Zero Net Climate Policy as a Threat to National Security

Sir Richard Dearlove's lecture to the Global Warming Policy Foundation is not a climate-science paper. It is a security brief. A former head of MI6 is saying Britain has built an energy system that hostile states can squeeze, sabotage, or simply wait out, and that Net Zero, as currently practised, is part of how that system got there.

That claim is easy to caricature as "climate denier versus the planet." It is more useful to treat it as a three-layer problem: what the grid actually depends on, who can break those dependencies, and what Net Zero does to the country's ability to recover.

Dearlove's frame is standard intelligence work. Threats come in three kinds. Direct attack from a hostile state. Vulnerabilities we create ourselves and others then exploit. Threats we misidentify, so we prepare for the wrong war.

Russia is the first kind: grey-zone sabotage, underwater cables, pipelines, interconnectors. China is mostly the second: long-horizon industrial capture, rare earths, transformers, electrical steel, buses with manufacturer software, United Front influence that treats Western movements as useful terrain. Weather is a natural hazard. You build a Thames Barrier for that. You do not confuse it with an adversary who has a doctrine, a budget, and a queue at the transformer factory.

Net Zero enters as policy that rearranges the second layer. If you shut domestic hydrocarbons, load the grid with weather-dependent generation, import the hardware, and hollow out the factories that once absorbed a shortage, you have not "decarbonised the threat." You have changed who holds the spare parts.

Fifty years ago the UK still had heavy industry. Factories were both a customer for power and a shock absorber: in a pinch you shed industrial load and kept households alive. That interruptible mass is largely gone. Industrial final energy use has collapsed as a share of the total. What remains is a consumption economy that moves people and imported goods. When the grid fails, there is nowhere to park the shortage except living rooms, hospitals, and water pumps.

Worse, the country has lost the ability to rebuild the energy system itself. Large transformers now take years. Grain-oriented electrical steel, no real substitute, is concentrated in China, with two stressed European producers left. Design talent can still sit in friendly countries. The material does not. In a crisis you join a queue or you beg. That is not energy policy. That is logistics owned by someone else.

China has spent decades building exactly this kind of leverage: rare earths, solar supply chains, batteries, undersea cables, cheap EVs and buses. Huawei was the preview. Software-controlled Chinese buses in London are a punchline until they are not. A grid that cannot replace failed kit is not a punchline. Water, sewage, rail, traffic lights, and communications all ride the same mains. Peacetime dependence is crisis leverage.

Russia's complementary skill is kinetic and underwater. You do not need to occupy a country if you can cut the interconnectors and leave a stochastic grid with no spare transformers.

Dearlove is explicit: this is not a plot. Britain wandered to the cliff. Extreme targets, subsidies that privilege low-density generation, refusal to use North Sea resources, a grid that struggles with intermittency, and growing import dependence in a nasty world; the list is familiar. The security point is narrower. Adversaries do not need to invent Net Zero. They need only watch a democracy moral-disarm itself on energy while they keep coal, nuclear, and industrial capacity.

He reaches for an old intelligence analogy. Soviet active measures used Western peace movements because they were already there. China's United Front Work Department is built to shape a world favourable to Beijing, including by riding the moral language of its rivals. You do not have to believe every NGO is a cut-out to notice that a policy which makes Europe poorer, more import-dependent, and less able to rearm is convenient for states that do not share that policy. Napoleon's line applies: do not interrupt an enemy who is making a mistake.

The lecture's prescription is not "ignore the climate." It is: stop treating climate targets as a substitute for grand strategy. Identify single points of failure that sit in unfriendly jurisdictions. Stockpile and, where possible, onshore the unglamorous kit; transformers, GOES, switchgear, even if it costs more than the cheapest tender. Treat nuclear and dispatchable gas as security assets, not as moral leftovers. Keep enough domestic fuel optionality that a Foreign Secretary cannot be squeezed by a supplier mid-crisis. Rebuild, over a generation, the strategic industries without which an island cannot repair itself. Allow national-security exceptions to Net Zero until the fuel mix has thermodynamic and geopolitical ballast, not just a target date.

The first duty of government is the safety of the nation. Weather will still happen. Rivals will still think in decades. A policy that prices electrons as a sermon and supply chains as an afterthought hands them both.

https://dailysceptic.org/2026/09/18/as-a-former-head-of-mi6-its-clear-that-britains-climate-policy-is-leaving-us-dangerously-exposed-to-our-enemies/