UK newspapers’ increasingly desperate campaigns against climate change policies

The Mail on Sunday and The Times have both published yet more misinformation about the work of Britain’s National Energy System Operator (NESO) and the ‘cost of net zero’, writes Bob Ward.

On 11 January The Mail on Sunday falsely claimed that NESO had found that the “cost of net zero” would be £4.5 trillion by 2050, while The Times repeated this claim in a plagiarised version of the Sunday newspaper’s article. This is the third time that newspapers have misrepresented the findings of NESO over the past few months, and is a clear demonstration of how they disregard accuracy when they are campaigning on an issue.

The Times had misrepresented the contents of NESO’s ‘FES [Future Energy Scenarios] 2025 Economics Annex’ when it was published on 11 December 2025, claiming that NESO had concluded households would pay an additional £500 per year to achieve the UK’s net zero target.

Several newspapers again misrepresented the NESO report after the Institute of Economic Affairs, a right-wing lobby group, published a false account of the operator’s work in a pamphlet in January 2026. The IEA wrongly claimed that NESO had found the cost of net zero to be £7.6 trillion by 2050, and perhaps more than £9 trillion.

In between, The Mail on Sunday and The Times both again misrepresented NESO’s findings.

On 11 January 2026, The Mail on Sunday published an article on page 16 by Calum Muirhead, Executive Editor of the Financial Mail on Sunday, under the headline ‘£4.5 trillion: Staggering cost of Ed Miliband’s Net Zero drive finally revealed’. The article was also published on the newspaper’s website under the headline ‘The staggering cost of Ed Miliband’s Net Zero drive finally revealed: £4.5 TRILLION… that’s more than the UK’s entire GDP.’ While the article was not transparent about its exact source, it was clearly based on ‘FES 2025 Economics Annex’, but loosely: it grossly misrepresented NESO’s findings, and was littered with false statements.

What did the NESO report really say?

The NESO report outlined economic analysis of four ‘Future Energy Scenarios’, three of which, the ‘Holistic Transition’, ‘Electric Engagement’ and ‘Hydrogen Evolution’, were consistent with the target of net zero emissions by 2050, and one, ‘Falling Behind’, which was not.

Among the report’s findings was:

“When carbon costs are included (at the UK Government’s Green Book values), the Holistic Transition pathway has the lowest cost over 2025–2050 and enduring savings beyond 2050. If carbon costs are ignored, the Falling Behind scenario is cheaper over 2025–2050, saving the equivalent of around 0.4% of GDP on average annually. It would have higher costs beyond 2050, given higher ongoing fuel costs and the need for further investment if net zero is to be achieved later.”

The report also stated:

“The Falling Behind scenario also implies a substantially higher carbon cost, as carbon emissions remain high even in 2050, and would secure fewer of the wider benefits such as for air quality and health…With the carbon cost included, the Holistic Transition pathway would be the cheapest. Using the Green Book carbon appraisal values, costs in the Holistic Transition pathway are on average £36 billion per year cheaper over 2025–2050 compared to Falling Behind, a difference equivalent to around 1% of GDP.”

The NESO report also warned about misinterpretation of its findings:

“The comparative costs should be seen only as indicative given the uncertainties and differences between pathway assumptions detailed later in this report. The numbers cannot be compared directly to those published earlier in the year by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) and used by the Office for Budget Responsibility, as their costs represent the cost of reaching net zero compared to a no-action baseline, which our numbers do not.”

However, Mr Muirhead clearly ignored all this in writing his article, and instead obtained figures from a different source.

Ignoring an important fact – expenditure is needed regardless of the net zero target

After I complained to The Mail on Sunday about Mr Muirhead’s article, it revealed in an email to me that his figures were concocted from a spreadsheet called ‘FES 2025 Economics Outputs Data Workbook’, which was published alongside the NESO report.

The figure of £4.5 trillion which featured in the headlines and opening paragraph of the articles was formulated by Mr Muirhead from the Workbook’s spreadsheet, which lists for the four NESO scenarios in-year costs and annualised costs of capital and operating expenditure from 2025 to 2050 for the sectors of Electricity, Residential, Commercial, Industrial, Road Transport, Hydrogen, Engineered Removals, Rail, Aviation and Shipping.

The Workbook states: “All costs represented in this Data Workbook refer to resource costs. These include the costs of investment in energy technologies, the costs of operating/maintaining them and the costs of the fuels they use. In line with HM Treasury Green Book guidance, we do not include transfer payments between groups, such as taxes, subsidies and economic rents.”

In an email to me, The Mail on Sunday indicated that the figure of £4.5 trillion was calculated by summing from 2025 to 2050 the in-year capital expenditure costs only for the sectors of Electricity, Residential, Commercial, Industrial and Road Transport in the Holistic Transition scenario. This produces a sum of £4.4816 trillion.

Clearly, this figure excludes operating expenditure and sectors such as shipping and aviation. However, they include significant expenditure on the energy system between 2025 and 2050 that would be required regardless of whether the UK reaches net zero emissions by 2050.

For instance, the capital expenditure for the Electricity sector in the Holistic Transition includes £164.7 billion between 2025 and 2050 for the “distribution network”, primarily connecting new homes and businesses to the power grid. Capital expenditure on the “distribution network” would be required even without the net zero target.

Similarly, the capital expenditure for the Residential sector in the Holistic Transition includes £261.8 billion between 2025 and 2050 for “heating technologies”. While this would include the cost of heat pumps to reach net zero, it would also include the cost of replacing gas boilers when they stopped working, even without net zero.

And the capital expenditure for the Road Transport sector in the Holistic Transition includes £2.6 trillion for “vehicle costs”, including the purchase of new cars and vans. But again, these purchases would still take place between 2025 and 2050 even if they were not powered by electricity.

