “grinding poverty.”

There’s no better example than Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s New Green Deal, which her office called a “jobs and justice-centered plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy within 10 years.” But that was merely a cover for a much more sinister objective. “It wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” according to the New York congresswoman’s former chief of staff, it was a “how-do-you-change-the-entire economy thing.”

The New Green Deal didn’t pass. But Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act did, and it was “badly mistitled and intentionally so,” says H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute.

“In truth, the IRA was nothing more nor less than a backdoor effort to impose the Green New Deal scam that Biden and company had tried and failed to pass through Congress previously,” he adds.

In his 1979 television faceoff with the late, and hard-left, Phil Donahue noted above, Friedman also said that “if you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from” capitalism and open markets. Which is exactly what the climatistas are working toward, and they’ve had some success in the United Kingdom.

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