A new pragmatism is infusing the climate debate in the West, driven by voters weary of soaring energy bills and annoyed by increasingly hysterical and patronizing climate rhetoric. From Washington to Westminster, Berlin to Canberra, the political class is confronting a simple truth: aggressive net-zero mandates are delivering present economic pain for unmeasurable and far-off climate gain.
The clearest warning comes from the United Kingdom. The UK’s net-zero law, enacted in 2019, committed the country to zero emissions by 2050. It was hailed as bold leadership, but the reality has been economic sabotage. Industrial electricity prices surged 124% between 2019 and 2024 — quadruple the U.S. increase — leaving the UK with the highest rates in the Western world at 37 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Reform UK, now leading national polls and poised to form the next government, first demanded an end to net-zero targets, condemning their design and cost. The Conservatives, staring at electoral oblivion, hastily followed suit, pledging to repeal the Climate Change Act.
The UK’s plight is no isolated incident — it’s a harbinger of a retreat from the global net-zero experiment recently championed by politicians even in blue U.S. states and across Europe, as well as further abroad.
This broadening dissent largely doesn’t dismiss the reality of the climate issue, but insists that we shouldn’t deny the climate policy costs either. Achieving net-zero emissions will cost hundreds of trillions of dollars and yield benefits that are much smaller. Moreover, even if all wealthy countries were to achieve zero emissions by mid-century, climate models clearly show that the effect would avert less than 0.2 of a degree Fahrenheit of the projected warming by the end of the century, while imposing 8% to 18% reductions in GDP by mid-century.
Enter philanthropist Bill Gates, whose recent memo, issued ahead of the COP30 climate summit, calls for a strategic pivot. He lays out three tough truths: Climate change is serious but “will not lead to humanity’s demise” or the end of civilization; temperature is not the best progress metric; and health and prosperity are our best defenses against it.
Gates highlights that we need to focus on what most effectively boosts human welfare. For the world’s poor, that means tackling hunger, poverty and disease directly.
To respond to climate change smartly, we need to pivot from making energy more expensive to innovation that will eventually make green energy cheaper: investing in R&D to achieve breakthroughs like more advanced nuclear, carbon capture and geo-engineering, and far more efficient green energy generation and storage, rather than driving up all energy prices while subsidizing today’s intermittent and uncompetitive renewables.
Bjorn Lomborg is the president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and the author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First.”/InsideSources
