Last week the Climate Change Committee warned that we must prepare for a world hotter than 2°C by 2050. But we’re already seeing an increase in extreme weather events. The physical impacts of climate change cost the global economy at least $1.4 trillion last year and have risen 10-fold since the turn of the century.  

Without new renewables in the UK, we’ll continue to import billions of pounds worth of gas to meet the rising demand for electricity, priced on volatile international markets, leaving billpayers exposed to unnecessarily high prices. In 2022, we saw the single biggest energy subsidy in the UK’s history when the Government spent over £40 billion subsidising the cost of gas to shield consumers from skyrocketing bills.  

And let’s not forget that gas resources are finite. According to RenewableUK, if the UK were to meet its rapidly increasing electricity demand in the coming decade without new renewables, it would need to more than double its gas imports. There is no credible way the UK could source this gas through additional North Sea extraction. Even if every potential North Sea discovery was brought into production, it is estimated that this would only be sufficient to meet between 5% and 10% of the country’s electricity demand by the early 2030s.  

In contrast, renewables provide a homegrown, low cost means to meet rising demand. Wind and solar offer a stable price of electricity, unlike gas, which changes based on the international market. But because of the UK’s current market pricing system, gas sets electricity prices in the UK so billpayers don’t benefit. Research suggests that reducing emissions by 87% by 2040 could help cut household costs by £1,400. And wind and solar are already supplying a large chunk of our electricity demand. Last year renewables provided more than half of the UK’s electricity needs, with wind generating around 30% of total demand.  

Not to mention the huge economic opportunity we’d be missing out on by dampening net zero ambitions – the UK’s wind industry alone employs around 55,000 people in high value jobs, a figure that is expected to rise to over 110,000 by 2030. And just this week the government announced plans to create an extra 400,000 clean energy jobs by the end of the decade. It’s also estimated that over the past ten years more than £550 million has already been locally invested through Community Benefit Funds (payments made by developers of renewable energy infrastructure to the local community). This figure is expected to rise to £150 million annually if Government ambitions to 2030 are met.  

Tackling climate change comes with costs, but what we can see here is that the price of inaction is likely to prove far greater. The cost of adapting to rising sea levels and other climate impacts, plus the disruption of dealing with man-made ‘natural disasters’, will dwarf the opportunity to implement net zero. So, amongst the noise let’s not lose sight of the huge opportunity we have to build a cleaner, more prosperous future for people and planet.