A number of weeks into the Labour government, the inevitable cracks are starting to appear in the pre-election promises.

According to The Telegraph, the new Secretary of State for Energy Security & Net Zero refused to repeat his elections pledges in the House of Commons, and admitted that it may be some time before the bill payer sees the benefits of the tens, perhaps hundreds of £billions that are required to meet the government’s unilateral policy targets, such as clean energy by 2030.

Meanwhile, new chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, plans to save £5.5 billion by scrapping winter fuel payments for ten million pensioners.

In this podcast, we are joined by director of Net Zero Watch, Andrew Montford, and David Turver, whose Substack has shone much needed light on the Net Zero agenda’s economics and technical failures.

The appointment of the new government sees the return of Ed Miliband, who last held the energy brief in 2010. Then Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, now Energy Security and Net Zero, Miliband has made climate and energy, the beginning, midden and end fs his political narrative. This week we learned a little more about the new government’s plans, but not much.

It is a shame that Miliband didn’t spend the last 14 years reading this week’s podcast guest. In 2009 Professor James Woudhuysen and Joe Kaplinsky’s Energise! was published — which argues for a radical re-think of energy…

“…consuming more energy isn’t a problem if the right kind of supply can be arranged. With the right supply, climate won’t run out of control. But so long as the state’s ineffective, moralistic policy on energy is left unchallenged, it’s the state’s interventions in our everyday lives that look set to run out of control.”

We caught up with James for some of his reflections on the book, and how well it has stood up over the fifteen years that have passed.

The new Labour government has wasted no time in launching three new vehicles it hope will reanimate the corpse of the green agenda. The National Wealth Fund, GB Energy and the Clean Energy Mission Control. All staffed and supported by the same-old-same-old wonks, banks and blobs, can this new configuration of deckchairs stop the Net Zero Titanic from sinking beneath the waves? And what is green economics anyway? Host and Climate Debate UK co-founder Ben Pile is joined by

David Paton -- Professor of Industrial Economics, Nottingham University Business School.

Catherine McBride OBE – Independent economist, often seen on screens and social media heroically defending Brexit.