Net Zero in the Afterlife: Labour's Green Grip on Your Final Journey

Image by Martin Foskett / Knelstrom

By Martin Foskett  |  Dispatches  |  Knelstrom Media

The green zealots have kicked down the door of your garage, prised the boiler from your kitchen wall, and now, God help us, they're eyeing up your coffin. It's not enough to manage your life from cradle to mortgage; now they want to regulate your death. You won't rest in peace, you'll rest in paperwork.

​I stood outside a crematorium last week, watching the mourners shuffle past in stiff collars and heavy black coats, and all I could picture was some climate commissar leaping out from behind the wreaths, clipboard aloft, declaring: "This coffin fails emissions compliance!" That's where we're heading, funerals dictated by spreadsheets, death audited for carbon neutrality.

This is Labour's latest brainwave, guided by the ever-zealous Ed Miliband, a man who seems convinced that even your ashes must serve the cause of Net Zero. The old gas furnaces? Too dirty. Solid oak coffins? Environmentally vulgar. Soon, the bereaved will be politely informed that their loved ones may only be dispatched in biodegradable pods woven from willow twigs, hemp, and guilt.

The Theatre of Green Death

Cremation, once an efficient way of returning a body to the elements, has been recast as an environmental crime scene. The solution is to replace gas-powered ovens with hydrogen burners or electric chambers, which resemble industrial bread-makers and operate at a similar speed.


And if you're squeamish about fire, don't worry: they've got "aquamation," a charming process where the dearly departed is dissolved in alkaline water and flushed away like last night's leftovers. They call it modern, they call it sustainable, I call it the world's most undignified drain cleaner.

Funerals are not meant to be experiments in plumbing. They are supposed to carry a weight of meaning. Yet here comes the State, stripping away the last threads of ceremony in the name of targets, quotas, and abstract promises to shave half a degree off the weather in 2050.

The Great Green Gadget Graveyard

And what's next in this parade of lunacy? Why not just shove us in an industrial air fryer, golden brown in 40 minutes, served with a garnish of smugness? It's not official policy (not yet, anyway), but it could be.
Because the actual "solutions" aren't much less ridiculous:

• Hydrogen Furnaces – slower, costlier, and dependent on a lorry turning up on time. Imagine booking a cremation around delivery slots.
• Electric Cremators – great hulking ovens that drain the national grid. Quicker to roast a turkey at Christmas than cremate Uncle Derek.
• Water Cremation ("Aquamation") – drop the body in a chemical jacuzzi and flush the soup away. It's eco-friendly, yes, but it sounds like a nightmare pitched by a plumber.
• Compost Burials – the "woodchip special." You rot down into mulch for the garden. Forget solemn oak caskets, you're basically this year's leaf collection.

The so-called green alternatives may not be giant kitchen gadgets, but the indignity is the same: you are no longer a person. You're an emissions problem, a fuel source, a box to be ticked on a carbon ledger.

Heating the Pool With Your Nan

Perhaps the darkest comedy of all is the idea of "waste heat capture." Translation: the crematorium doubles as a municipal boiler. Grandma's send-off doesn't just give you closure, it provides the council with a nice warm current for Tuesday aquarobics.

There is something grotesquely comic about splashing about with a rubber ring, powered by the mortal remains of the recently deceased. But behind the joke is something colder: the idea that people aren't individuals anymore, just fuel sources in a never-ending utilitarian cycle. You lived as a tax number. You die as central heating.

Queues for the Eco-Oven

Of course, the mechanics of this are even worse. Hydrogen cremators take longer to run. Electric ones suck up power like a theme park at Christmas. Which means funerals will slow down, costs will climb, and families will be left waiting in antiseptic side rooms for the next available eco-approved chamber.

The British queue, already a cultural institution, will extend beyond Tesco and into the afterlife. Not just waiting for hospital beds, GP appointments, and passports, now there's a wait for the furnace.

Imagine the undertaker explaining delays: "Terribly sorry, sir, the hydrogen delivery hasn't arrived yet. We can fit your father in on Tuesday if the lorry comes." That's not progress. That's a Monty Python sketch with added grief.

Humiliation Is the Whole Point

The grim brilliance of it all is that the humiliation isn't a bug, it's the feature. If you can be forced to submit even in death, then you'll submit to anything.

What greater insult than to tell a family that their farewell is not "compliant"? What greater reduction of human dignity than to classify your corpse as a pollutant? This isn't compassion, this isn't respect, it's domination dressed up as environmental virtue.

The green agenda has shifted from cleaning rivers and planting trees to something far more sinister: controlling every fibre of your existence, right down to your ashes.

Freedom, Even in the Grave

Here's the irony: no one's stopping families who want to go green. The market already offers a variety of options, including wicker coffins, tree burials, and water cremations. Choose what you like. But choice is not enough for Labour. It has to be imposed, mandated, and enforced. You're not allowed to bury Dad in mahogany, even if he wanted it. Targets must override his wishes.

That's the tragedy: stripping away the individuality of farewell. The most personal act a family performs, hollowed out and repurposed for climate theatre.

The Last Word

And so the net tightens. First, the car. Then the boiler. Now the coffin. Bit by bit, the trappings of ordinary life, and now death, are stripped away, replaced with the bland, bureaucratic sterility of the green agenda.
We are told this is the future. I say it's theft, a theft of dignity, a theft of freedom, a robbery of the most sacred human rituals.

In life, you are managed. In death, you are recycled. The question is simple: do we accept this, or do we insist that even in our final moments, we remain human, not carbon credits, not fuel for the leisure centre, but people, deserving of choice, dignity, and respect?
​
Because if they can claim ownership of your coffin, they already own your soul.

​This is satire. It uses exaggeration and absurdist humour to comment on reported eco-funeral proposals and Net Zero policies. It should not be read as factual reporting.