Overall, most of the capital expenditure attributed by Mr Muirhead to net zero would be incurred by the energy system anyway. This point is clear from the fact that the sum of the capital expenditure costs for the Falling Behind scenario, which does not achieve net zero, would be just over £4 trillion, using the same methodology as Mr Muirhead employed for the Holistic Transition.

Hence it is extremely clear that the £4.5 trillion figure is not the cost of net zero. It is also clear that this figure, which purports to be costs accumulated over a 26-year period between 2025 and 2050, cannot be meaningfully compared with the UK’s gross domestic product (GDP) for just one year. In 2025, the UK’s GDP was £3.04 trillion at current market prices.

Further falsehoods

The third paragraph of Mr Muirhead’s article stated: “The figures, quietly published last month by the National Energy System Operator (NESO) – a Government quango responsible for Britain’s energy systems – includes an estimated £585 billion to be forked out by ordinary households to pay for the move away from energy-guzzling boilers towards eco-friendly heat pumps.” This was nonsense.

Firstly, the Workbook was not “quietly published”. It was made public alongside the ‘FES 2025 Economics Annex’, which itself was accompanied by a press release. Indeed the publication of the report and workbooks received widespread media coverage, including from the Daily Mail, the sister newspaper to The Mail on Sunday.

As for the figure of £585 billion, this was obtained by Mr Muirhead by summing £584.9 billion in all capital expenditure costs in the Residential sector for the Holistic Transition, including energy efficiency, heating technologies, required retrofits for heat pumps and domestic district heating for the Holistic Transition. The required retrofits for heat pumps only represent £88.5 billion. And nowhere in the Workbook does it state that any of these costs would be “forked out by ordinary households”.

The fourth paragraph of the online and print articles also stated: “And new wind farms and electricity pylons across the country would cost £1 trillion, it estimates, while switching to electric vehicles and building more charging stations could add further costs of up to £2.6 trillion.” These numbers, too, were concocted by Mr Muirhead. He summed £1.08 trillion in all capital expenditure costs for the Electricity sector, including generation, offshore network, transmission network, distribution network, interconnectors, and carbon dioxide transport and storage. Hence this included far more than just “wind farms and electricity pylons”.

Mr Muirhead obtained the £2.6 trillion figure by summing £2.64 trillion in all capital expenditure costs for the Road Transport sector, including vehicle costs, hydrogen refuelling stations, private electric vehicle chargers, ultra-fast and fast DC chargers, slow public chargers and vehicle-to-grid costs. Again, the figure from Mr Muirhead represented far more than “switching to electric vehicles and building more charging stations”.

The fifth paragraph of the newspaper’s online and print articles stated: “In total, NESO estimates Britain will need to spend £182 billion a year to reach its targets by 2050.” According to the email I received from the newspaper, the £182 billion figure was obtained by dividing the £4.4816 trillion figure by 25. But as explained here, this figure was wrong, and was, in any case, obtained by summing the figures over 26 years from 2025 to 2050. Even if the £4.4816 trillion figure was correct, the average annual figure would be £172.4 billion, not £182 billion.

It was not just the work of NESO that the newspaper article misrepresented. The 19th paragraph of the online and print articles stated: “Previous estimates from the UK’s fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, suggested the move to Net Zero would cost more than £800 billion over the next two decades – with the public purse shelling out £30 billion a year.”

This was, yet again, completely wrong. The ‘Fiscal risks and sustainability’ report published by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in July 2025 concluded: “In its [the CCC’s] Seventh Carbon Budget ‘Balanced Pathway’, the net cost to the economy of reaching net zero is estimated to be £116 billion (in 2025 prices) over the 26 years from 2025 to 2050.” Here, Mr Muirhead appears to have completely confused the whole-economy costs of net zero with the fiscal costs. The OBR report stated: “The total fiscal cost of the net zero transition in our central scenario is an estimated £803 billion, or £30 billion a year on average (0.8 per cent of GDP). Around two-thirds of this comes from lost receipts, and one-third from additional spending.” The lost receipts would be primarily fuel duty that motorists would not pay.

Plagiarised by The Times

It is clear that the article in The Mail on Sunday was fundamentally wrong. While this should be an embarrassment, even more shocking was the plagiarised version of it that was published by The Times.

Written by its Assistant Political Editor Geraldine Scott, the article was posted on the website of The Times on the evening of Sunday 11 January 2026, under the headline ‘Britain ‘will spend £4.5 trillion on road to net zero’’, after the print edition of The Mail on Sunday’s article had appeared. Ms Scott’s article was then published on page 2 of the print edition of The Times on Monday 12 January under the headline ‘Cost of reaching net zero in UK estimated at £4.5 trillion’.

Neither the online nor print version of this article mentioned The Mail on Sunday as the source and instead misled readers into believing that The Times was independently reporting figures from NESO. The degree of plagiarism was so great that The Times article not only repeated the inaccurate figures attributed to NESO, but also the misrepresentation of the figure from the OBR.

The plagiarism is all the more ironic given that The Times had covered, albeit in an inaccurate and misleading way, the publication of the NESO report when it was published on 11 December 2025.

For its part, NESO has already made clear that the £4.5 trillion figure is wrong. In a post on LinkedIn about the many misrepresentations of its findings, NESO’s chief economist, Mike Thompson, wrote: “Some wild numbers have been used in the media this week for “the cost of net zero”. Reports have said that net zero will cost £4.5 trillion, £7.6 trillion – the list goes on. None of these are the cost of net zero…” I have now made complaints to the Independent Press Standards Organisation about the articles published by The Mail on Sunday and The Times.