For some time now I have been irritated by the BBC Radio 4 programme Rare Earth, presented by Tom Heap and Helen Czerski. It increasingly feels like a non-stop lecture about the “climate crisis” [sic] and pure propaganda in favour of UK net zero. However, the most recent programme went further still. Aired at 12.04pm on Friday 6^th June the programme blurb on the BBC website is headed “Is Net Zero a toxic brand?” and asks “Can the UK ditch its carbon emissions by 2050? Is the commitment made by all the major parties in 2008 even politically possible?” To discuss the question, a panel of climate alarmist net zero enthusiasts was duly assembled. So much for balance. If the BBC really wants an answer to the question, surely it would have been wise to have a sceptic voice in the mix, to point out the difficulties that are becoming increasingly apparent concerning net zero? Of course, that wasn’t the object of the exercise, which was patently to persuade us that net zero is a great idea, it’s achievable, it’s popular, and we must press on full steam ahead (if that isn’t an inappropriate metaphor in this context) The programme can be listened to here, but I have transcribed it below to save you the trouble. My tetchy interpolations appear in italics in square brackets.

Tom Heap (TP): Welcome to Rare Earth, your weekly guide to the natural world and what we’re doing to it. I’m Tom Heap…

Helen Czerski (HC): …and I’m Helen Czerski. And this week we are talking about how to move beyond burning stuff in order to power our society and economy, sometimes known as Net Zero.

TH: I think it’s probably worth pointing out, Helen, in this programme that I think both of us agreed we’re not really debating whether fighting climate change or reducing emissions is a good thing [of course you’re not, you take it as a given], but how we get there and kind of how useful is this term Net Zero in framing that debate, I think is where we are. [It’s certainly where you are].

HC: Yeah, because it has actually become really interesting. As you say, there’s all the sort of technical stuff around how it works, and there’s actually a really interesting social story that’s growing alongside this and how people respond to this and, you know, people generally like to look after their environment. We understand that the planet is our life support system to some degree, but there’s a lot of debate about how we talk about it and how we communicate. And really interestingly, what we think everyone else thinks.

TH: Yeah, we’ll come onto it, but there’s some sort of discrepancy in belief about how popular or unpopular this stuff is, and what’s actually backed up by the research. But I think one of the things that is really underpinning it is the political debate round it, which may be based on a false assumption, but is very powerful now, that somehow fighting climate change has kind of got on the wrong side of populism, if you like, is unpopular, is politically difficult and therefore politicians of all stripes seem to be backing away from it at different speeds.

HC: Yeah, and it’s interesting, cos it’s only five years ago it was so completely different. You know, there was consensus, certainly in the UK, that this was a thing we all wanted [speak for yourself], and of course that has led to significant change, and the consequences of those decisions, you know, five or ten years ago are that this is already happening. You know, I’ve got an app on my phone where I can look at the energy mix of the UK’s electricity day to day – and of course I do that because I’m that kind of person – and there was this brilliant moment last week where I picked up my phone and 87% of our electricity in the UK was coming at that moment from renewables. So that’s already happening, and yes, it was a very windy day and it was a sunny day and all of that. So the progress towards a cleaner future with less air pollution is already happening. And yet the debate still goes on. [Perhaps, Helen, that’s because you haven’t mentioned the numerous dunkelflautes last autumn, winter and spring, when renewables were producing the square root of diddly squat, prices were through the the roof, we were totally dependent on gas and the interconnectors, and your “cleaner” future wasn’t happening at all].

TH: It does. I think one of the questions that underlies this is whether it is true, or whether it is seen to be that it’s pain today and gain tomorrow [or pain today, and pain tomorrow with no gain at all], i.e. you know, we have to pay the literal physical capital costs of installing this stuff, and the return in terms of a world that doesn’t boil [sic] is a little bit later down the road.

HC: It does sound a bit like doing your homework, doesn’t it? So, we’re going to be getting into all of this, looking at how we’re doing, and how we’re talking about it and we’ve got a fabulous panel of very knowledgeable people to educate [brainwash] us on our journey.

TH: We have Simon Evans, who is a friend of the programme [of course he is!], I think it’s fair to say, as it’s not his first time on here [and no doubt it won’t be his last appearance either]. He’s policy editor at Carbon Brief, a UK-based website covering the latest developments in climate science, policy and energy policy. [That’s one way of describing them. I have a rather low opinion of the extraordinarily heavy spin they put on things.

HC: We have Rebecca Willis, who’s a Professor of Energy and Climate Governance at Lancaster University and also an expert adviser to the Climate Change Committee. [Climate Governance? Nicely balanced so far….].

TH: And we have Bob Sherman, who is Director of Harbury Future Energy and Chair of the Warwickshire Low Carbon Network, and I should be honest, he’s someone I know [of course you do], because I live in Warwickshire and we’ve occasionally had dealings on how to cut the carbon [sic] of that county. [That’s it? Utterly lacking in balance, then, with no prospect whatsoever of a debate with the views of those opposed to net zero being heard].

TH: Right. Let’s start with some basics. What is Net Zero, a beginner’s guide. Help us out Simon.

Simon Evans (SE): Yeah, so, Net Zero is, is literally the only way to stop global warming from getting worse – that’s according to the Inter-Governmental Panel of Climate Change (the IPCC), which is a collection of the world’s best climate scientists. That being true, it doesn’t really make any sense to say – as some politicians have done recently – that you’re a Net Zero sceptic but you’re not a climate sceptic. [First problem – the IPCC doesn’t say that UK Net Zero is literally the only way to stop global warming from getting worse. It has to be an international effort. Therefore it makes perfect sense to be a sceptic about UK Net Zero without also being a climate sceptic]. Unless the world reaches Net Zero emissions [yes, Simon – the world], global warming will keep getting worse [loaded word – global warming will continue], so if you’re against Net Zero, you’re against stopping climate change [a rather dogmatic and illogical position to adopt, in my opinion].

