Kemi Badenoch, who joined US anti-abortion activists and European far-right parties at ARC, described energy secretary as a ‘villain’

Britain’s net zero policies and the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, have come under fire at a conference of conservatives, rightwing populists and wealthy US backers linked to Donald Trump.

The energy policies pursued by the British government were described as a “tragic mistake” by Trump’s energy secretary, one of a number of officials from the US administration attending the event.

Energy secretary hails £100bn milestone in this parliament and says it is ‘only the start of what we want to achieve’

Ed Miliband has hailed a boost to UK jobs and growth as government data reveals that private sector companies have pledged more than £100bn in investment into the green economy so far in this parliament.

Offshore wind, solar power and the electricity grid make up the bulk of the planned investment, most of it between 2024 and 2031, which will go to all regions of the UK and comes from a mixture of UK companies and overseas sources including the EU and Japan.

Prime minister was forced to row back on some policies despite strong support among voters for climate action

Keir Starmer has faced a problem no Labour government has needed to deal with before. His energy and climate policies – core to solving the cost of living crisis – have come under attack from opposition parties, which have made dismantling the agenda one of their top priorities, second only to immigration, in their pitch to voters.

This is new in British politics, where a cross-party consensus on the climate and environment has held at least since the days of Margaret Thatcher. She warned the UN of the climate crisis in 1988; David Cameron in 2006 urged voters to “vote blue, go green”; Theresa May enshrined in law the requirement to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050; Boris Johnson championed the Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow in 2021; even Rishi Sunak only tried a partial rollback of green policies as a last desperate throw before calling an election.

Energy specialists say abandoning net zero and increasing oil and gas drilling would cause more instability for Britons

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Abandoning net zero and drilling for more oil and gas in the North Sea would be a massive setback for the UK and would not help the economy, leading experts have said in response to claims by the former prime minister Tony Blair.

“This is a bizarre intervention to make during the worst May heatwave on record and when the Iran crisis is providing yet more evidence of the enormous costs of oil and gas,” said Ed Matthew, the UK programme director at the E3G thinktank. “Clean energy is cheaper energy – it protects our bills from prices skyrocketing, its running costs are virtually zero, and it doesn’t cause climate change which threatens economic collapse ... The government should ignore Blair’s ideological nonsense and focus on what works.”