When the climate scientist Jim Skea said this week that Britain should think “beyond Net Zero”, he may have thought that he was speaking as a sober figure of authority. But to ordinary Britons who pay some of the highest electricity prices in the developed world, the suggestion borders on fantasy.

“Beyond Net Zero” does not mean something modest or technical. It means adding yet another layer of obligation to policy which is already extraordinarily expensive and economically destabilizing. It means large-scale carbon removal technologies that remain unproven at that scale. It means vast land-use changes. It means infrastructure that does not yet exist. And it means money — lots and lots of money.

That might be arguable if Britain were a major emitter driving the global trajectory. But it’s not: the country contributes well under 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and that share is shrinking. Even if the UK were to decarbonize completely tomorrow, the impact on global temperatures would be negligible unless the world’s largest emitters follow.

Despite the Westminster rhetoric about “leading the world”, Britain increasingly looks isolated on a global stage where economic competitiveness is overtaking climate ambition as governments’ primary concern.

Meanwhile, the country’s energy costs are already punitive. UK industrial electricity prices are the highest in the developed world, while households endure the fourth-highest prices. Energy-intensive industries have been severely impacted, resulting in job losses and weakening Britain’s productive base. The country is not approaching these policies from a position of surplus wealth and industrial dominance, but instead from one of economic vulnerability. To suggest that Britain should now move “beyond” Net Zero into a world of large-scale engineered carbon removal and open-ended decarbonization commitments is to ignore that reality.

Another problem is the uncertainty embedded in the entire enterprise. The case for going “beyond” Net Zero rests on the concept of “overshoot” — that global temperatures may exceed 1.5°C and later need to be brought back down through negative emissions.

But negative-emissions technologies at scale remain speculative. Direct air capture is extremely expensive. Bioenergy with carbon capture requires vast land and water resources. Afforestation competes with agriculture and biodiversity objectives. Britons are being asked, in effect, to commit to a policy pathway whose later stages depend on technologies that are not yet commercially proven, affordable, or deployable at scale.

All of this sits alongside deeply uncertain climate projections. When the public sees worst-case scenarios reported as inevitabilities, and then finds that reality unfolds more gradually or differently, confidence is undermined. London is not underwater nor the Arctic ice-free in summer, as some predicted at the turn of the century. That erosion of confidence matters, as durable policy depends on public trust.

Britain has already committed to one of the most ambitious decarbonization programmes in the developed world, while bearing disproportionately high energy costs and contributing a vanishingly small share of global emissions. At some point, the question stops being about climate virtue and starts being about economic responsibility.

The honest debate Britain now needs isn’t whether to go “beyond” Net Zero, but instead whether Net Zero itself remains a rational objective for a fading power with limited global leverage and already elevated energy costs. Climate change is real, but public policy is about trade-offs. A policy that imposes high domestic costs for negligible global impact isn’t morally superior: it’s economic self-harm.

If Britain is to remain prosperous, competitive and politically stable, its climate policy must be proportionate to its influence and aligned with the national interest. The call to go “beyond Net Zero” is not just technocratic but cultural. It comes from a class of people for whom energy costs are an inconvenience rather than a constraint — people who will never have to choose between heating and eating, never worry whether their business will survive another winter, and never see a loved one’s health deteriorate because the house is cold. After all, it’s easy to demand ever more ambition when others pay the price.

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Kathryn Porter is an independent energy consultant at Watt-Logic.

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