TH: Could you actually, though, spell out what is meant by Net Zero. What’s the Zero, what’s the Net?

SE: So that basically means balancing human emissions of greenhouse gases with human-caused removals. So, emissions come from burning fossil fuels primarily, and removals could be things like planting forests, it could be using technology to suck CO2 out of the air.

HC: So I think there’s quite an interesting perspective on this , just looking at the whole planet – and, you know, that’s what I do so I like to share these things – which is that there’s lots of carbon in the atmosphere, on the land, in the ocean. You know, carbon kind of moves around the planet, but it only causes a problem – this particular problem for us – when it’s in the atmosphere because it acts as a, effectively as a blanket that prevents energy leaking the earth. So we heat up because it’s keeping the energy in. And I think that, that perspective is quite useful – the idea that carbon does just move around the system, huge amounts of carbon are coming and going from the land in natural organisms or in, sort of, rock form, but….

TH: …So this is why people think, you know, planting trees or other kind of things, helps…

HC:…Yeah…

TH….Affects that exchange of carbon dioxide…

HC:…That’s right…

TH:…And it is of course worth remembering that we’re not just talking about carbon dioxide, we’re talking about methane, and oxides of nitrogen as well…

HC:…That’s right. We choose where the carbon is, basically, through our actions, and if we put more of the carbon into the atmosphere, then it can’t…causes problems, and so actually it’s a sort of distribution problem, where do we choose to distribute the carbon to, depending on our behaviour.

TH: And Rebecca, what are the key levers that the government and others are pulling to help us reach Net Zero?

Rebecca Willis (RW): Well, the UK has a really world-leading piece of legislation called the Climate Change Act, which has been going for more than a decade now, and it basically sets a path to take us to that Net Zero target, and that path is overseen by the Climate Change Committee that I advise. So the Climate Change Committee every five years recommends a Carbon Budget to government, which is basically saying where greenhouse gases can be reduced and what sectors they’re reduced from, and also advising on the kinds of policies, the kinds of things that government can do. So, government can encourage certain technologies, it can change tranpsort systems, it can influence the energy system, which means that we’re taking those greenhouse gas emissions down. Every five years we review progress and we make sure that we’re on track. So the UK has this really nifty bit of legislation, which means that we’ve always got our eye on the ball, making sure that those emissions are down year on year, and so far the UK has been on track to meet that downward slope to Net Zero.

HC: And just set out what are the targets across the UK.

RW: The targets are pretty much aligned sloping downwards from 1990 levels, which is the sort of baseline year, all the way down to Net Zero in 2050. So, we’re actually about the half-way point now. By the mid-2030s we need to get to about 80% reduction. Obviously there’s quite a lot of bumps because, you know, covid was a bump, war in Ukraine is a bump, it tends to follow what the economy’s doing, but overall that line has been going steadily downwards.

TH: And we’ll come on to a bit more about the sectors later, but really energy is probably the single biggest one here – how we generate electricity – but there are also transport, domestic, farming, etc., etc.

RW: Yeah, so, the savings so far have come from de-carbonising the power sector, that’s electricity generation. So what we’ve seen over the past thirty years is that the UK stopped burning coal and it’s now generating electricity without using fossil fuels [er, gas?]. I think that’s made a huge difference. We’ve also changed the patterns of industry, the way things are made [yes, we’ve largely exported making things – and the associated jobs and emissions – to China and elsewhere in Asia]. What there hasn’t been a lot of progress on is reductions in emissions from the transport sector, so, essentially cars, other road transport and flying, and from land use, so farming and the way that we use land.

HC: There’s this weird thing, isn’t there, with cars, that actually cars are a lot more efficient, but they’ve also got bigger. And so those two things kind of cancel out. Simon, how are other countries faring in comparison with the UK?

SE: So the UK was one of the first of the first major economies to set a Net Zero target in 2019, when Theresa May was the Prime Minister, but it’s certainly not the only one now. And actually, when you look around the world, something like 85% of the world’s emissions are now covered by Net Zero targets. Just to take a few examples, the EU’s also targeting Net Zero by 2050, and it’s got interim targets of 55% reduction below 1990 levels by 2030 and 90% by 2040. Those are roughly quite similar to the UK’s targets [yes, but there is now considerable push-back in the EU against those targets]. And then, looking to, you know, sort of developing countries, China’s targeting Net Zero by 2060 [isn’t it interesting that China continues to benefit from developing nation status within the Paris and other international climate agreements?], and India by 2070 [meanwhile both China and India are going hell-for-leather for coal use]. Even most of the world’s biggest fossil fuel producers, you know, in the Middle East and so on, also have Net Zero targets [hmm, those targets aren’t specified by Simon, and it’s worth bearing in mind that targets affect fossil fuel emissions at point of use, not at point of extraction and sale].

TH: Which makes people a little dubious about the value of Net Zero targets. Do you think that scepticism is fair?

SE: It’s definitely fair to say that there’s a broad spectrum of, let’s say, detail behind the Net Zero targets in different countries. That’s kind of a simple way to put it. The UK has lots of detailed plans, policies, and, you know, the legislative framework that Rebecca already talked about, and the EU also has quite detailed, you know, frameworks around getting towards its Net Zero target. Other countries don’t have so much detail, and therefore people are a bit more sceptical about whether or not they can meet those targets [my scepticism would extend to whether they have any intention of meeting those targets, given lack of progress towards them to date. How many of those targets are legally enforceable through the Courts, for instance? Didn’t this question merit more scrutiny, since it goes to the heart of the matter?].

