Net Zero is a Far-Left Tyrannical Death Star

Written by David Turver on June 17, 2025. Posted in Current News

Some friends have asked me to write more articles on the political and sociological impact of Net Zero. In addition, another contact put forward the suggestion that Net Zero is an attack on freedom. That idea has been turning over in my mind and I have concluded he was right and effectively, Net Zero is just a cloak for far-left tyranny.

The Political Compass

The Political Compass is a widely used tool to differentiate between different political ideas, philosophies and ideologies.

It is typically drawn with the x-axis representing left and right opinions along the economic dimension. The left represents a desire for the economy to be run by cooperative collective agency with substantial state intervention and the political right represents a desire for the economy to be left to the devices of competing individuals and organisations, otherwise known as free markets.

The y-axis represents the social dimension, with the top representing authoritarianism and the bottom representing libertarianism. For shorthand, we can shorten this to tyranny versus freedom.

Net Zero Is Far-Left Tyranny

We can characterise Net Zero along both axes of the political compass. Starting with energy policy, we can see that there are Government mandated subsidies for renewables which cost a fortune. Plus, intermittent renewables can bid low into the market and be dispatched onto the grid despite the full cost of renewables being much higher than the market clearing price. Then there’s extra subsidies for the Capacity Market to provide backup to intermittent renewables. In addition, there are even more subsidies for industry to compensate them for the resulting high electricity prices. There are extra subsidies for biofuels, green gas, green hydrogen and carbon capture and storage. On top of that, Miliband’s plan for Clean Power by 2030 sounds like a Soviet-era five-year plan for tractor production.

The Government and the Climate Change Committee are also intent on forcing landlords to install insulation measures, many of which have payback times measured in centuries. We also have subsidies for heat pumps and company EV drivers pay less tax than for petrol cars.

On the supply side, new drilling for both onshore and offshore oil and gas resources is effectively banned and the assets that remain are being taxed to oblivion with 78% marginal tax rates. Using gas to produce electricity attracts carbon taxes through the Emissions Trading Scheme amounting to about 20% of wholesale prices.

All of this takes energy policy as far away from free markets as it is possible to imagine. Net Zero is a far-left project that would not have been out of place in the USSR.

Turning to the vertical axis we can see that many of the proposed measures to achieve Net Zero can be described as tyrannical. First, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) is effectively beyond the control of Parliament and the people, because as former chair Lord Deben put it, Parliament has to seek the permission of the CCC to change the Carbon Budgets. To achieve the targets, the Government and their advisors want to interfere in our lives to an unprecedented extent. They are interfering in markets to mandate targets for heat pumps and EVs to change how we heat our homes and the type of car we drive. The Energy Act 2023 gives the authority for draconian powers to take control of EV chargers, batteries, home heating, washing machines, fridges and dishwashers. The Act even gives authority for powers of entry to check our smart appliances are compliant. Now the Government is planning to force pension schemes to merge into mega-funds and force them to invest in clean energy projects.

The CCC has recommended we cut our meat consumption by a third and cut the number of livestock by almost half. Of course, they also want us to eat “alternative proteins” which is code for things like insects.

Some of the advisors to Government are even more tyrannical. We have the Behavioural Insights Team (also known as the Nudge Unit) calling for regulation of advertising and for TV drama and news to promote upbeat stories about Net Zero. They also want to influence the physical, social, economic and digital environment to alter what is offered to consumers and change perceptions of what is socially acceptable.

They recommended that Government intervenes across vast swathes of the economy to align businesses, markets and institutions with Net Zero. These measures include a meat tax, making flights more expensive, defaulting us onto renewable energy tariffs and making heat pumps look cheaper than gas-boilers.

The National Energy System Operator (NESO) is planning to halve per capita energy consumption. They also want to “optimise” demand by introducing penal charges at peak times through Time of Use Tariffs (TOUTs). In other words, consumers need to organise their lives around the grid rather than the grid being designed to meet the needs of its customers.

The Government-funded UKFIRES project was even more extreme. They want all airports except Heathrow, Glasgow and Belfast to close by 2030 and all remaining airports as well as shipping to be eliminated by 2050. Road use must be cut by 40% by 2050. UKFIRES also calls for beef and lamb to be phased out by 2050, along with the production of cement, new steel and plastics. According to them, all conventional mortar and concrete should be phased out by 2050, meaning construction work will be limited to retrofit and adaptation of existing buildings. They are signalling they want to take us back to an agrarian society when lives were brutal and short.

