Net Zero gleams like a moral North Star in the echo chambers of Western academia, a pledge to slash carbon emissions to nothing by 2050, heralding an era of planetary salvation. Yet, as Maurice Cousins argues in his searing critique for The Critic (see link below), this high-minded aspiration is quietly dismantling the very foundations of Western strength: industrial might, energy sovereignty, and military readiness. President Xi Jinping's recent vow, a mere 7-10% emissions cut by 2035, drew effusive praise from Reuters and the Washington Post as "green leadership," despite experts like those at Carbon Brief deeming it woefully short of Paris Agreement imperatives. This isn't coincidence; it's cunning. China, the world's top emitter, exploits the West's ethical reflexes, compassion for the climate, woke virtue-signalling, to mask its coal binge and mineral monopoly, all while the UK and much of the West grapples with sky-high energy bills that throttle factories and families alike. Net Zero, pursued with fervent idealism but scant strategic steel, risks not just economic stagnation but a civilisational slide into decline, echoing the appeasement-fuelled frailties of the 1930s. Unless the West tempers its green zeal with realpolitik, this policy won't cool the planet, it will hasten the collapse of Western civilisation.
The economic fissures are already cracking wide. Britain's Net Zero crusade, enshrined in law since 2019, has ballooned household energy costs to the highest in the developed world, with industrial electricity prices outstripping those in the US and Europe by up to 50%. A Watt-Logic report pegs the 2023-24 surcharge at over £17 billion, funnelled into subsidies for intermittent renewables that leave grids gasping during windless winters. Factories shutter: Steel mills in Port Talbot idle as Tata Steel axes 2,800 jobs in 2025, citing uncompetitive power rates; chemical giants like Ineos warn of offshoring to dirt-cheap Asian rivals. The Institute for Fiscal Studies laments how tax policies perversely favour gas over electricity, inflating the decarbonisation tab by billions and pricing out low-income households, precisely those least equipped for heat pumps or EVs. Across the Atlantic, Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, hailed as a green triumph, has spurred $100 billion in subsidies, yet manufacturing growth lags China's by a factor of five, with rare earth dependencies leaving supply chains brittle. This isn't progress; it's self-inflicted atrophy. As Thatcher presciently noted in Statecraft, democracies flirt with "naïve idealism" at their peril, mistaking fiscal masochism for moral high ground, while rivals like China build coal-fired behemoths at a clip of 50 gigawatts annually, even as renewables surge. The result? A West deindustrialising into a service-sector shell, exporting jobs and emissions abroad, a "moral arbitrage" where Beijing's factories hum on our discarded carbon footprint.
Strategic vulnerabilities compound the peril, turning economic erosion into existential risk. Net Zero's mineral hunger, lithium, cobalt, nickel for batteries and turbines, cedes control to China, which dominates 80% of global processing and wields export bans like geopolitical clubs. The UK's fragile grid, 40% reliant on gas imports, buckles under volatility: 2025's cold snap spiked prices 20%, forcing blackouts that hobble everything from data centres to defence logistics. Military implications are stark. NATO's decarbonisation push, risks capability gaps: The US Army's net-zero-by-2050 fleet, electric tanks and drones, falters in Arctic ops where batteries freeze, and RAF jets guzzle biofuels at double the cost of jet fuel. A 2025 ENSEC COE report warns that rushed green tech adoption could "risk capabilities" in high-intensity conflicts, as seen in Ukraine where fossil-fuelled artillery outpaces Western EV prototypes. Meanwhile, surging military budgets, $2.2 trillion globally in 2025, divert trillions from climate adaptation, per Energy in Demand analysis, igniting an arms race that mocks Net Zero's pacifist veneer. Cousins invokes the KGB's "active measures," amplifying Western environmentalism to fracture alliances; today, Xi's modest pledge, emissions dipping just 1% in early 2025 amid record solar installs, flatters our instincts while coal permits linger and heavy industry shifts westward, unburdened by our rules. In this asymmetry, the West's "leadership" becomes liability: We virtue-signal while rivals weaponise our restraint.
History's ghosts whisper warnings. The 1930s' appeasement, as Paul Kennedy chronicles, wasn't craven but "moral," a public recoil from war's scars, prioritising welfare over rearmament until Munich's folly. Churchill's dissent was "censored" as warmongering; today's Net Zero sceptics face "denier" smears, their calls for nuclear revival or gas bridges dismissed as heresy. Thatcher's Statecraft, penned post-Cold War, foresaw this: Without "steel along with good intentions," liberty withers. The Climate Change Committee urges policy tweaks to lure investors, lest wavering spook markets, but the damage accrues: Britain's emissions fell 4% in 2024, yet its global share is a piddling 1%, while China's 30% footprint swells unchecked. In a multipolar maelstrom, Russia's Ukraine grind, Iran's proxies, North Korea's salvos, the West's productive sinews atrophy, ceding the field to powers unhampered by green dogma.
The trajectory is inexorable: Decline, then fall. Net Zero, untethered from realpolitik, accelerates a hollowing out; economies enfeebled, alliances strained, adversaries emboldened. Greenpeace's "Power Shift" envisions £5.2 billion in savings by 2028 via gas phase-out, but at what cost to sovereignty? Ember's 2025 review lauds China's renewables overtaking coal capacity, yet Beijing's power emissions could peak at 5.2 billion tonnes this year, per Greenpeace, enough to eclipse Western totals thrice over.
To avert the abyss, the West must rediscover Thatcher's dictum: Principles demand power. Bolster nuclear and gas bridges for affordable electrons; diversify minerals via domestic mining; recalibrate military green goals to preserve lethality. As Cousins implores, if we cherish open societies, we must fortify their material base, not virtue-signal over its ruins. Otherwise, Net Zero won't net salvation; it will net surrender, consigning the West to history's footnotes as the civilization that was woke to the core, but lost itself.