TH: So, er Bob Sherman, from Warwickshire. Give me a little run through about some of the projects that you’re involved in, or you see happening in the county that are helping us to cut carbon, and in the end help us reach Net Zero goals.

Bob Sherman (BS): Well, I’m under no illusions as to how significant some of the small actions that happen by individual people are, but when you bring them all together, it starts to look a little bit more significant. The Steering Group of the Low-Carbon Warwickshire Network put together a list of 132 different actions that have been taken by groups, communities in the county. It ranges across a whole load of activities from planting trees and being bee-friendly to car-sharing to solar panels, EVs, you name it. There’s a project I’ve come across recently – it’s a project called Charge – where they’re working with a commercial company on a, on the idea of a ground-mounted solar system which will provide income for the village which they will then be able to challenge [sic – channel?] into other green projects. We’ve got lots of repair cafes around, hedgehog highways, all sorts of things, you name it, it’s such a range of things. One of the things you shouldn’t forget is that it makes people feel better. They feel part of the solution. [Who could object to hedgehog highways and being bee-friendly? But I question what much of this achieves and wonder if time and money might not be spent more productively elsewhere. If people feel better, that’s great, but is this not one great delusion? They’re making absolutely no difference to the climate whatsoever].

TH: How excited are you? I mean, do you feel sort of dynamism on the ground with these projects?

BS: Well, it depends who I’m talking to, but yes, I mean it is a slightly self-selecting group of people, so we tend to be amongst people who are enthusiasts, and they are no less enthusiastic than they were some time ago.

HC: But it’s really interesting, isn’t it, because, I mean, the two parts of the conversation we’ve just had. One of them is national targets, it’s international co-operation, it’s all of these massive big top down things, and what you’re talking about is people who are in, you know, their local village or wherever it is, and they’re just saying well, we want to do this. And so you have this parallel effort from the bottom up of what you can do in your own town and your own lives.

BS: I think the big targets can be a bit off-putting. They look so remote and impossible. So I think to give it scale people can actually work with is quite helpful, because the, in my mind there’s no doubt that the efforts of individual people are important and do play a part in all of this. But I think if people don’t actively participate and don’t support it, then I think political ambitions might wane a bit.

HC: So Rebecca, this is your area of research, you know, what people actually think about this, so what, what do you find when you actually do surveys that go beyond anecdote, you know, you collect robust data sets over large groups of people. Are people interested in this?

RW: Yeah, the bottom line is this: politicians massively under-estimate public support for climate action. So, there’s a long-running survey asking how concerned people are about climate change. And it’s pretty, pretty robust that 80% or more of the population are concerned – either very concerned or fairly concerned – compared with an absolute minuscule, sort of around 3 or 4% who are not at all concerned. So, people are worried about this, and in my work we bring together groups of people who are representative of the population as a whole, so it will include people like Bob who are, you know, absolute champions of this agenda. It will also include people from that 3 or 4% who are not at all concerned about climate. But when you get those people in a room, what you get is this overwhelming consensus amongst most people that we really need to act on climate and that people are willing to support that. But it’s not unconditional, right – they don’t want to do it if it’s gonna mean major upheavals, if there’s gonna be huge cost, and most of all, they’re looking to government that set the framework to provide that sort of enabling framework, which means that people can, can do their bit. So, with the best will in the world, if you live in a rural area like Bob’s, you probably need to drive, right, so, you know, unless there’s a bus service laid on you have to get in your car. So we need to look at how we provide those enabling frameworks like transport systems, which mean that there is a low or zero carbon alternative, which means that people can change what they do. [Counterblast – even the ONS doesn’t endorse the claim of overwhelming concern about climate change. Its social insights survey from April 2025 has the cost of living as the main concern (88%); followed by the NHS (85%); followed by the economy (74%). They are followed by crime (63%); housing (55%); immigration (54%); international conflict (50%); then climate change and the environment (49%). Climate change and the environment straddle two issues, and I would say that I’m concerned about the environment, but not about climate change, so where does that leave the 49% figure? It’s also worth noting that it’s a number in steady and consistent decline, and on current trends it’s likely soon to be pushed into ninth place by the rising proportion of the population concerned about employment. Needless to say, the programme didn’t push back with that sort of challenge].

BS: People don’t always make the best choices though, do they?…

TH: …Just unpack that. What do you mean?

BS: Er, well we have a fairly large car manufacturer nearby, which produces very large cars, and we have a lot of those around here. One of the frustrations I have is that people will express the concern about the environment and about global warming, etc., but it, they don’t want it, as you say, they don’t like change, they don’t want it to affect their lives. [Precisely. And why should it affect their lives if the rest of the world isn’t following suit, such that sacrifices in the UK are achieving precisely nothing?].

TH: So, there’s an international study – a paper published in Nature – looked at people, talked to 130,000 people, across the world, and found 69% of the global population expressed a willingness to contribute 1% of their personal income to fight climate change, to address this problem, so there does seem to be support, at least in what people are saying. Is there a gap between what they’re saying – what they say to pollsters – and what they actually do themselves or what they actually vote on? I dunno. Who wants to pick that up? [Good question, for once. And of course the answer is yes].

HC: Simon.