These measures put Net Zero right at the top of the tyranny scale. In fact, if we substitute “Net Zero” for “the State” in Mussolini’s famous quote, we get close to describing the totalitarian Net Zero agenda: “Everything within Net Zero, nothing outside Net Zero, nothing against Net Zero”. The impact of centrally planned, expensive and scarce electricity, imposed by a tyrannical regime could well be as proportionately damaging as Mao’s Great Leap Forward, because there are no rich countries with low energy consumption and poorer people tend to live shorter lives.

If we translate this into film metaphors, Net Zero becomes the dark-side Death Star of far-left tyranny.

The Dark Forces of Net Zero Zealotry

Despite Net Zero clearly being a project of the big-state tyrannical far-left, it is strange that opposition to Net Zero is sometimes framed as “far-right” and “climate denial”. It is peculiar that opposing an overarching state and emphasising personal freedom over tyrannical rules is somehow portrayed as an extreme position. The Net Zero activists seek to denigrate their opponents with claims of far-right fascism rather than address the arguments.

There is scientific evidence that Politically Correct Authoritarians, otherwise known as Net Zero zealots, are strongly linked to the Dark Triad of personality traits. The components of the Dark Triad are Narcissism, Machiavellianism and Psychopathy.

Narcissists display grandiosity, entitlement, dominance and superiority. Examples of this might include throwing soup over some of our greatest artworks or gluing yourself to the road to prevent others getting to work or to the hospital. Anoter example would be sycophantic photo-shoots with Greta Thunberg to gain virtue points.

Machiavellians view interpersonal manipulation as the key for life success. Influencing markets and the media as outlined by the Nudge Unit to manipulate consumer behaviour can be seen as a form of Machiavellianism. The CCC persists with laughably low estimates of the cost of renewables in an attempt to manipulate us into believing Net Zero will not cost us much.

Psychopaths show low levels of empathy and psychopathy correlates negatively with agreeableness. Seen in this light, the UKFIRES measures to abolish airports and shipping and cut car transport could be seen as psychopathic. Moreover, the CCC and NESO could be seen as psychopathic because they do not seem to care about the economic and social havoc that will be wrought by higher energy prices and energy austerity. Government and Parliament presiding over the highest electricity prices in the developed world as the economy stagnates, industry closes or moves abroad and more families endure fuel poverty display a psychopathic lack of empathy, even if they do try and come across as agreeable.

We have somehow allowed the very worst people to take charge of most of our lives. The Net Zero agenda has become an Evil Empire of the dark-side.

Return of the Energy Jedi

It is natural for people to strive for the light of freedom when authoritarian forms of government over-reach themselves. Throughout history and works of fiction, we have examples of oppressive regimes being constrained or overthrown by the forces of freedom. The Magna Carta was signed in 1215 to curb the power of an absolute monarch, protect property rights and establish the rule of law. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, people fled from the tyrannical East Germany to the then free West, not the other way round.

In the fictional world, Katniss from the Hunger Games killed President Coin as she saw Coin as a Machiavellian figure who would perpetuate tyranny and be more dangerous than Snow. And of course, we have Luke Skywalker destroying the Death Star, a symbol of the light-side of the Force overcoming the dark authoritarian power of the Evil Empire.

We can already see signs that the Net Zero Death Star is crumbling. New Zealand has backtracked on its Net Zero targets by lifting the ban on new oil and gas drilling. Indonesia and Argentina are considering pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Moreover, there are signs of some weakening in EU climate targets. President Trump has decided to pull out of the Paris Accords again, declared an energy emergency in America and paused new offshore wind leases. His administration recognises that “an affordable and reliable domestic supply of energy is a fundamental requirement for the national and economic security of any nation.” To that end Trump has also signed Executive Orders aimed at quadrupling America’s nuclear capacity by 2050. We might liken these developments to the return of the Energy Jedi.

But sadly in the UK, although Net Zero policies are coming under increased scrutiny, the dark force of the Climate Change Act remains in place and Ed Miliband is still Energy Secretary. We must keep firing the proton torpedoes and eventually we will destroy the Net Zero Death Star.

See more here Substack

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