Governing is about choices, and the indication is that this government is choosing economic prosperity over Net Zero. In the wake of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves’s push for growth, Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband looks chastened. He has now had to concede his previous opposition to expanding Heathrow Airport, and also appears likely to approve the Rosebank oilfield. Once again, it clearly isn’t easy to be green.

Though the minister stresses that there is no conflict between Net Zero and economic growth, these policy moves suggest otherwise. Building bigger airports and extracting more oil are hardly climate-friendly moves, but both mean jobs and investments. Labour, for the time being, seems to be choosing the latter. If more decisions like this follow, the UK’s bold commitments on Net Zero could be in danger.

With the Government scrabbling around for growth ideas, however, and still conscious of the cost of living, fiscal demands will likely trump green credentials for a while. That could mean a greater reluctance to adopt the sort of changes which hit businesses and voters in the pocket. The difficulty is that these are often some of the most effective environmental measures.

Avoiding them will perhaps mean making tougher decisions elsewhere. It will also mean looking at the real challenges of reducing carbon, where some things that are popular or often of short-term benefit tend to be detrimental in the long run. Measures such as reducing plastic, for example, can cut the use of oil products but end up generating more waste and emissions. Future governments will have to get to grips with these sorts of problems if they want to build a credible road towards Net Zero.

There will be further looming battles about the things that need to be built to manage the transition. From grid infrastructure to housing, there is a real need to build newer, greener alternatives. These often come into conflict with ecological groups, who object to the immediate effects of building regardless of the future potential for carbon savings. These are difficult political conflicts to manage, as the Government is already seeing protests planned against its current wave of infrastructure building.

Managing public opinion around Net Zero could prove far trickier than dissent in Cabinet. Overall, the UK public has bought into environmental responsibility. A majority believe in human-driven climate change and want to stop it. As a headline idea, Net Zero is largely popular. This falls away, however, when voters are pushed on many of the policies that deliver it. People are protective of their individual polluting habits and are reluctant to embrace policies that reduce their quality of life or cost them too much.

These moves might be a sign that the tides are shifting against Net Zero. The flagship promise came in 2019, before energy price rises and security issues shocked the UK — and before the lack of growth seemed so stubbornly locked in. The target sought to constrain the choices of future administrations, putting them on a path where reducing carbon emissions trumped other concerns. Now, it seems like economic progress is again the priority for both voters and politicians. With even Miliband yielding on Heathrow, pragmatic environmentalism is likely to become the order of the day.

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John Oxley is a corporate strategist and political commentator. His Substack is Joxley Writes.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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