In the belief that atmospheric CO₂ is the control knob of ‘dangerous’ impending climate change, Net Zero emerged in the 2010s as the global rallying cry to ‘save the planet’. By the time the Paris Agreement was concluded in 2015, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) established the arbitrary 1.5°C limit on global temperature increase and established the ‘Net Zero by 2050’ policy target for developed countries around the globe. Tilak’s Substack has the story.

But a spate of recent headlines suggests that the ‘Net Zero by 2050’ policy is falling apart. There is a growing realisation across advanced economies that the grandiose project of achieving ‘Net Zero by 2050’ is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. What was once heralded as a consensus across the political class, corporate boardrooms and multilateral agencies now looks increasingly like an edifice of ideology built on a vaporous, oxymoronic ‘consensus science‘. The rising tide of empirical reality — the costs of intermittent renewables, the geopolitical consequences of energy insecurity and the sheer scale of power demand growth from artificial intelligence infrastructure — has swept away the carefully constructed narrative of inevitability around the so-called energy transition.

Yet, as David Blackmon reminds us in his well-subscribed Energy Transition Absurdities Substack blog, “climate alarmism is demoralised but it is far from dead”. It would seem that no amount of evidence on prohibitive system costs of intermittent renewable energy and their adverse impact on energy prices can convince diehard climate doomsters otherwise.

The Crumbling Edifice of Climate Orthodoxy

Last week, Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch pledged to “extract every last molecule of oil and gas from the UK North Sea”, as the Tories seek to distance themselves from their previous support for the country’s Net Zero emissions target. She rightly described the abandonment of domestic resources as “an act of economic disarmament”. It may be doubtful whether Badenoch is serious in her intent to carry out a US-style ‘drill, baby, drill’ campaign if the Tories were to achieve office (an unlikely prospect). But the fact that she was led to make the radical pledge to dump Net Zero is evidence of the waning influence of the globalist climate agenda of drastic decarbonisation.

In its ‘Global Outlook’ published last week, ExxonMobil declared what has become increasingly obvious: the world is burning more coal than ever, and global Net Zero goals are “slipping away”. Earlier this year, a poll of British energy industry Chief Executives revealed that a majority no longer believe Net Zero by 2050 is remotely achievable — a stark departure from the optimism of a decade ago. The once-celebrated European climate consensus has fractured, as Hungarian and Austrian MEPs successfully opposed a motion to fast-track the EU’s 2040 climate target (a 90% emissions reduction), which failed in July 2025.

The cracks in the climate industrial complex are no longer hairline fractures; they are gaping holes. Even some former apostles of the green faith, such as former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, now admit that phasing out fossil fuels is “doomed to fail”. Yet for all this, the machinery of climate alarmism keeps churning. Climate activism is not so much a science-based project as it is a secular religion of the globalist Left. It is a belief system too deeply ingrained in the zealous worldview of its adherents to ever be abandoned willingly. The Malthusian spectre that pervades the climate change movement remains to be exorcised.

Trump’s Counter-Revolution and Paul Krugman’s Fictions

Chief among the shocks delivered to the Church of Climate is the re-election of Donald Trump and the energy counter-revolution he has unleashed. Having already withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement for the second time, Trump has now gone further.

Read the full story here.