SE: Yeah, I just wanted to, I think, kind of picking up on what Rebecca was saying, one of the most pernicious I can…misunderstandings I think people have about public attitudes to Net Zero is that support for taking action stops as soon as there’s a cost associated with it. I think that’s pernicious because it’s basically exactly the same at any given area of government spending. People have been talking about defence spending recently, because of the government’s defence review, and if you ask people do they want more government spending on defence, they’ll say absolutely. And then, if you ask them, well how much are you willing to pay for that, should the government raise taxes to pay for that, they’ll say, oh no thanks. And it’s absolutely the same whether it’s for climate change, whether it’s for schools, whether it’s for health – any area of government spending people will say they support it, but they will say that they don’t support more government spending. So I think that it’s just really misleading that people try and pick out climate change as being unique in that. [Fair comment, regarding the electorate’s desire to have it all without paying for it, but I think he is absolutely wrong in one fundamental respect. People rightly get angry when they see government being wasteful with taxpayers’ funds, but generally, if people see money being spent on defence, they feel safer; if they see money being spent on the NHS, they can see that they might benefit from this – ditto most areas of government spending. But UK government spending on climate change is only making their lives worse, not better. People are rightly sceptical about spending money on Net Zero, which will make no difference to climate change if the rest of the world isn’t joining in. That’s a crucial difference which Simon Evans ignored].

HC: Rebecca.

RW: From the point of view of the individual, it’s not just “Is this going to cost me?” although that is a factor. It’s also “Am I part of a collective endeavour? Is the government, are our leaders speaking out about what needs to be done? Are they making ir easier for us to do the right thing? If I do this, will other people join in?”. What we hear in our groups is that there is actually – and I think this is slightly contradicting what you were saying, Bob – there is actually a willingness to, to contribute, to be part of the solution as part of that sort of society-wide endeavour. So, we find that when we do our citizens’ panels, for example, people want to see that overall shift, they want to see politicians showing leadership, they want to see people in other positions of leadership like celebrities, or like local leaders, doing the right thing. And then that builds that kind of collective sense of, of agency, so that, that’s really what we need to see. And unfortunately politicians seem to fall back into this position where they say yes we need to act on climate change, but don’t worry, you won’t have to change anything, rather than starting from the premise that people actually want to contribute. [I found that to be a fascinating paragraph. I fear Rebecca Willis finds the answers she wants to find – seek and ye shall find, and all that. It’s interesting that she implicitly recognises that there is a personal cost to Net Zero, seems to claim that the public is up for it, and doesn’t understand why politicians shy away from being honest about the costs. At least that’s what I take from what she said. As for politicians retreating from Net Zero, they’re the ones whose seats are on the line, and I suspect they are more attuned to the public mood than she is].

HC: Well, there’s this interesting phrase that I have heard – and I love this – like it’s a terrible sort of technical-sounding term, but the concept, which I think is really important, and it’s “pluralistic ignorance”, and I learned last year that pluralistic ignorance basically is that thing where there’s a silent majority who want to do something but they don’t think everybody else wants to do something. They’re hidden, and so they think, oh well, we shouldn’t do this cos most people don’t want to do it, but actually most people do. It’s just they’re all staying quiet about it. And I think that is something that’s a really important thing to be aware of. [Got no evidence that everyone supports Net Zero? Claim they do, but they’re just part of a silent majority. Believe it if you wish, but don’t use such wishful thinking as a device to force your ideas on the real majority].

TH: Well it also, that plays into the sort of fairness thing isn’t it, because one of the things you see – particularly those opposed to taking action on climate change – will be telling you, the rest of the world isn’t doing this, which is a, is quite a powerful argument. [Yes it is, and for good reason]. I mean, Simon, how come it’s got on the wrong side of popularity as far as the politicians are concerned? How come they think it’s unpopular?

SE: Er, I mean, Rebecca may correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that actually most MPs in Parliament are, are very strongly supportive of, of the Net Zero target…

TH: …Come on, we’ve seen all of the parties kind of weaken their enthusiasm for moving in this direction. So why is that happening at leadership level? [Is that entirely true? The UK government seems to be as committed to it as ever].

SE: Er, I mean, I, honestly, I don’t, I don’t really understand why, but there, you know, there’s clearly a very strong media narrative going on, that. That’s kind of leapt on the global energy crisis that’s taken place since Russia invaded Ukraine…

TH: …Sorry, the global energy crisis should have pushed this the other way to say we don’t want to be reliant on, you know, oil and gas that’s funding a warmonger.

SE: Well, I mean, absolutely. In the initial period, when gas prices spiked up after Russia cut off gas supplies to Europe, people did understand that, that meant that we in the UK were particularly exposed to gas prices going up and that, you know, perhaps we ought not to be doing so much of that, and we ought to rely on clean [sic] electricity supplies that we can have domestically instead. But over that time, that narrative seems to have disappeared a bit. People have just kept repeating the falsehood that Net Zero is causing bills to be high, which is not the case [my laptop almost went out of the window at this point. I’m afraid that claim really should have been called out big-style, but of course it wasn’t]. And somehow that has started to stick [for the obvious reason that people can see their bills going up when they where promised they would go down, and people aren’t stupid – they do see the subsidies and the costs of decarbonising the grid].

HC: So, Rebecca, is it the case that Net Zero is now a, you know, toxic, term?

