The arts should learn to love fossil fuels
This article was published at artsprofessional.co.uk on 14 July 2025 (link £), and is reproduced here with permission. It is a response to an editorial on the same website, which called for an end to fossil fuel sponsorship of the arts.
Many people in the arts are fiercely antipathetic to fossil fuels. Chris Garrard’s call to end all fossil fuel sponsorship (link £), published in Arts Professional last week, is a case in point.
But such virtue-signalling is both ill-informed and incredibly short-sighted. The recent travails of the Edinburgh Book Festival show where it can lead. After activists persuaded it to jettison its sponsor, the financial services giant Baillie Gifford, over some minor fossil fuel investments, festival managers found themselves looking at a potentially terminal financial shortfall.
In the event, they got lucky. A few weeks later we saw, in close succession, the appointment of a former Scottish National Party adviser to run the festival, the sudden disappearance of the financial black hole as the SNP administration in Holyrood delivered £300,000 of public funding, and then the equally rapid appearance of former SNP first minister Nicola Sturgeon at the top of the festival programme. Reasonable people might suggest that this was all just an extraordinary set of coincidences, but it is equally possible to speculate that it might have been something more sinister, and to wonder if this money was any less ‘tainted’ (in Chris Garrard’s terminology) than the Baillie Gifford money it replaced.
The idea that fossil fuels are tainted is muddled thinking – a luxury belief that we can no longer afford. The truth is that fossil fuels are indispensable. Without them there would be no pharmaceuticals, no chemicals, no plastics or – more directly relevant to the arts – no cosmetics, no paints, no synthetic dyes, and no artificial fibres.
But there is a more fundamental dependency on fossil fuels too. The arts are the children of wealth. They flourish here because we are a rich country with millions of patrons to support them. Ordinary people buy their tickets, bringing revenues to venues; they pay their taxes too, and that funds the subsidies that keep high-cost operations such as ballet, opera and arts festivals afloat. The rich, and the businesses they own and run, play an important part too, not just because of their taxes, but also because of the sponsorship they willingly offer up.
But we need to understand where all this money comes from. If the arts are the children of wealth, then they are the grandchildren of fossil fuels. As coal took over from wood as our main source of energy in the seventeenth century, national wealth exploded. The newly minted middle classes, with money to burn, wanted entertainment, and artists were the beneficiaries. At the start of the seventeenth century, Dowland and Gibbons were playing lute songs for the wealthy few. Long before the century was up, Purcell was composing for shows in huge theatres flung up to meet the burgeoning demand. Then the Industrial Revolution kicked in, and by the end of the 20th century Queen were filling Wembley Stadium. Each ticketholder was, and is, in their own small way, a patron of the arts.
Through all those centuries there was a virtuous circle of growing energy use, growing wealth and further flourishing of the arts. But it doesn’t have to be this way; there is no law that says things can’t go into reverse. That’s the way things are going. We have tried to replace fossil fuels with renewables, and the result has bordered on catastrophic. Electricity prices have doubled in real terms. As a result, we have deindustrialised. Whole industries – aluminium, fertiliser, steel – are gone, or almost so. The chemicals industry is on the brink. Tens of thousands have been flung out of work. That means tens of thousands no longer patronising the arts through ticket sales or taxes. We have tried to make up the difference by fleecing the rich, but they are now leaving the UK in staggering numbers, taking their taxes and their sponsorship money with them.
The virtuous circle of the last three centuries has been replaced by a spiral of decline – falling energy consumption (alarmingly, down 30% since 2005), less wealth, and a squeeze on the arts that is now starting to be felt in earnest.
It is set to get much worse. The economist Professor Gordon Hughes, a former adviser to the World Bank, has suggested that the Government’s plans for the next five years would raise the cost of the electricity system by £25 billion per year. That means electricity at 40p per kilowatt hour rather than the 25p that is already proving so disastrous for British householders. At those prices, necessities will be so expensive the arts will be squeezed out of the market. Will anyone be able to afford to see a live performance or buy a recording? How much business profit will there be to tax? Will anyone be able and willing to sponsor a festival or a show?
And for that matter, how many venues could afford to keep the lights on?
The counter argument to all this always contains the question, ‘But what about climate catastrophe?’ That’s a discussion for another time, but let me leave you with the following thought. If (and it's a big if) the climate models are correct, and we dropped Net Zero, the arts, and everyone else, might be in trouble in a hundred years’ time. Climate dangers are distant, poorly understood and uncertain. But the climate policy dangers are here, now and very clear. If Ed Miliband ploughs on, the arts face certain decimation over the next five years. I know which option I’d choose.