The US-Israel war on Iran will drive household energy costs in Britain to their highest level in two years over the summer. This has given fresh impetus to calls for the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, to change course. The cabinet minister is vulnerable because he promised cheaper bills if Britain embraced his clean, green power plan.

Critics, including Labour’s former prime minister Sir Tony Blair, are circling. Yet Mr Miliband ought to ignore the naysayers. Until global carbon emissions, including Britain’s, are reduced to net zero, the planet will continue to fry and temperature records will continue to be broken.

But what happens when Mr Miliband’s clean power system is not yet in place, while the fossil fuel system is being run down in a crisis? That is the question a new paper for the Common Wealth thinktank seeks to answer. The economist Patricia Pino takes the lessons of the 2022 price shock and applies them........

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