RW: It may be in the political debate, or it may be heading that way in the political debate, but it definitely isn’t in wider society, so I think it comes back to this point that you mentioned, Helen, about the, the silent majority or the quiet majority. So if you think about who politicians are hearing from on climate change: on the one hand they, they’re hearing from very vocal sort of pro-climate protestors like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion [who are a tiny minority with a disproportionate influence and media presence, thanks in part to the BBC], but the kind of person who takes part in a Just Stop Oil protest is a particular type of person and, and relatively small fraction of society [thank you]. And then at the other end you have this 3 or 4% [come off it] I was talking about, who just reject climate outright. And those, those two extremes are the voices that politicians hear from more. So, they’re not listening to the quiet voices, they’re listening to the loud ones. [I suppose that’s what happens regarding your connection to society when you work in a University].

HC: Simon, what about the, the economic costs of this? Cos I think, you know, for a lot of people, there is a cost of living crisis, things are expensive, and this is still seen as an extra cost [that’s because it is]. How does that all work out?

SE: Yeah, if I may, I’m just gonna come back to the, to the previous conversation. I think one of the things that’s really interesting is we’re in this place where, politically, in terms of what’s published in a lot of our newspapers, there’s this sense of gloom and doom about Net Zero, about climate action globally as if, you know, things are really not going that well. You know, we passed 1.5 degrees last year in terms of warming. Fossil fuel emissions are the highest they’ve ever been. But actually, if you look at the facts on the ground, we’re doing a lot, a hell of a lot better than we were, you know, a decade ago, if you looked at where we were heading by the end of this century, three and a half or four degrees of warming back before the Paris Agreement was passed. Now it’s more like 2.7ish. You know, it’s still not great, it’s certainly nothing like the 1.5 target. But actually, you know, record sales of electric vehicles, record installations of wind and solar energy around the world. I think that there’s this real disconnect between the political and media narrative and what’s actually happening on the ground. [Yes, renewables are at record levels, but given the amount of subsidies they receive, that’s hardly surprising. They still represent a drop in the ocean, and fossil fuel use continues to rise, as do greenhouse gas emissions, year on year. I’m not sure anyone ever believed we were on track for 3.5-4C of warming by the end of the century – wasn’t that always the RCP 8.5 outlier?].

HC: But isn’t it the case that, you know, big SUVs are selling extremely well, right, so…

TH: …and people get angry about losing their gas boiler.

SE: Well, you know, I think, I, I think we have to think what’s the counter-factual here. Yes, emissions are, you know, going in the wrong direction still. We need to see them level off and then start falling rapidly. But ultimately, they would have been a hell of a lot higher if we hadn’t installed loads of wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles.

HC: Well, let’s have a think about what all this might look like in practice. So, a couple of weeks ago I went to Doncaster to visit Geopura Renewable Energy Solutions, and what they’re doing is, er, using hydrogen as a fuel to replace a fossil fuel in a generator. So the way that works is that you can use some energy to break water apart into hydrogen and oxygen and when you re-combine them you get some energy back. And so they’re making devices that can replace a diesel generator using that system. [Call me a Luddite, but surely this is a massively backwards step? In the absence of the supposed climate energy, would anyone really start from where we were in the late 20^th century and decide that this was a good idea?].

Cut to excerpt outside the studio:

HC: I’m standing in a field near Doncaster. It’s full of flowers and trees and it’s also quite full of solar panels – a lot of them – and I’m here with Ian Wilkinson from Geopura. So Ian, can you tell us what these solar panels are all about, please.

Ian Wilkinson (IW): Yeah, of course. We are using the electricity that’s generated by these solar panels to produce hydrogen. So we have an electrolyser plant just over the back of the hill that’s got the solar panels on them, and we feed the electricity and water into the electrolysers, and it splits the water and turns it back into hydrogen and oxygen. We keep the hydrogen. But the ultimate source of the energy is the solar panels here that we’re just looking at.

HC: So let’s start with what you can actually do with hydrogen. So, you know, we’re in a world now where there’s loads of batteries – there seem to be batteries everywhere – why is it that you might use hydrogen instead of a battery?

IW: So, we’re using hydrogen as a fuel. With regard to batteries, we use batteries as well, so the hydrogen power units that we put on our customer’s site are a combination of a hydrogen fuel cell – you feed it hydrogen and it makes electricity – and a battery to give some, you know, short-term storage, but batteries only get you so far for the, for the higher power applications or long duration – of often both – then the higher energy content of the fuel really makes it worthwhile. And we’re using hydrogen as a fuel because it doesn’t have carbon in. [Am I alone in thinking that this is borderline insane?].

HC: So let’s talk about the people who are buying hydrogen and taking your electricity generating units. What are they doing with it?

IW: What our customers are after is electricity when they can’t get it from the grid. So, if the grid isn’t there, or if the grid is insufficient, then we come along with a hydrogen-powered unit. We fuel that with hydrogen, and that generates 400 Volts AC in the normal way as you would expect from a diesel generator, except that you’ve avoided all the emissions associated with diesel generators.

HC: So what sort of customers have you got, like, where are people taking these things to?

IW: Anywhere and everywhere, literally. Wherever the grid is not there yet, or by definition isn’t there, or isn’t there in sufficient quantity, so construction sites, film TV, festivals and events, and then we also have a growing sector in grid augmentation, so EV charging is a good example of that, where people want to be able to charge up electric vehicles, but the grid at their location isn’t sufficient and we need to top it up. We use hydrogen to do that.

HC: And how does the economics of it work out? Do you receive any subsidies to do this?

IW: No, we’re operational on a commercial basis. [Really? What Rare Earth won’t tell you is that – according to Geopura’s own website – “A new cross-industry initiative will design and develop the use of hydrogen as an alternative to diesel on construction sites following the approval of a £4,872,653 grant from the UK Government’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.”]. We are more expensive than diesel at the moment, today…

HC:…By a little bit, by a lot, how much?

