By Paul Homewood
If there is one lesson I have learnt, it is that anything emanating from the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit is likely to be untrue:
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https://eciu.net/analysis/reports/2025/net-zero-economy-across-the-uk
According to the Guardian, the new ECIU report finds that:
Britain’s net zero economy is booming, CBI says
The net zero sector is growing three times faster than the overall UK economy, analysis has found, providing high-wage jobs across the country while cutting climate-heating emissions and increasing energy security.
The net zero economy grew by 10% in 2024 and generated £83bn in gross value added (GVA), a measure of how much value companies add through the goods and services they produce.
The analysis, by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), found that 22,000 net zero businesses, from renewable energy to green finance, employ almost a million people in full-time jobs. The average annual wage in the businesses – £43,000 – was also £5,600 higher than the national average.
The analysis showed economic growth and climate action go together, said the report’s authors, and improve lives and livelihoods. The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was criticised in January for suggesting economic growth was more important than net zero, but said more recently: “There is no tradeoff between economic growth and net zero. Quite the opposite. Net zero is the industrial opportunity of the 21st century.”
The figures contradict claims by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party that “net zero is crippling our economy”. It has promised to “scrap net stupid zero”. The Conservative party, which put the 2050 net zero emissions target into law in 2019, now says it “leaves us economically worse off” and its new leader, Kemi Badenoch, has called it a “mistake”.
The whole report is in fact one big fat lie.
The number of direct jobs is 273,000, not “nearly a million”. They go on to claim an extra 678,000 jobs in the supply chain and “induced” spending in the wider economy, without any specific evidence for either.
You could, of course, use the same logic with every job in Britain, and you would end up with three times the number of jobs in existence!
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Tellingly the report offers no detail on the number of jobs in each specific sector, but we do know that it includes conventional jobs, such as waste management, heating, and the motor sector.
None of these are new jobs, even though the CBI has decided to rebadge them:
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As the ONS reported last year, there has been very little growth in employment in what might be termed “the low carbon sector”, ie renewable energy and so on:
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In 2022, for example, there were just 27,700 jobs in the wind, solar and carbon capture sectors. And all of these are heavily dependent on government subsidy.
Simply switching jobs from, say, making diesel cars to electric ones does not create jobs at all.
Given that the report was written by CBI Economics, I am amazed they show no understanding of basic economics. Simply throwing government money at industry, or mandating what people can and cannot buy, might boost particular sectors of the economy. But they also drain money and resources away from other sectors.
The money that is wasted on subsidies means less can be spent elsewhere.
Worse still, subsidies and mandates lead to a misallocation of resources, which will likely lead to a smaller pot overall. Nowhere is this more evident than with wind and solar power, which have pushed up electricity prices and damaged industrial competitiveness.
The report has of course been specifically written to push the Net Zero agenda, as its conclusion makes clear:
“The net zero economy is not only driving environmental progress but also delivering transformative economic and social benefits across the UK”
It is not, but the CBI’s members would love to get their hands on those hundreds of millions of taxpayer money which will be doled out.