• Timeline
• Votes
• Speeches
• Tweets
• Contact

Nick Timothy's Speeches In Parliament Related to Climate

We've found 22 Parliamentary debates in which Nick Timothy has spoken about climate-related matters.

Here are the relevant sections of their speeches.

• 20 Nov 2025: Russian Ship Yantar

  11:09

  We know, as the Minister has said, that Russia and China target undersea cables and interconnectors, which we rely on increasingly because of the Government’s energy policy. We know that the Russians put listening devices on our offshore infrastructure to monitor our submarines, and we know that China, which dominates the world market for cellular internet modules, inserts kill switches into the turbines that this Government want to buy from them. I have been asking the same question for a year now: why is there not a single Minister in charge of the security of our offshore energy infrastructure? What representations have Ministry of Defence Ministers made to the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, who is causing so many of these problems?

  [Source]

• 14 Jul 2025: Draft Warm Home Discount (Amendment) Regulations 2025

  18:09

  It is hard to see how this expansion will achieve the Government’s solemn manifesto pledge to cut energy bills by £300 before the end of this Parliament. We are seeing this approach play out across energy policy: the Government raise the cost of energy with their unrealistic decarbonisation policies; energy-intensive industries then suffer under the highest industrial energy prices in Europe; and the Government step in with subsidies to help them cover the cost that they created to begin with. It is madness, and we are now seeing the same thing done for families.

  [Source]

• 1 Jul 2025: Business Energy Supply Billing: Regulation

  10:13

  As the hon. Member for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) suggested, high energy costs themselves are a huge problem. It is not just about the conduct of businesses; we must explore the effects of wider Government policy, too, because no country in history has ever made itself richer by making energy more expensive. First fossil fuels and then nuclear powered the industrial and technological revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries, and yet it is the policy of our Government to increase the price of energy and make its supply less reliable. They are defying common sense by pushing up demand for electricity with their ideological targets for decarbonising the grid and rolling out heat pumps and electric vehicles. Large-scale electrification is pushing the grid to its limits; it is already struggling to supply new homes, factories and data centres. We can clearly see the effect on energy bills for businesses.

  The Climate Change Committee—an unelected and unaccountable quango against which Ministers offer little or no resistance—says the cost of electrification must be shifted on to bills for gas and oil. For years the climate lobby insisted that renewables were cheaper than gas, but now that they have to put their money where their mouth is, they want to put the public’s money where their mouth is—now that the world can see the truth, they want to transfer the massive cost of renewables on to gas bills.

  Grid decarbonisation will create a carbon price of £147 per tonne of CO 2 , which is 2.7 times higher than the current level. Ever-rising carbon prices will be locked in under the EU reset deal, which will keep us aligned with the EU emissions trading system. We already have the highest industrial energy prices in Europe. Our energy consumption fell last year by 0.1%—we were the only G7 country where that happened, apart from Japan and Germany. Despite global energy demand getting ever higher, our energy supply fell by an average of 2.1% per year between 2014 and 2024. Output from energy-intensive industries has fallen to its lowest level since the 1990s.

  Decarbonisation is undoubtedly fuelling deindustrialisation. Just last week, it was announced that a facility in Teesside, one of the largest chemical plants in the country, will be permanently closed. The Grangemouth oil refinery stopped processing crude oil last April. British Steel has been brought to its knees. Yesterday, we heard the sad news about the Prax Lindsey oil refinery.

  [Source]

• 30 Jun 2025: Draft Contracts for Difference (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 3) Regulations 2025

  18:07

  I am pleased to respond to the draft regulations for the Opposition. Under this legislation, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero will be given new powers to view anonymised CfD bids before setting the budget for the next auction of contracts, due to take place later this year. That means that he will know ahead of time exactly how much will be procured if he sets the budget at a certain level, and therefore what the strike price will be. That poses questions about exactly how much the next round of CfD contracts—AR7—will end up costing the taxpayer.

  Why are Ministers having to pump so much more money into CfD contracts? It is because of the Government’s ideological rush to decarbonise the grid within five years. That requires a massive expansion in wind power over the next two auctions, and the result will be higher prices forced on to households and businesses. We know that not just from experience and an understanding of how renewable technologies work, but because it has come from the horse’s mouth, too. Behind closed doors, a senior RWE executive has admitted that there would be “spikes in prices” and predicted that the “consumer risks losing out”. In other words, bills are going up. It would be nice if we could have such honesty from the Government.