IW: …So we’re – just to give you an idea of it – if you convert our hydrogen into diesel, for example, the equipment price you’re paying around £2.70 a litre. So that’s quite expensive diesel [indeed it is – almost twice as expensive as I can currently get it at a petrol station], but it’s not ten times as much…

HC: …So that’s compared to the price at the pump, that’s….

IW: …Yeah, the price at the pump, you would pay, I don’t know, £1.50, £1.60, sort of historically [but not currently – I filled up for £1.39 a litre the other day]. And we’re £2.70 for hydrogen, for an equivalent amount of hydrogen in energy terms. We’re just starting out, though. If you think about the economies of scale in diesel production compared with what we’re doing at the moment, then it’s just chalk and cheese. And our customers understand that the clean, non-polluting solution is gonna cost you more than the polluting version.

HC: OK, so let’s go and look at the hydrogen production….

HC:….So we’ve just walked around the hill and down into where the hydrogen is produced. And, Ian, we’re looking at a yard which first of all has a lot of white gas cylinders in it, which I assume are hydrogen. But then the actual hydrogen production is behind that, so tell me what we’re looking at.

IW: Yeah, exactly. So, here is where the hydrogen’s produced, as you say. We have an electrolyser, which is for us another wide 40′ shipping container, and that’s a Megawatt scale. So around 16 kilos of hydrogen per hour. It’s by splitting water back into hydrogen and oxygen. So the elctrolyser you can think of as you feed it electricity and water and it generates the hydrogen. Next to that we have a compressor. That compresses the hydrogen to much higher pressure, so that it takes up less space, basically. And then the cylinders that you were looking at are manifolded cylinder packs, so we have a number of cylinders collected together, and we fill those with hydrogen. And they’re useful for customers with relatively low power needs. Where customers need more energy, then we have a set of clylinders on a tube trailer on the back of a lorry and we can deliver both of those by road [is that a diesel lorry, I wonder?].

HC: So there’s two things that go into this process. There’s the electricity itself…

IW: …Yeah…

HC: …and then there’s the water. So, where does the water come from?

IW: Here, we’re just using mains water [is that environmentally friendly, given talk of a water shortage?]. As sites scale, and get bigger and bigger and bigger, then you would start looking at particular water supplies – because we need to make sure that we’re not causing any problems with water supplies – but here, they hydrogen production is small enough that we can just use an ordinary water connection, and that’s fine. [Hmmm.].

HC: So, one of these gas cylinders we’re standing next to – it’s approximately as tall as me – how many kilos of hydrogen is in one of those cylinders?

IW: So, seventeen kilos of hydrogen in one of these….

Change of scene – more noise.

IW:….Yeah, so we’re here at the, in the control room of the electrolyser, so what you can hear are cooling fans and pumps, essentially. So, in here we have the power supplies that produce the DC electricity that the stack needs, we have water treatment, because the electrolysis process needs pure water, and we also have the control system that controls everything and makes sure it’s running reliably and safely.

HC: It does look – I know it’s just one shipping container – it does look relatively simple. It’s kind of, it’s a very clean process, I mean, it’s not – I’m not saying you wouldn’t do the sweeping up – but there’s not, nothing’s producing dirt or smoke or anything dirty around here. It’s just white containers with electronics inside. [It may be a “clean” process, but it seems to be a very energy-intensive one].

IW: Yeah, exactly. The inputs of the process are electricity and, as I was explaining before, potable water, the water over the, over the main. And the outputs of the process are hydrogen, oxygen and some heat. And the heat we have cooling on the roof, which goes back [unclear] into the atmosphere; the oxygen is vented – we haven’t come up with an economic use for that yet – but the hydrogen is the really valuable bit.

HC: OK, let’s go somewhere a bit quieter…

HC: …Well this all sounds, I mean, it sounds incredibly sensible [you think so!]. The field with some solar panels, you can make these units. None of it’s particularly new tech, you know, it’s safe, it’s established. So, why isn’t everyone doing it? [You have to ask?]

IW: Historic reasons, I guess, and costs. Fossil fuels, you know, work really well – apart from the carbon emissions and the impact that that has, which we have come to learn about. But you’re absolutely right. It’s a practical alternative that works today using available technology today. And you absolutely can generate the power you need off grid in this way.

HC: So I think when most people think of hydrogen, they are going to think of one event in history – and I can see you’re smiling cos you know what I’m gonna say – I’m thinking about the Hindenberg, which was a very large hydrogen-filled balloon that did blow up. How safe is the hydrogen that you supply?

IW: It’s safe. Hydrogen is a fuel. It’s useful because it has a lot of energy in it, like all the fuels we use, so petrol, diesel, methane have their hazards because of the energy that they contain. Hydrogen itself is nothing new. The technology we need to produce, store and transport hydrogen safely, and indeed use it safely, all exist. The safe working practices, the procedures, are all very mature. We’re just applying them into a new sector, the energy sector.

HC: I guess you must sometimes have school groups here or you show this project to kids, you know, the next generation, who haven’t grown up like you and I have, just accepting that our world is powered by lots of small explosions. What’s their reaction to it?

IW: They love it. I mean, one of my favourite deployments that we did for the [unclear] was a climate conference for the school children and they had a big marquee in a field and they needed to power the event, and we were delighted to do that using hydrogen through one of our hydrogen power units. And we actually became part of the conference. The school kids all came out and had a look and saw what we were doing. A lot of the discussion around decarbonisation, reducing carbon emissions, involves not doing stuff or changing behaviour, which is part of the story, of course. But there are certain things that we’re not gonna want to change. There are certain aspects to our lives, like transport, for example. I think one of your previous episodes on this programme was talking about festivals and events and should we be doing that still. And people are gonna want to still do it. We need to find a way to enjoy those things without the climate impacts that we’ve had in the past.

