The attempts to set up a binary choice between defence spending and climate action is dangerously flawed
The world has got more dangerous. The UK needs to be ready to defend itself and its allies. More money will need to be spent on defence. That means less money will have to be spent on other suddenly less important things, such as welfare, international aid, and climate action.
This is the seductively simple argument advancing across Whitehall and parts of the media. Sir Dieter Helm, the energy economist who is renowned/notorious (delete as appropriate) for his tireless mission to point out how difficult decarbonisation will prove to be, published a paper this month titled Defence and the retreat from net zero. Nils Pratley in The Guardian today asked if the UK can really aspire to be both a clean energy superpower and a defence superpower? The question was sparked by the announcement British Steel is to close the UK's last primary steel manufacturing site and the Chancellor's decision to set out the government's ambitions to make the country a "defence industrial superpower", while neglecting to mention its long-standing ambition to become a "clean energy superpower".
"A serious defence policy needs secure supply chains and energy- and carbon-intensive industries that don't pass the green test," says Pratley, as he summarises Helm's essay. "The Scunthorpe plant itself may be destined for a cleaner furnace eventually, but the mix of steel, defence and net zero ambitions raises deep questions. Setting aside £2.5bn to revive steelmaking in the UK may be easy bit. If Helm is right, there will also be policy compromises."
It is a compelling argument based on legitimate concerns about how the UK can rapidly ramp up defence spending and capabilities that have been eroded for far too long. It is understandably resonating with plenty of people in government tasked with defending the realm, while providing a respectable gloss of real politik to proposals from the Tories and Reform to just scrap net zero targets altogether - proposals that critics maintain have a lot more to do with Trumpist climate denialism than national security.
All but the most committed pacifist now accepts it is complacent for the UK to operate an army so small it can famously fit into Old Trafford, at a time when there is a land war in Europe and our most powerful military partner treats its closest allies with open contempt. President Trump is wrong about many things, but he is right to demand NATO members meet agreed defence spending targets. UK defence spending will have to rise sharply and national, energy, and supply chain security all need to be taken a lot more seriously. It is only a single lifetime ago that the UK had to fight an existential war. It is naïve to think it could never happen again.
But the suggestion the government now faces a binary choice between net zero and national security, between becoming a 'defence industrial superpower' or a 'clean energy superpower', remains deeply flawed - dangerously so.
There are at least three big problems with this argument.
The first is climate change is still a thing. It will not stop happening while you get your defensive lines in a row. If you 'retreat from net zero' and others then follow your lead, it will only result in worse climate impacts in the coming decades. These impacts will trigger more migration, more geopolitical insecurity, and a much greater risk of conflict.
The pursuit of net zero emissions by 2050 is often characterised as some kind of hippy or bourgeois crusade, but one of the primary motivations remains the desire to maintain national and international security in the face of droughts, famines, and floods that risk fuelling societal disorder and brutal resource wars. Trump can sack the people in the Pentagon who monitor and understand these risks if he wants, but those risks won't go away - in fact they are getting worse by the year.
The second problem is that far from being mutually exclusive, there are lots of ways in which the missions to become a 'defence industrial superpower' and a 'clean energy superpower' are complementary.
At the technological level defence innovations in drones, AI, energy and fuel efficiency, aerospace, and even renewables all have the potential to feed into the UK's booming clean tech industries - and vice versa.
At the geo-strategic level decarbonisation, if done right, has the potential to bolster energy security and national security. Admittedly, Helm makes the opposite case, highlighting how the end of primary steel production in the UK would increase reliance on China for steel at a time when a conflict between China and US cannot be ruled out. "If the PM does want to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder' with the US over Taiwan, it is hardly a safe assumption that the supply chain for defence, including the steel from China, is going to stand up," he writes.
It is a fair point and a real concern, but is it a reason for a retreat from net zero, especially when our current supply chains for both defence and fossil fuel energy are hardly any less exposed to the risks that would come with global conflict? Critics of net zero maintain it leaves us too reliant on Chinese steel and clean tech imports and we should instead redouble efforts to produce our own steel and extract our own fossil fuel reserves. But even leaving aside the resulting climate impacts, it remains unclear whether domestic steel and fossil fuel production would make a significant difference to our reliance on imports. And in the event of a shooting war would an energy supply chain that required frequent gas, oil, and coal imports really be more secure than a dispersed renewables fleet that could keep operating away? Reliance on China could quickly become a point of risk (and one which would be felt by the technology and auto industries at least as much as the renewables space), but in such a volatile world supply chains centred on Russia or the Gulf states or even the US would be loaded with risk.
As recent years have shown, our current fossil fuel supply chains face huge risks of disruption from sabotage, terrorist attacks, full blown wars, and price manipulation by geopolitical rivals. Clean energy systems come with their own security risks, but let us not pretend the current system is an exemplar of robust stability.
The scenarios are simply too numerous and too complex for anyone to declare with confidence which energy and industrial mix delivers optimum security. But it is not a slam dunk argument that a continued and potentially indefinite reliance on fossil gas and domestic blast furnaces really offers greater security than a clean power system and the deployment of emerging low carbon steel technologies. It should be possible to create a net zero economy that tackles climate risks, while also building out a distributed energy system and supply chain that has fewer points of failure than the current fossil fuel system - a system, which lest we forget, is making the world more volatile and dangerous through the climate risks it is exacerbating.
Finally, the attempt to position defence and clean energy aspirations as a binary choice mischaracterises how the net zero transition will play out in reality. The fact is it is a transition. Its pace and direction will shift over time and it will respond to events. There is nuance and flexibility here, because how could there not be?
The government may well decide the ratcheting up of security threats means some carbon intensive parts of the defence supply chain need to continue for a bit longer than previously planned (although it is clearly not overly impressed with British Steel request for £1bn of support for its plans). It may conclude more targeted support is needed to curb energy costs for defence contractors. It may even argue the winding down of North Sea oil and gas production needs to be stretched out a bit.
But none of this would mean the UK would have to ditch or even delay its net zero targets. Nor would it mean that it could no longer become a 'clean energy superpower'.
It could and should still forge ahead with deploying domestic renewables at scale, upgrading the grid, accelerating the switch to electric vehicles, and enhancing energy efficiency right across the economy. It should continue to advance these efforts not just because they would help to curb climate impacts, but because they would also enhance energy security, reduce costs, and drive investment, growth, and jobs.
Equally, the government should recognise it will still have to decarbonise carbon intensive industries - including defence - at some point and the best thing to do from both a climate and a national security standpoint is to think seriously about how emerging new technologies, such as green primary steel, sustainable aviation fuels, and carbon removals, could be developed and deployed in the 2030s and beyond.
In fairness to the government, this is basically what it is trying to do. It would be nice to think we could discuss this complex, nuanced, and necessary transition, as well as the near-term trade-offs it may entail, without the debate being hijacked by a false binary choice between climate action and national security. And yet sadly that is not the political and media ecosystem we live in.
It will not be easy, but it is entirely possible for the UK (and Europe) to become a defence and a clean energy superpower. Indeed, if it wants to ensure national and climate security over the coming decades it has to become both.
