Author: Sh4ne024

The comfortable hypocrisy of Britain’s climate class There is a familiar type of climate advocate in modern Britain: university-educated, professionally secure, internationally travelled and entirely convinced that other people must change how they live. They lecture families about driving while posting photographs from overseas holidays. They condemn gas boilers from warm, expensive homes. They support…

For generations, carbon dioxide released by cement works was treated as an unavoidable by-product of producing the materials needed to build Britain. It had no commercial value. Nobody owned it, traded it or expected households to pay for burying it beneath the seabed. Net Zero has changed that. Through carbon targets, emissions trading and government-backed…

a beautiful view about to be destroyed by a experiment in ideology The Peak Cluster carbon-capture scheme is being presented as a £59.6 million project intended to protect British cement and lime production. That description is deeply misleading.The £59.6 million is only the development-stage funding required to advance the scheme through engineering, planning and towards…

Orwell’s 1984 — 40 Years Later When government stops asking whether a policy is right and starts asking how to make the public believe in it George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. He imagined a future Britain in which political power did not depend merely on controlling what people did. It depended upon controlling…

Hooton Pagnell Hall and the historic landscape surrounding it. There are some places whose value is difficult to express on a planning form. Hooton Pagnell is one of them. Seen from above, the village does not appear as a collection of buildings sitting independently in the countryside, but as something woven into it: stone walls,…

When Parliament launched its inquiry into “Building support for the energy transition”, the central question was framed around public understanding and communication. Could Government explain the transition better? Could it build greater public support? Could trusted voices, clearer language and better information bring people with it? Months later, the Committee has published its final report.And…

The Energy Security and Net Zero Committee wanted to know how to build support for the energy transition. What it received instead was a warning about what happens when consultation begins with the answer already assumed. On 17 September 2026, the House of Commons Energy Security and Net Zero Committee published its report Zero sum…

When advocacy is presented as neutral expertise, the public deserves to know the difference Britain is being told that it needs an emergency. Not simply that climate change presents risks. Not simply that flooding, heat, biodiversity loss or energy security deserve serious attention. The message being promoted by the National Emergency Briefing is much stronger:…

Britain’s electricity grid needed renewal. Britain’s power generation needed renewal. Britain needed new nuclear capacity, new transmission infrastructure, new substations and a serious long-term plan for declining North Sea production. The argument is not that Britain should have done nothing.The argument is that Britain did things in the wrong order. Since that fateful passage of…

Britain was not forced to choose an energy system this exposed to international shocks. We could have renewed the grid, rebuilt strategic gas storage, maintained domestic production and developed firm replacement generation before reducing our existing energy base. Instead, successive governments made Net Zero targets the organising principle of energy policy. We are now beginning…

Britain’s energy problem is not simply that prices have risen. It is that successive governments set the political destination first , then expected the engineering, the grid and the consumer to absorb the consequences.Instead of beginning with the basic requirement , firm, reliable and affordable power through the worst winter conditions , policy was increasingly…

Ed Miliband’s department has approved gigawatts of new generation while the cables, substations, supply chain and planning system required to connect it remain years behind. The National Audit Office has exposed a target-first policy whose costs will fall on households, businesses and the British countryside. Electricity cannot be generated by ministerial announcement. A development consent…

We were promised clean, cheap power. Instead, Britain’s countryside is being industrialised to support an electricity system that was never properly planned. By Shane Oxer What made Great Britain was never just its people, its industries or its institutions. It was also the land itself. The rolling countryside of southern England. The marshes of Kent.…

When political ideology and computer modelling are allowed to dictate energy policy without being restrained by engineering reality, chaos follows. The National Audit Office has now exposed the scale of that chaos, and the bill that will be passed to the public. Ed Miliband did not create every failure identified by the NAO. The connect-and-manage…

How twenty years of climate politics became Britain’s governing orthodoxy , while the economic and engineering consequences were left for later. The previous article, A Montage of Failed Ideology, looked at where Britain has arrived: extraordinarily expensive industrial electricity, almost £5 billion of household energy debt, food prices nearly 40% above their 2020 level, a…

Britain was promised cheaper energy, secure power and a green industrial revolution. Instead we are paying through higher bills, higher food prices, lost industry and an electricity system requiring hundreds of billions more simply to make it work. For nearly two decades, successive British governments have followed essentially the same direction of travel. Prime Ministers…

Having gone back through the material I sent Jonathan Leake over the course of 2026, my view is that today’s Telegraph investigation follows remarkably closely the line of inquiry I had been putting directly in front of him for months. I want to be precise about that. I cannot prove that Jonathan used my work…

Britain’s energy and environmental transformation is usually measured in gigawatts, hectares, investment and carbon. But beneath those numbers are people whose livelihoods depend upon land and sea they do not own. The tenant farmer and the fisherman expose the same uncomfortable question: when government policy gives an asset a more valuable new purpose, what happens…

The fisherman may own his boat, his nets and his business, but he does not own the seabed beneath him. As offshore wind, marine protection and new energy infrastructure compete for the same waters, that distinction is becoming one of the most important in Britain’s Net Zero economy. By Shane Oxer The fisherman is, in…