Back to the studio

HC: Well, it was, it was a really interesting project to visit. And actually they told me that BBC Springwatch – which is on air at the moment – powers their outside broadcasts using those units, so that when they’re out in the field they’re not producing any extra pollution [note, CO2 is not pollution].

TH: There was also a reference there to our previous episode on festivals and the arts generally, cinema, and how they are trying to trim their climate impact. That is available [along with all the other propaganda] on BBC Sounds. Really impressive stuff, but a bit of a key phrase, he said that the clean non-polluting [note, CO2 is not a pollutant] version is going to cost you more than the polluting version. So that’s the problem, isn’t it, for a lot of people, cost-conscious types [do you mean poor people?]. They’re still gonna reach for the diesel genny.

HC: Well I guess that’s the case now, I mean, his point was that they are a really small facility and they’re about to build another big one, and he thinks that by the time the economies of scale have kicked in, it will be cheaper. At that point, I guess, most people won’t care, because all they care about is that they’re in the middle of a field, something happens and they get some electricity. [Rather a patronising view, in my opinion].

TH: Well, that’s something which is making a fuel out of sunlight and water. I mean that’s pretty darn good, isn’t it? [actually, it’s pretty darn wasteful – solar panels generate electricity, which could be a primary energy but instead it is used to split water into its constituent parts to create a secondary power source. How wasteful is that?].

HC: Yeah, and it’s quieter as well [it didn’t sound quiet during the interview], that’s the other thing. These units are quiet and of course they’re not, anyone who’s walked round the back of a tent at a festival and just smelt the diesel generator kind of pumping out, you know, it’s not, it’s not pleasant, and so they’re avoiding all of that.

TH: I don’t know if any of our panel had any thoughts about what they heard there?

BS: I find the whole thing absolutely fascinating. I don’t think it’s anything like reached its potential yet, and it’ll be a long time before it has any impact on the domestic world. But I think in, in commercial terms it has enormous potential.

TH: Thanks Bob. Simon, there is some, let’s say, debate about how big a role hydrogen plays in, as a fuel in a low-carbon economy. Can you just briefly unpack what the questions are there?

SE: Yeah, so we heard in that recording – I agree, it’s a really fascinating example – hydrogen is, is, can be a clean fuel if you make it via electrolysis. You can do almost anything that you do with gas with, with hydrogen. So it’s incredibly versatile. The thing is that it’s relatively hard to make, and so basically there was this big debate about what’s the role of hydrogen gonna be, but we’ve now moved on, I think…

TH: …Should it be in homes and cars and things like that?

SE: Yeah, yeah. And then there was this other idea that was relatively unique to the UK, that we should be replacing our gas boilers with hydrogen boilers, and that would be an easy way to decarbonise home heating. I think that the expert evidence on that has, has swung very firmly away from the idea that that’s sensible. It’s economically not a great idea [neither’s using electricity to make electricity] producing hydrogen and using it in gas boilers instead of methane would be roughly three times more expensive than heat pumps.

TH: When people talk about hydrogen-powered vehicles I always thought, well, hang on a minute. The great advantage of electricity is we have the network out there, don’t we? We have an electricity grid running across the country. We do not have a hydrogen grid. Having to recreate all that would be extraordinary. I can’t plug in to hydrogen in my home. I can plug into electricity. [Has it not occurred to you that the electricity grid can’t cope with the demands being placed on it both by widely dispersed renewables and by insistence on increasing the amount of electricity we use, by requiring us to use heat pumps, to cook with electricity, and to use electric cars – and in due course electric buses, lorries etc? Having to add in the necessary additional infrastructure is equally extraordinary and equally stupid].

Pause

HC: This is Rare Earth and this week we are talking about the path to burning less as we power our society, and how the social debate around it is progressing, and with us we have Simon Evans, the Policy Editor at the environmental website, Carbon Brief; Rebecca Willis, Professor of Energy and Climate Governance at Lancaster University and a special adviser to the Climate Change Committee; and Bob Sherman, who is the Director of Harbury Future Energy, and Chair of the Low-Carbon Warwickshire Network.

TH: We want to move on now to something we did touch on earlier, but I would like to unpack this in slightly greater detail, which is how the different sectors of our economy are doing when it comes to reducing the amount of burning, i.e. reducing their carbon emissions. It’s widely acknowledged that we’ve done quite a lot on electricity and the advance of big wind turbines and solar panels and other things are helping to bring that down, and as Helen mentioned in the introduction, some days are almost completely fossil fuel-free in our electricity generation [but as you failed to mention, during dunkelflautes, we’re almost completely dependent on gas, nuclear, and imports via the interconnectors]. But what about some of the others? Who wants to pick this up? Maybe Simon.

SE: Yes, I think right at the beginning of the show, Tom, you mentioned that the power sector was the biggest emitter in the UK. That, that’s no longer true. It, it was for many years the case. You know, we used to get all of our electricity essentially from coal. Nowasays, you know, we’re the first G7 nation to phase out coal [Indeed, Germany still uses lots of it, lignite at that].More than half of our electricity is coming from clean [sic] sources, you know – renewables and nuclear – and so the power sector’s only the fifth largest emitter in the country now…

TH: …The fifth! I was well wrong….