  This is the reality of net zero. Last January, a combination of dark skies and low wind—what has now become known as Dunkelflaute—brought Britain to the brink of blackouts. That was avoided only thanks to our remaining gas fleets, which the Government say they want to run down. The Prime Minister has promised categorically that decarbonising the grid by 2030 will not cause any power shortages, blackouts or energy rationing, yet unreliable solar contributed to a lack of inertia in the Iberian grid that could have prevented their power outages. In Britain, customers have paid over half a billion pounds already this year for power generated by wind, with which the grid cannot cope.

  [Source]

• 23 Jun 2025: Geo-engineering and the Environment

  16:51

  The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Pippa Heylings) used the opportunity to speak about climate change. Although she and I probably disagree profoundly about the wisdom of the net zero target and the plan to decarbonise the whole grid by 2030, I am sure she opposes, as I do, the giant solar and battery farms that the Government want to impose on both our constituencies and most of the east of England.

  [Source]

• 18 Jun 2025: Future of the Gas Grid

  10:25

  The hon. Members for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell), from the land of my grandmother’s birth, reminded us of the Northern Ireland experience and the importance of geography when we debate energy. That was reinforced by the hon. Member for Worcester (Tom Collins), who rightly said that we will continue to need a national gas grid, because of the nature of the demand for gas. I thought he was right to criticise the Climate Change Committee for proposing no gas for heating homes. I think the hon. Member for Peterborough (Andrew Pakes) put it well when he said that Britain runs on gas. He noted the challenge of reconciling the policy to decarbonise with maintaining fairness for families.

  We must always be honest about trade-offs when we talk about policy, which is one of the things about which I will try to warn the Minister. The Government may come to regret their failure to do so on several fronts, particularly on net zero. Sadly, that is a lesson, especially on net zero, that my party has drawn from its time in office, including the unhappy end of that time.

  [Source]

• 10 Jun 2025: Nuclear Power: Investment

  12:46

  The Conservative party is a pro-nuclear party and we welcome any decisions, backed by investment, that increase Britain’s nuclear capacity, because we cannot deliver cheap, reliable and secure energy without it. Although the investment announced today by the Secretary of State is significant, it is a fraction of the £230 billion cost, which will ultimately be borne by consumers, of his plan to decarbonise the grid. Unlike the intermittent technologies backed at such cost by the Secretary of State, nuclear provides reliable baseload power. It generates inertia to stabilise our grid. Nuclear power plants require substantially less new grid infrastructure compared with dispersed generation from wind and solar. It is to the shame of successive Governments over many years that Britain relinquished its status as a world leader in civil nuclear technologies. In 1965, we had more nuclear reactors than the United States, the USSR and the rest of the world put together. Between 1956 and 1966, we built 10 nuclear power stations, but we gave all that up. The contribution of nuclear to our power generation peaked in 1994 and has fallen consistently since then.

  Canada has approved a plan for four SMRs by 2029. As things stand, Britain will not have SMRs connected to the grid until the 2030s. The contrast between this caution on nuclear and the Government’s rush to decarbonise the entire grid in just five years, while betting the house on unreliable and intermittent renewable technologies and shutting down British oil and gas in the North sea, could not be clearer. We need the Energy Secretary to focus on the positive, not to stake our country’s future and people’s bills on ideology.

  [Source]

• 5 Jun 2025: Battery Energy Storage Sites: Safety Regulations

  16:35

  The fact that there were such clear themes from Members across the House and across the divides of the House—right and left, net zero enthusiasts and sceptics—shows that we are dealing with an undeniable problem that the Government have not yet gripped. There was a clear consensus across the House, from my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith) to the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman), that there is a total absence of regulation with this risky technology. There was also agreement, from the hon. Member for South Derbyshire (Samantha Niblett) to my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas), about the effects of the policy on the countryside, such as on the availability of good farmland and on rural roads, as well as the challenges of fire service response times in the country. The hon. Members for Normanton and Hemsworth (Jon Trickett) and for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) made the point that BESS fires can have serious effects on our precious rivers.

  I am afraid that I am going to breach the cross-party love-in by picking up on what my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Sarah Bool) said about ideology. The Government are betting on battery energy storage systems thanks to their ideological aim to decarbonise the entire grid within five years, therefore choosing to depend on unreliable, intermittent and expensive renewables. That is the root cause of the dependence on the technologies we are debating. [ Interruption. ] The hon. Member for Ipswich (Jack Abbott) can intervene if he wishes.

