Britain Nears Its Net-Zero Breaking Point

 That wailing sound you hear drifting across the Atlantic are the cries of climate activists as London weighs a big step away from net-zero insanity. Maybe common sense lives after all.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer is preparing to ditch his promise to shift 95% of Britain’s electricity generation to renewables by 2030, the Guardian newspaper reported this week. Mr. Starmer’s office denied it, but every other word and deed from his government suggests the report is correct.

Mr. Starmer and colleagues estimate the cost of their net-zero electricity pledge at some £40 billion a year in government spending and private investments. That’s all but certain to be an undercount, and by a wide margin.

Grid improvements alone are expected to cost about £80 billion before 2030, again probably an optimistic estimate. Meanwhile, the government’s main vehicle for subsidizing renewables is a “contract for difference” program that guarantees generators a minimum return. No one can say how expensive those subsidies will be since the subsidy increases as energy prices fall.

Britain can’t afford any of this. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves is struggling to balance the books ahead of a new annual budget to be released next month. Big tax increases are expected, and Mr. Starmer may need to try again to push through some reforms in social spending. All of that will be hard to do if they’re also shoveling billions of pounds into a nebulous “energy transition.”

Especially when businesses and households already are chafing under the costs of the transition to date. British industry has long paid electricity rates among the highest in Europe. Consumers also are paying more owing to the growing cost of building new power lines to connect wind and solar, and escalating “balancing costs” to supply electricity when intermittent renewable sources aren’t generating.

The cap for household energy prices increased 2% this autumn, even though the regulator noted that wholesale energy costs have fallen recently. One line item that keeps growing is subsidies for power generation, which have exploded in absolute terms and as a share of a household’s total electricity bill—to about 20% today from 8.5% in 2015.

The political stakes are rising. Not long ago climate was a bipartisan preoccupation for Mr. Starmer’s Labour Party and the Conservatives; a Tory government introduced a legally binding net-zero target. No longer, as Tory leader Kemi Badenoch now promises to scrap the whole idea. Nigel Farage’s insurgent Reform UK party is winning over Labour voters by heaping scorn on net zero.

Labour’s Energy Secretary Ed Miliband must decide in coming weeks on the next round of subsidies for new renewable power. Even a true climate believer such as Mr. Miliband is getting the message. “We won’t buy [renewable power] at any price,” he told an industry conference this month.

The climate left won’t go down without a fight, and it is waging a rear-guard action to hold Mr. Starmer to his renewables promise. He may change his mind this autumn. Still, it’s progress that he’s even thinking about ditching Labour’s climate obsession. Reality generally wins in the end.