The Folly of Climate Leadership: Britain’s Net Zero Masochism and the China Mirage
Tilak Doshi
Aug 15, 2025
It is one of the enduring marvels of political hubris that a small, deindustrialising island nation contributing less than 0.8% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions believes it can “lead the world” into abandoning fossil fuels. This belief – sincerely held by Westminster’s political elites on both the Conservative and Labour benches – has birthed an energy policy that combines moral grandstanding with economic self-harm. The outcome is a textbook case study in how virtue-signalling masquerading as “climate leadership” can hobble an economy while empowering the very geopolitical rivals it purports to outpace.
The latest manifestation of this delusion comes courtesy of Ed Miliband’s “Head of Mission Control for Clean Power by 2030”, Chris Stark. Writing in the Telegraph, Stark urged Britain to emulate China in becoming an “electrostate” – a nation powered entirely by abundant low-carbon electricity – claiming that “we ignore these changes at our peril”. Stark’s premise is as breathtaking in its naivety as it is in its selectivity. China, he tells us, is “laying vast networks of transmission lines, rolling out the world’s biggest fleet of electric vehicles and deploying solar and wind at a scale that dwarfs the rest of the world.”
China’s Net Zero Pledge: Smoke, Mirrors and 2060
It is an attractive picture – if one edits out the inconvenient facts that China remains 60% powered by coal, is permitting two new coal plants a week and is adding annual coal capacity equivalent to the entire UK electricity grid. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), coal consumption hit another new record last year – 8.77 billion metric tons – due to soaring coal use by China and India. In fact, the International Energy Agency reports that China’s coal consumption has ballooned from 1.3 million tonnes in 2000 to an estimated 4.5 billion tonnes today. That is not a typographical error. It is the energy reality.
https://tilakdoshi.substack.com/p/the-folly-of-climate-leadership-britains
