Preface. Below are excerpts from cost estimates for achieving net zero in Britain. The £7.6 trillion by 2050 leaves out the trillions required for the gobsmacking cost of massive transmission and energy storage systems to back up, store, and balance solar, wind, and other alternative energy resources. Plus the increasing costs of copper and other minerals and metals to construct them as ore concentrations continue to decline and the energy cost to get them out of ores increases. Not to mention the cost of the coal to make the steel and cement in blast furnaces and kilns, and the diesel transportation to move ores and parts to fabrication plants and final delivery.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”, The Preservation of Knowledge, Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
The Staggering £7.6 Trillion Price Tag of Britain’s Net Zero Ambition
By City A.M – Jan 18, 2026
A new report from the Institute of Economic Affairs suggests the UK’s net zero policy could cost up to £7.6 trillion by 2050, significantly higher than the Climate Change Commission’s cumulative estimate of £108 billion. Energy analyst David Turner and others have accused public bodies of using “fantasy assumptions” and not being “truthful” or “transparent” about the true cost of the transition.
A link in this article takes you to:
Turver D (2025) The cost of Net Zero. Institute of Economic Affairs
https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Cost-of-Net-Zero-Turver.pdf
Since 2019, there have been many attempts to put a cost on achieving net zero by 2050, with wildly different results.
Introduction by KRISTIAN NIEMIETZ Editorial Director, Institute of Economic Affairs London, January 2026
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has repeatedly revised down its estimates for the costs of net zero. From an initial cost estimate of £1.5 trillion for an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, the CCC now suggests that the cost of achieving net zero in the 2025–50 period will be ‘just’ £108 billion. Their low estimates of the cost and capital of renewables and low-carbon technologies, led to dramatically underestimating the cost of net zero and greatly overestimated the operating cost savings.
Climate change activists had achieved a near-total victory. Not only had they elevated climate change from a niche concern to a national and international top priority over the course of just a few years, but they had also secured near- unanimous political support for their position, across all major political parties, media outlets and civil society organisations. They had defeated all of their opponents – not just climate change ‘deniers’ (of which there were never that many to begin with), but also people who accepted the findings of mainstream climate science and merely drew different policy conclusions from them. Climate policy had ceased to be the subject of political debate in the conventional sense. It is hard to think of another contemporary example where one side had so completely won the argument
In 2018, a new wave of climate activism started in Sweden, where a youth movement sprang up around teenage activist Greta Thunberg. Within days, it spilled over to the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland, and a few months later, the UK had its own version of it. The Extinction Rebellion movement emerged in parallel. Throughout 2019, there were regular mass climate protests across the UK. This was a movement which refused to accept its own victory. They had already won. In 1990, the UK emitted a little over 600 million tonnes of CO2, so a 26% reduction – the 2020 interim target – would mean cutting those emissions to below 445 million tonnes. That was achieved in 2014, six years ahead of schedule.
The most bizarre aspect of it all, though, was that the political class went along with it, and pandered to the movement. They must have known that, far from ‘doing nothing’ on climate change, they were already doing a huge amount, and at a huge cost. In a panicked rush, the UK Parliament declared a ‘climate emergency’ in May 2019, and since the Climate Change Act 2008 was apparently all of a sudden no longer good enough, in June 2019, it was superseded by what we now call ‘net zero’.
Net zero was essentially a more absolutist version of the original 2008 Act. There was much to criticise about the latter, but at least it was subject to parliamentary debate and scrutiny. Net zero, though, appeared to be the result of a mass hysteria and a terror of being seen to be on the ‘wrong side of history’. To say the very least, it was clearly not a response to any new scientific information that had suddenly emerged on climate change.
Why was there so little interest in the potentially enormous cost of this measure? It probably helped that the new climate movement, even more so than the old one, was at its core an anti-capitalist movement. They managed to create the impression that emitting CO2 is something which benefits only a few large fossil fuel corporations and billionaires, but which the average consumer has nothing to do with. If that were so, the flipside would be that those fossil fuel corporations and billionaires are the only ones who will feel the cost of net zero, while the rest of us will barely notice. Except – we clearly have started to notice.
So I asked energy expert David Turver what I wrongly thought was a simple question: what is net zero actually going to cost us?
It turns out that nobody really knows. There have been a variety of estimates, but they differ wildly from one another, and as Turver shows in this paper, there are good reasons to believe that the truth is closer to the more pessimistic end of the spectrum (if not beyond). The fact that realistic cost estimates are so hard to come by, and that proponents of net zero show no interest in them, is in itself telling us something. But as the cost of net zero is starting to bite, that question will only become more pertinent.
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Go to this pdf to read the pages about costs.