Under the guise of fighting climate change, the British government has resurrected a core instrument of 20th-century war economies: the state-guaranteed contract. Britain’s flagship Contracts for Difference (CfDs)—designed to foster a transition to green energy—are structurally very similar to the Wirtschaftlichkeitsgarantieverträge (profitability guarantee contracts) that Nazi Germany used to subsidize its rearmament and achieve autarky. This is not a new, innovative policy, but the revival of a failed, centrally-planned approach that replaces market signals with political directives