The local elections have changed everything. As Simon Carr of the Guido Fawkes website has pointed out, despite having only five MPs, Reform UK is already setting the agenda in Parliament.

This is as true of net zero as it is of so many other policy areas. Twelve months ago, claims from the Government benches that renewables were bringing down energy bills would have been accepted without question. Now, when Starmer and Miliband say the same thing, they sound ridiculous.

Everyone now knows we have installed more wind and solar power than just about anyone else, and also that we have the highest electricity prices in the developed world. Everyone can see that our industrial sector, already decimated by years of decarbonisation policies, is rapidly disappearing entirely. Grangemouth, the Luton van plant, a major pottery in Stoke – the litany of disaster seems endless.

The Government is desperately trying to come up with wheezes to alleviate the economic pain. A new industrial strategy has been mooted but, as with so many Labour schemes, it’s mostly smoke and mirrors – the only concrete idea on the table seems to be to exempt industry from some of the costs of grid upgrades. Like so many of the ideas that are touted by green activists, this is a mere shuffling of the deckchairs.

The people of the UK ultimately pay for the whole electricity system, either through the cost of living, through taxes, or directly through electricity bills. While it might bring a little relief to industry, Labour’s plan to move network charges would only shift the cost of all those new wires and pylons from your supermarket bill to your tax bill or your electricity bill.

If the Westminster debate about decarbonisation is still somewhat otherworldly, in the wider world thinking is much clearer – the shock of the local election results has clearly concentrated minds. With Reform now in pole position to form the next government, investors can see that the writing is on the wall for net zero. Within a week of the local election results we have had the Danish wind power company Orsted cancelling the vast Hornsea 4 project. The Cruachan 2 pumped hydro scheme in Scotland has been put on hold too, the developers citing rising costs.

Whether these moves are real, or simply part of attempts to negotiate higher subsidies remains unclear. But the truth is that when net zero is reversed – it is inevitable – neither will be needed. All those pylons and batteries that threaten to scar the counties down the East Coast will be surplus to requirements too.

Meanwhile, the financial gains to be made from reversing net zero are significant. Although green activists have been trying hard to convince the public that high electricity bills are all down to gas prices, if you dig into the numbers it’s clearly not true. The costs of all the “green crap” (to use David Cameron’s pithy phrase), including carbon taxes, renewables subsidies, grid upgrades and paying windfarms to switch off, are a substantial proportion of what we pay for electricity.

In other words, the prize for cancelling net zero is a massive cut in electricity bills. That is a real industrial strategy.

Of course, those gains will be partially reversed by the need to compensate investors, and it is important that the financial community recognise now that they have a duty to minimise that future cost to the public purse. Recklessly ploughing on with projects that now clearly have no future would rightly be seen as reprehensible.

As the retreat from net zero gathers pace, we should remind ourselves of where we have come from. Just a few months ago, the complete decarbonisation of the economy was seen as a sensible policy, despite the fact that Whitehall had produced neither an engineering plan of the project, nor a credible cost-benefit analysis, and with little or no serious debate of the details in Parliament, academia or the media. Assurances from ministers and officials that the project was desirable and, as a result of the (allegedly) collapsing cost of renewable energy, affordable too, were simply accepted as articles of faith.

And a faith – or to be more precise, a cult – is exactly what climate catastrophism has become. It has operated just as all cults do, ruthlessly silencing or demonising all opposition. It was only the arrival of upstart media outlets, such as GB News and Talk TV, and Elon Musk’s free speech stance on social media, that forced the important questions into the public discussion. The green establishment tried to silence them of course – through lawfare via Ofcom and IPSO, and desperate denunciations of any dissent as “far-Right”, “hate mongering” and the like.

Reform UK’s insurgency has given a political voice to the net zero dissenters and the local election results have now changed everything. We will reverse the net zero policy – of that, I now have no doubt – but there is a real possibility that huge harm will be done before we make it happen. I just pray that we are not too late.