Cheap energy is what we need not Net Zero making us cold and poor.

NEW: The Jackdaw gasfield will be given the go-ahead on Wednesday, signalling Andy Burnham’s commitment to the North Sea fossil fuel industry and threatening to trigger a row with climate campaigners and Labour MPs. Story by @kiranstacey theguardian.com/environment/…

It’s official: a legal investigation has found engineers in Britain’s electricity grid control room are stressed because renewables make it so hard to keep the lights on. And when they raise concerns, managers won’t listen - they only want “good news” thetimes.com/article/413d547…

FOOL BRITANNIA by @EdConwaySky While many countries face higher energy costs due to the events in the Middle East and Russia, few have seen quite as big a spike as Britain has. Industrial power costs are comfortably higher than in most developed nations, with domestic costs not far behind. To some extent, this is a function of bad luck and geopolitics. Britain is particularly dependent on natural gas to provide the critical baseload power for its electricity, not to mention much of its domestic heating. But higher energy costs are also the product of policy. Britain pushed faster and further towards net zero (the goal of diminishing carbon emissions to close to nothing in net terms) than most of its peers. The ambition, held by Labour and Conservative governments, was that the UK should be the global leader in decarbonisation – the flag-bearer for net zero. In one respect, the enterprise was a stunning success – Britain is one of the fastest-decarbonising major economies in the world. The main catch in – and the cardinal sin of – the make-things-cheap economy is how it affects energy bills. For all that Boris Johnson and Ed Miliband insisted (and as far as I can tell, sincerely believed) that renewables would mean lower costs, the opposite has happened. Unlike solar power, the cost of which fell precipitously as the Chinese mastered the mass production of arrays, wind power has remained comparatively expensive. And so Britain’s ambitious offshore wind programme happened largely thanks to a complex web of subsidies and price guarantees. Those interventions will lock in higher power costs in this country for years. There is a point – most likely a decade and a half in the future – at which the savings from net zero (less spent on gas and fuels) should outweigh the costs of building all the necessary infrastructure. But for the time being, the policy is expensive – nearly £30bn a year for the next five years, which is the equivalent of an extra 5p on the basic rate of income tax. One of the main reasons net zero is becoming so controversial (and will likely get more controversial) is that the majority of those costs end up on consumer bills. The other problem is that much of this decarbonisation was achieved through deindustrialisation. In the face of higher energy costs and rising environmental taxes, many manufacturers relocated overseas. Indeed, more than half of Britain’s carbon footprint is now accounted for by imported goods. Paradoxically, the more steel mills and chemicals plants shut down, the better the UK’s environmental credentials, since net zero plans ignore the embedded carbon in our imports and focus solely on what is puffed out of domestic flues and chimneys. Cover art by Doug Chayka

Running scared of Polanski. Burnham is putting the Labour Party ahead of the country. As the geopolitical situation gets ever more dangerous and a gas shortage threatens Europe, he has chosen to chase green votes in north London before securing our energy future.