Former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove

Clintel Foundation
Date: 21 September 2026

Dearlove’s central argument was not primarily about climate science. Dearlove explicitly acknowledged that he was not a scientist and said he would leave the scientific debate to others. His expertise, he stressed, was national security and geopolitics, based on 38 years in the intelligence service and extensive experience dealing with foreign governments and intelligence organisations.

From that perspective, he argued that Britain’s energy vulnerability should be viewed as a strategic problem. Extreme weather and climate change, he said, were natural hazards that governments should prepare for, but they should not be confused with threats posed by hostile states. The critical issue was the vulnerability of Britain’s infrastructure—and the possibility that countries such as Russia and China could exploit those vulnerabilities.

Dearlove rejected the idea that the recent summer’s drought, heatwaves and other extreme weather events should automatically determine the direction of energy policy. Such events, he argued, were not a logical starting point for an assessment of energy security. Instead, governments should take a strategic view that separates natural hazards from deliberate actions by hostile powers.

He identified three dimensions of national security: direct threats from hostile states; vulnerabilities created by weaknesses in infrastructure and government policy; and threats that governments have failed to identify accurately or prepare for. In the energy sector, it was primarily the second category—and its potential exploitation by foreign powers—that concerned him.

The Chinese and Russian dimensions

A substantial part of Dearlove’s argument concerned China. Drawing on his own experience of dealings with Chinese officials, he described the Chinese Communist Party as highly conscious of vulnerabilities and adept at exploiting weaknesses in other societies. He pointed to the party’s United Front Work Department, which he described as a major instrument for shaping political and social environments abroad in ways favourable to Chinese interests.

Dearlove argued that Western countries should pay greater attention to such activities. He referred to the concept of “active measures”, historically associated with Soviet attempts to exploit political and social movements in Western countries. In his view, the capabilities developed during the Cold War remain relevant, with both Russia and China possessing substantial organisations devoted to influence and strategic competition.

He included what he called “climate catastrophism” among movements that have acquired substantial influence in Western societies. His argument was not that every environmental organisation or climate campaign is controlled by a foreign power. Rather, he warned that ideological movements can potentially become vulnerabilities that foreign intelligence services exploit, just as the Soviet Union had sought to exploit Western political movements during the Cold War.

Russia, however, represented a more immediate and conventional threat, according to Dearlove. He highlighted the country’s capabilities in underwater warfare, noting its longstanding investment in the ability to interfere with undersea cables, pipelines and electricity interconnectors. In an increasingly interconnected energy system, damage to such infrastructure could have consequences extending far beyond the immediate target.

Dearlove therefore urged politicians to look beyond familiar arguments about renewable subsidies, fossil fuels and Net Zero targets. His central concern was the resilience of the system if critical infrastructure were deliberately disrupted.

“We have as a nation negligently wandered close to a cliff edge and the adversaries I have described stand ready to help us over it,” he said.

Deindustrialisation as a strategic vulnerability

For Dearlove, one of the deepest problems facing Britain is not simply the composition of its electricity generation but the loss of the industrial capacity that once supported the energy system.

He cited figures supplied by energy analyst John Constable showing a dramatic decline in British industrial energy consumption. Between 1974 and 2025, industrial final consumption reportedly fell by around 70% in absolute terms, while its share of national energy consumption declined from 41% to 14%. Britain has consequently evolved from a major industrial economy into what Dearlove described essentially as a consumption centre, increasingly dependent on imported goods.

That transformation has created a strategic vulnerability because Britain no longer possesses the industrial base required to rebuild its own energy infrastructure quickly after a major disruption.

Large transformers, for example, can now take around two years to arrive, according to Dearlove, compared with seven to 14 months before 2020. Generators can take up to three years. Even more fundamentally, some critical materials are increasingly concentrated in China. Grain-oriented electrical steel, or GOES, which is essential for transformers and has no straightforward substitute, is produced on a huge scale by China while European production capacity has declined.

This means that Britain may retain the technical ability to design and assemble important grid equipment without necessarily controlling the supply chains required to manufacture it. In a serious crisis, the country could therefore find itself competing with other nations for equipment and materials.

“We have very little industry left to protect and we cannot rebuild non-existent industries which lie in foreign jurisdictions beyond our reach,” Dearlove warned.

The problem extends beyond the electricity grid. Modern societies depend on electricity for water and sewage systems, gas networks, railways, underground transport, traffic lights and communications. A prolonged failure of the grid could therefore become a much broader societal crisis.

Dearlove singled out China as particularly important because of its strategic approach to creating economic dependencies. He pointed to China’s dominance of rare-earth production and the global spread of Chinese telecommunications technology as examples of how economic relationships can potentially generate geopolitical leverage.

The “energy trap”

The former intelligence chief contrasted today’s situation with the Cold War. At that time, British and Western strategists assumed that a country’s war-fighting potential depended heavily on its industrial base. Although fuel supplies were vulnerable, the underlying industrial capacity to repair and rebuild infrastructure remained available.

That assumption, Dearlove argued, no longer holds.

Britain has moved from an industrial economy with a large and flexible energy-consuming manufacturing sector to an economy dominated by services, transport and consumption. As a result, there is less capacity to absorb an electricity shortage by temporarily reducing industrial demand. A modern consumer economy cannot simply switch off factories because many of those factories no longer exist.

This creates what Dearlove called an “energy trap”. Britain is simultaneously more dependent on complex infrastructure and less capable of repairing that infrastructure independently if it fails.

He argued that this vulnerability has been created gradually rather than through a deliberate conspiracy. Successive governments, he said, have allowed the country’s industrial and energy capabilities to decline without adequately considering the national-security consequences.

“The first responsibility of government is the safety of the nation. However successive governments have forgotten this, and Britain is now caught in an energy trap, of its own making.”

A national “Grand Strategy” for energy

Dearlove concluded by calling for a fundamental change in the way Britain thinks about energy. Rather than simply arguing over whether Net Zero is desirable or undesirable, he proposed developing a national “Grand Strategy” for energy security.

Such a strategy would identify critical vulnerabilities, single points of failure and dependencies on foreign suppliers. It would also examine whether Britain has sufficient contingency arrangements if key infrastructure or supply chains were disrupted.

He suggested that national security exceptions should be incorporated into the Net Zero framework, allowing the government to suspend or modify climate-related objectives where they conflict with essential security requirements. He also called for efforts to rebuild strategic industries needed to maintain the country’s energy infrastructure and strengthen Britain’s ability to defend itself and support allied democracies.

Dearlove acknowledged that rebuilding industrial capacity would be difficult and could take at least a generation. He also cautioned that the state itself might not be the best agent for achieving it. Nevertheless, he argued that the long-term benefits would be substantial.

His argument ultimately represents a shift in emphasis: rather than asking only how quickly Britain can decarbonise its energy system, policymakers should also ask what happens if that system is disrupted—and whether the country still possesses the industrial capability to recover.

For Dearlove, the answer is increasingly uncomfortable. Britain has become dependent on global supply chains for critical energy infrastructure while simultaneously pursuing an energy policy that, in his view, has insufficiently accounted for geopolitical competition.

His proposed remedy is therefore not simply a change in the electricity mix, but a broader reassessment of energy as an element of national defence. Britain, he argued, needs to regain the ability to withstand disruption, maintain critical infrastructure and, ultimately, rebuild what it might lose.

“The task is urgent,” Dearlove concluded. “The government should have this amongst their very top priorities.”

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