  It is the consequence of the zeal of the Energy Secretary that we are debating these subjects. Thanks to net zero policy costs, which are relevant more than wholesale gas prices, Britain already has the highest energy costs in Europe. Pushing policy to run faster than technology will allow risks a crisis in the grid and in our economy.

  [Source]

• 2 Jun 2025: Draft Contracts for Difference (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 2) Regulations 2025

  Beyond those concerns, we must also ask ourselves whether subsidising companies like Drax is good energy policy. The evidence shows that it is clearly not. The company that I have been discussing is an expensive white elephant for which we have been paying ever since the Energy Secretary first held his post back in 2009. Since the ramp-up that he authorised, the company has cut down 300 million trees, six times more than in the entire New Forest. The company has received £6.5 billion of public subsidy. In the nonsensical world of net zero, it has been classed as clean energy, but it is far from being a source of clean energy. It is a plant for burning wood imported from forests across the world. As new forests are planted to offset the emissions from chopping down the trees, turning them into pellets and burning them, we are supposed to believe that it is clean. The truth is that the plant we are discussing produces four times the carbon dioxide emitted from our last coal plant, which itself produced twice as many emissions as gas. The imported wood has come from rare, at-risk and irreplaceable forests and arrives here on diesel-powered ships.

  [Source]

  18:14

  If Members here today believe that this is environmentalism and a solution to climate change, I have a bridge to sell them. The Climate Change Act 2008 has created a complex web of targets, quotas and regulations, as well as policies set by a monomaniacal and unaccountable quango tying the hands of elected Governments and twisting policy out of shape. It is producing an energy system that is less secure and more expensive, while doing nothing to prevent rising carbon emissions worldwide.

  [Source]

• 20 May 2025: Draft Pollution Prevention and Control (Fees) (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2025

  14:35

  Removing oil and gas from the equation is an ideological and destructive move. It does not serve our national interest or help our struggling industries. The Government should be much more hard-headed about their approach to energy. Lower prices, more jobs, higher growth and stronger revenue, not ideology, should be the objectives. Instead, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero is driving us towards economic and national decline.

  [Source]

• 31 Mar 2025: Draft Ecodesign for Energy-Related Products and Energy Information (Amendment) (Northern Ireland) Regulations 2025

  However, we offer a word of caution to Ministers. These regulations put a modest compliance cost on manufacturers that sell their goods in both Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but the Government are now considering aligning the whole of the UK with net zero laws written and decided in Brussels. We would be signing up not only to the European Union emissions trading scheme, with its significantly higher carbon price—increasing our carbon price has not been ruled out by Ministers in a succession of answers to our questions—but to a whole slew of regulations that will be enforced by the European Court of Justice.

  [Source]

• 18 Mar 2025: Electricity Grid Decarbonisation

  11:45

  The Government’s rush to decarbonise the grid means more hidden costs, more curtailment payments, more balancing payments, more subsidies and a higher carbon price. Will the Minister guarantee that our carbon price will remain lower than the European price for the remainder of this Parliament?

  [Source]

• 5 Mar 2025: Renewables Obligation Certificate Scheme

  The phasing out of the renewables obligation and feed-in tariffs is being used by the Government in their efforts to hoodwink the public on the true costs of their net zero policies. The National Energy System Operator’s 2030 report made several highly questionable assumptions about how the Government’s goal of decarbonising the grid will cut energy bills. One of the points made by NESO was that energy bills would fall due to the expiration of the renewables obligation and feed-in tariff contracts, but those contracts will expire regardless of the speed of decarbonisation, so it is misleading to include that as a benefit of the Government’s deeply flawed clean energy plan. We will see costs increase significantly elsewhere, thanks to Government policies.

  [Source]

  15:14

  It is absolutely our position that the Energy Secretary is trying to move too quickly. The plan to decarbonise the grid by 2030 is deemed by many experts to be unrealistic. It is predicated on a report produced by NESO, which itself says that the plan will lead to higher bills, and on calculations based on the carbon price increasing to £147 per tonne. It would be interesting to hear from the Minister whether the Government’s policy is to ensure that Britain’s carbon price should remain lower than the European carbon price for the duration of this Parliament, because the Secretary of State has so far refused to say that.

