The question “what should we do about climate change?” does not have a scientific answer: our response to the climate crisis will be guided by our moral values, and science does not answer moral questions.

However, science can help us to understand the consequences of our decisions. For example, if global temperatures are increasing, will the adoption of low carbon technologies slow the rate of change? Can sustainable jet fuel really help to reduce the devastating impact of airline travel on our environment? By formulating testable scientific hypotheses, we can exercise our moral agency confident about the concrete, real-world consequences of the choices we make.

Critical Rationalism

According to Karl Popper, a hypothesis is scientific if it can be tested and found to be false. “Is climate change real?” is the most fundamental question we can ask about climate change. We can recast this question as a testable hypothesis. For example:

Mean global temperatures have increased since the industrial revolution.

This hypothesis is not only testable; it has been tested and it has been corroborated. For many years, climate-change deniers argued that we simply couldn’t be sure that climate change was happening, but the weight of evidence is now so colossal that even those who are deeply involved in the promotion of fossil fuel consumption do not any longer deny it.

Nevertheless, arguments against taking action against global warming are well-rehearsed and widely made. Outright denial has largely given way to climate doomism. “There’s nothing we can do about it”, the argument goes; rather than attempting the costly and impossible transition to net zero, we should focus our efforts on mitigating the effects of the inevitable and uncontrollable climate change that is coming. Or, as US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright put it:

“The Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens.”

The Populist Argument

The argument against striving for net zero was recently made by Sarah Elliott of the Prosperity Institute on Radio 4’s Any Questions. It ran as follows:

1. every UK citizen begins life with £40,000 of debt;
2. green technologies are creating this debt;
3. the drive for net zero is impoverishing us;
4. if we turn instead to the cheap, abundant energy beneath our feet – shale gas – then the road to prosperity will open up to us.

Thus “net zero” is an idealistic fantasy, a luxury promoted by “elites” who are denying us the cheap energy that comes from fracking. It is easy to see why such an argument would appeal to people who are struggling to make ends meet; they want practical solutions to the severe problems that they face here and now, and not expensive and impractical fantasies imposed by idealists.

Rational Critical Analysis

Karl Popper advocated a form of philosophy that he called critical rationalism, “mutual control by rational criticism”, based on the application of the central methods of Popperian falsificationism – the formulation of hypotheses and their testing by comparison with evidence – to problems that may not traditionally be regarded as “science”. Central to Popper’s thinking is the process of deductive reasoning from a hypothesis (a high-level claim about the way the world is) to specific statements that are testable.

Elliott’s argument, also the argument of Reform UK, breaks down into a series of hypotheses that can be subjected to objective scrutiny.

1. The burden of debt

• In May 2025, according to the Office for National Statistics, UK debt was 96.4% of GDP. That’s a large number, but in December 2023, the UK debt as a percentage of GDP was placed 24.8 percentage points below the G7 average. The nations that have invested most heavily in renewables (UK and Germany) were placed at the bottom of the table of the G7 nations, while in contrast, the US – which has nowhere near the scale of green investment in the EU or the UK – has a national debt that is 122% of GDP. Thus, the hypothesis that investment in green energy is correlated with national debt is falsified. Indeed, economists have argued that the reverse is true – that investment in green technologies should lead to a decrease in national debt. In his landmark review in 2006, leading economist Lord Nicholas Stern concluded:
• “This Review has assessed a wide range of evidence on the impacts of climate change and on the economic costs, and has used a number of different techniques to assess costs and risks. From all of these perspectives, the evidence gathered by the Review leads to a simple conclusion: the benefits of strong and early action far outweigh the economic costs of not acting.”
• Falsified

2. Green technologies are creating this debt

• Recently, Reform announced that if elected, they would cancel £45 billion per annum of net zero spending to fund tax cuts. However, the majority of this investment comes not from government but from the private sector.
• There is some state investment in supporting infrastructure (e.g. the planned upgrades to the National Grid) but it remains the case that the majority of the cost of investing in the green energy transformation comes not from taxes but from corporate investments. Why? Because it makes great business sense. Green technologies are not adding to our national debt.
• Falsified

3. The drive for net zero is impoverishing us

• It is nearly two decades since Lord Stern’s landmark review of the economic impact of green technology; however, by way of a reminder of the enduring validity of his findings, the Confederation for British Industry (not exactly a green activist group) recently reported that green technologies were booming in the UK. Their conclusions are remarkable: “The net zero economy has become a powerhouse of job creation and economic expansion with 10.1% growth in the total economic value supported by the net zero economy since 2023…When you factor in supply chain activities, the sector’s economic impact skyrockets to £83.1 billion, supporting nearly 951,000 jobs across the UK – that’s 2.9% of total UK employment. Even better, net zero jobs are 40% more productive than the national average, with wages 15% higher than the UK norm.”
• Thus, the evidence falsifies the hypothesis that going green makes us poorer. Moreover, the same evidence also corroborates the competing hypothesis that investment in renewable technology can make us better off as well as reducing the risk of catastrophic climate breakdown.
• Falsified

4. Shale gas will make us wealthy

• When the dash for gas began under Margaret Thatcher’s government, geologists were aware that North Sea gas was a finite resource that would soon be depleted. Since 2004, UK demand for gas has exceeded supply from the North Sea since 2004, and North Sea gas (and oil) are fast-dwindling resources.
• Does shale gas provide the solution? The US has some of the world’s largest reserves of shale gas and shale oil, and currently exports liquified natural gas to the UK. However, the UK’s reserves are much more modest. A very helpful analysis has been provided by the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics (LSE). Quoting from a review by Warwick Business School, they note that the UK consumes 70-80 billion cubic metres of gas per annum, and probably has the capacity to produce between 90 and 330 billion cubic metres by hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) of these resources. Setting aside all environmental considerations, it is immediately clear from these figures that fracking does not offer a solution to the UK’s problems with gas supply; it would mask the decline in production from the North Sea but it would not reverse it.
• The hypothesis that there is “abundant cheap energy beneath our feet” already looks falsified, because shale gas isn’t really that abundant in the UK. But it is important to finish the job. In fact, it isn’t cheap either.
• While the US has enormous reserves of shale gas, getting it out of the ground is a great deal more complicated than extracting conventional gas reserves, like those found in the North Sea. On top of that, fracking produces large quantities of contaminated water, and there is a cost associated with dealing with this. In the US, despite the huge reserves of shale gas, fracking has not delivered cheaper energy.
• Forbes notes “Anyone harboring the illusion of low-cost gas is operating as if it’s still 2015.” Shale gas producers are having to control supply to keep prices up, and US producers find that exports of liquified natural gas are more lucrative than supplying gas to domestic consumers. If the price of shale gas falls too low, then production ceases to be economically viable.
• Falsified

Net Genius Zero

Objective critical analysis of the data indicates that:

• Shale gas is not cheap;
• The UK has finite reserves of shale gas that are insufficient to meet more than a small part of the nation’s energy generating capacity;
• North sea oil and gas are a finite and fast-diminishing resource;
• Basing electricity generation on gas leaves us dependent on energy imports, the prices of which are outside our control;
• Renewables are cheap and give the nation control over its own energy generating capacity.

Recently, investment in new solar energy capacity in the US has massively outstripped investment in new gas capacity. The reasons are straightforward, and they are to do with economics and not ideology: the time to payback for photovoltaics is less than three years; thereafter all the energy generated is free, while a power station that burns gas will need to pay the gas bill every year for as long as it operates. That’s why investment in renewables is outstripping investment in fossil-fuel-based energy generation. Switching to renewables is not a sacrifice; eliminating renewables would deny citizens access to cheaper electricity at the same time that it accelerated climate change. During the summer, the UK’s electricity comes largely from renewables, and recently, Spain reached an important milestone by generating 100% of its electricity from renewables on April 16. Net Zero is not a far-off fantasy, but an achievable goal.

Based on these arguments alone – not considering the massive problem of catastrophic climate breakdown – the only intelligent conclusion is that we should think instead about “Net Genius Zero”. Anybody who tries to tell us otherwise has an agenda that is not about guaranteeing our energy security, and not about providing cheap energy to the British people.