  As long as policy races ahead of technology, costs will inevitably increase for taxpayers and consumers, and that is before we even consider the consequences of the Climate Change Committee’s seventh carbon budget. The committee has recommended a limit on the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions of 535 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, which represents an 87% reduction by 2040 compared with 1990 levels. That is an ambitious goal, but it is one that the committee’s own data shows will come at a net cost of £319 billion over the next 15 years. If we are to debate this, the Government should be honest and open about that fact.

  No Government have ever rejected a carbon budget, and the Energy Secretary has so far refused to come to the House to make a statement on the publication of that budget, so perhaps the Minister can tell us whether the Government intend to accept the carbon budget in full. The Climate Change Committee believes that we will need a sixfold increase in offshore wind power, a doubling of onshore wind power and a fivefold increase in solar panels by 2040. To accelerate the growth of renewables at such a pace would require a huge increase in public subsidy.

  There are so many questions left unanswered, and so far only silence from the Energy Secretary. That is not because the Government do not understand the scale of the challenge they have set themselves. The Energy Secretary understands it all too well, but he will not admit publicly what his ideological attachment to net zero and his net zero policies mean for us all: nothing less than a revolution in how we live our lives, and the massive expansion of public spending for a system of energy that is less reliable and more expensive in generating power. We need complete clarity, so that the mistakes of the renewables obligation are not repeated. Failure to do so will leave us poorer and exposed to risk and instability in the world.

  [Source]

• 26 Feb 2025: Family Businesses

  This debate has been held against the absurd backdrop of a Chancellor of the Exchequer writing to Government colleagues and begging regulators, desperately seeking advice on how to find economic growth, while the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is deindustrialising the economy, the Home Office is welcoming fiscally negative immigration and the Department for Business and Trade is adding more than £5 billion a year in new costs to business in a single Act of Parliament. And the Government are whacking up taxes, including through the change to business property relief, because they broke their election promises as soon as they got into office.

  [Source]

• 12 Feb 2025: Fuel Poverty: England

  10:34

  The challenge of fuel poverty affects people of all ages throughout the country. Rather than just creating new benefits and schemes to address the high cost of fuel, we need to resolve the root causes of energy costs more generally. Here, the Government are taking the country in a very worrying direction. The Energy Secretary promises to decarbonise the grid by 2030, and the Business Secretary wants to ban petrol and diesel cars by the same year. Tough standards on aviation fuel are being enforced; heat pumps are expected to replace gas boilers; expensive and intermittent renewable technologies funded by huge and hidden subsidies are favoured; and oil and gas fields in the North sea are abandoned, left for the Norwegians to profit from what we choose to ignore.

  The Energy Secretary has made much of the National Energy System Operator’s report on decarbonising the grid. He says that report shows that he can do so by 2030 without increasing bills, but in fact the report does not say that—and even then, its calculations rest on a carbon price that will rise to £147 per tonne of carbon dioxide. It is no wonder that, in reply to a question I asked him last week, the Energy Secretary would not rule out having a higher carbon price in Britain than in Europe. That will be terrible for families struggling with the cost of heating their home, but it will hurt them—and indeed all of us—in other ways. As long as policy runs faster than technology and other countries do not follow our lead on climate change, decarbonisation will inevitably mean deindustrialisation. That will mean a weaker economy with lower growth, fewer jobs, and less spending power to help those who we have been discussing today—those who need support the most.

  Of course, it is not just the NESO report that shows us the future consequences of the Government’s policies. The OBR says that environmental levies will reach up to £15 billion by the end of this Parliament to pay for net zero policies. As those levies will fall heavily on consumption, they will have a particularly regressive effect, as analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Cornwall Insight has confirmed. It is therefore no wonder that Labour’s election promise to cut bills by £300 by the end of the Parliament has vanished without trace, so I challenge the Minister today to do what she has not done since polling day—repeat that promise very clearly. I suspect she will not because, unlike the Secretary of State, she knows the reality of his policies. The Government are adding complexity and contradiction to our energy system and loading extra costs on to families across the country. There is still time for Ministers to think again and put the interests of decent, hard-working people ahead of the Energy Secretary’s ideological dogma.

  [Source]

• 11 Feb 2025: Draft Energy Bill Relief Scheme and Energy Bills Discount Scheme (Amendment) Regulations 2024

  09:30

  As the current Government continue down the ideological decarbonisation route, led by the Secretary of State, we will watch carefully in order to protect the families and businesses who bear the cost of unrealistic clean energy targets. Indeed, experts expect the energy price cap to rise next month. The Manchester-based— not Aberdeen-based—head of GB Energy, Juergen Maier, says it will be

  We support the regulations. We recognise their role in winding down the old schemes, but we remain vigilant about new policies that will surely make lives harder and more expensive because of the unattainable and self-harming decarbonisation goals that the Government are pursuing.

  [Source]

• 4 Feb 2025: National Wealth Fund: Opportunities for Industry

  The Government policy to decarbonise the grid by 2030 rests on the National Energy System Operator’s assumption of a £147 per tonne carbon price, but manufacturers are lining up to tell the Energy Secretary that it would destroy British industry. Will he guarantee today that for the remainder of this Parliament, we will have a lower carbon price than Europe?

  [Source]

• 27 Jan 2025: Draft Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading Scheme (Amendment) Order 2025

  18:00

  We have experienced unacceptable deindustrialisation in the years since 2008, and the trajectory of policy under this Government means that we will suffer a further loss of competitiveness in the years ahead, making the imbalances in our economy—sectoral and geographical—as well as a huge trade deficit and all the consequences of that, far worse. That is why I want to take this opportunity to ask the Minister about the assumption in the National Energy System Operator report that the carbon price will rise to £147 per tonne of carbon dioxide by 2030 to meet the Government’s clean power target. That is an incredible number, but the feasibility of the Government’s whole plan to decarbonise the grid by 2030 is entirely based on that number.

  The news gets worse for British business. The UK was once a net exporter of energy, with internationally competitive energy prices. This is no longer the case. We have been a net importer of energy since 2004, and our import dependency has increased from 13% in 2005 to 41% in 2023. Industrial energy prices have increased from 4.56p per kWh in 2005 to 25.46p per kWh in 2023. Industrial energy prices in the UK are now on average 50% higher than prices in in other advanced economies. Our industrial energy prices are four times higher than those in China and three times higher than those in America and Canada. They are also higher than prices in France, which has significant nuclear energy capacity. We are artificially driving up costs with a misguided drive to decarbonise before the technology is ready.

  [Source]

  18:14

  I certainly will, Mrs Harris, but this is relevant to the ETS, because there is nothing more important for the future of energy policy. Getting policy right means being straight about the trade-offs. The energy trilemma has not been resolved. We must choose how best to prioritise. We must do what other countries are doing and put cost and security ahead of decarbonisation.

  [Source]

• 21 Nov 2024: G20 and COP29 Summits

  On the Prime Minister’s plan to decarbonise the grid by 2030, can he guarantee that in that timeframe there will no power shortages, no blackouts and no energy rationing?

  [Source]

• 29 Oct 2024: Great British Energy Bill

  17:48

  Tomorrow the Chancellor of the Exchequer will announce her intention to borrow to invest. We know that the borrowing will not just be for investment, but what investment there is will be dominated by energy schemes that will cost more to do less. We do have an underinvested economy, but net zero zealotry will make the problem worse, not better.

  [Source]

• 21 Oct 2024: Employment Rights Bill

  19:49

  Why will the Government do nothing about the international trading system? Countries aiming to run trade surpluses, such as China, hold down their labour costs and destroy industry in deficit countries such as ours. Trade wars, as two authors like to say, are class wars, and the Labour party usually likes to fight a class war, yet this Government want to flood Britain with cheap Chinese electric cars because of the Energy Secretary’s obsession with net zero. That is just one way in which our economic model needs to change, because while the Government’s characterisation of their inheritance is, I am afraid, cynical and wrong, there is a case for economic change, if only the Government were prepared to undertake it. I think the Business Secretary might be one of those capable of doing that, but I am not sure that some of his colleagues are. Today, Ministers could be launching a plan for reindustrialisation, for competitive energy prices, for domestic steel manufacturing and for a strategy taking in better infrastructure, skills and training, planning, regulatory reform and more— [ Interruption. ] Would the hon. Lady like to intervene?

  [Source]

• 22 Jul 2024: Economy, Welfare and Public Services

  19:13

  We need to question economic theory, challenge Treasury orthodoxy and think beyond the intellectual limits of ideological liberalism. Theories like comparative advantage have led us to offshore industry and grow dependent on hostile states, like China. But international trade is neither free nor fair, and net zero cannot mean sacrificing our prosperity and security. Being a services superpower is a great advantage, but alone it is not enough. We need a serious strategy to reindustrialise, narrow the trade deficit and rebalance the economy. We need to change and, in the months and years ahead, I look forward to debating how we do so.

  [Source]

See all Parliamentary Speeches Mentioning Climate