SE: …Yeah, that’s only happened recently. It’s pretty remarkable progress. [It’s worth noting, however, that this reduction is only partly down to our having ditched coal. We’ve also reduced our electricity use, partly by using more efficient modern electric gadgets which ise less electricity than their predeccors, but also by reducing our manufacturing capacity, and by exporting jobs and emissions abroad. Is that progress?]. So the biggest emitter nowadays is the tranpsort sector. We’ve not seen a great deal of progress there. Cars are more efficient – you get more miles per gallon than you used to – but there are more cars on the road, more deliveries from Amazon and so on. Then the second biggest emitter is buildings – that effectively means gas boilers, heating our homes and businesses. The third biggest is industry. There has been quite a bit of reduction in emissions in industry. Some people [I’m one of them] argue that that’s simply because we have outsourced our emissions …

TH: …You mean we don’t manufacture things here any more. We get the Chinese or the South Koreans to do it, and they generate a lot of greenhouse gases there. Is that what outsourcing means there?

SE: Yeah, so over, say over the last 50 years there’s been a big shift of, of heavy industry out of developed economies like the UK and, you know, other places – France, Germany, people talk about the rust belt in America, this is about heavy industry moving as a result of globalisation and wider economic shifts, broadly speaking – to places like China [Surely this is a very important point that should have been pursued? It can readily be argued that by outsourcing to countries like China and India which use lots of coal, we have actually increased global emissions. The point should have been explored in depth, in my opinion]. Buildings: we’ve also seen very little progress, although gas boilers are more efficient than they used to be. And the land sector, you know, agriculture. Emissions haven’t really changed there. So, almost all of the progress we’ve made in the UK over, you know, kind of the last decade or two has been in the power sector. [In short, I would argue, we’ve plucked the low-hanging fruit by phasing out coal. Coal is cheap, so that has been an expensive, but easy thing to do. Everything else will be much more difficult, expensive, and problematic].

HC: But it’s not just a case of de-carbonising our existing electricity supply, right? Because as we have more electric cars, we have more heat pumps, all, as we electrify all of these other things, we’re actually gonna need more electricity, and I think the Climate Change Committee has said that’s gonna have to be at least a factor of two by 2050, so how are we doing on all of that, Rebecca?

RW: Yeah, so, as Simon said, the main solution for heating and for transport is to electrify. Essentially, we’re going from burning fossil fuels to provide that heat or to power that car directly, through to using electricity, and getting that electricity from zero-carbon sources – that’s primarily renewables and nuclear. So that’s pretty much fixed now, that is the most cost-effective and reliable way to de-carbonise. I mean, I can tell you what that would look like for us all in say ten years time in terms of how we live, if you like. So, in ten or fifteen years time, we are likely to have an electric heat pump instead of a gas boiler [speak for yourself!] and better insulated houses. We’re likely to be driving an EV rather than a petrol or diesel car [speak for yourself]. And we’re probably driving a little bit less because we’ve get better public transport [unlikely where I live] and people are walking or cycling more [in our ageing population?​]. And the amount of flights people take is roughly the same as today [it had better be, or you’ll never get this past the populace]. So, that’s just a picture of what the world might look like [no, it’s a picture of how you want the UK to look – the odds are that most of the rest of the world won’t look like that in ten or fifteen years time]. And we can relatively straightforwardly track a path from here to there by how we can use changes to financial incentives; [robbing Peter to pay Peter] how we can put some sort of strategic regulation in place [the stick]; how we can encourage people to be part of that shift; how we can get industry [what’s left of it] cued up to provide the goods and services we need for that transition to Net Zero [I suspect we’ll be importing this stuff, as – by and large – we are now].

TH: But this is about changing behaviour, normal behaviour, whether it be how you drive or how you heat your home, and there’s been quite a lot of resistance to that. I’d like Bob to come in, but briefly, Rebecca, you seem to be painting quite an optimistic picture of all these things – more public transport, everyone making these changes willingly.

RW: It goes back to what I was saying about government providing the sort of enabling framework. So, if you take EVs. We’ve already seen that people are happy to switch from petrol and diesel cars to electric vehicles, because they now provide, you know, really good performance, have a decent range, and so on. But that’s not gonna happen unless some other factors kick in, like having a decent charging network; making sure that electricity is cheap enough so that people can, can charge their cars. [Where to start? What was that Tom Heap said above about hydrogen making no sense because we already have an electricity network, effectively implying that we don’t need to add any extra infrastructure or cost if we use electricity for everything? What about the extra cost of buying an EV? If people are so happy to switch, why is the government fining manufacturers and retailers for not selling them in the “required” numbers?]. Erm, the price of electricity is particularly an issue for shifting on heating, because at the moment gas is cheaper than electricity. [electricity is four times more expensive than gas] If we’re gonna switch over to electric heating, we need to make electricity better value for people than gas [how you do that by adding more expensive renewables to the system is a bit of a mystery, unless of we course we adopt the brilliant strategy currently being mooted of simply loading all the extra costs of renewable electricity onto the price of gas instead. But that’s just kicking the can down the road. What do you do when everyone has reluctantly been priced out of their gas boilers? How do you disguise those higher costs, then, or don’t you care, because it will be a case of mission accomplished, the gas boilers have all gone?]. It’s all those kinds of things that government can do, and I think it is a myth that people aren’t willing to change their behaviour [believe that, if you want. I suspect the evidence suggests otherwise]. What our research has, has really shown is that, erm, people are generally on-board with these changes that need to be made, but they need support for that in terms of having the right information, having confidence that the government will do its bit, and changing the financial incentives, so that doing the right thing [sic] in climate terms is also not gonna cost you financially. [Sigh].

TH: Bob?

BS: The thing that bothers me is that all of this is fine if you can afford it. I think there are a lot of people in lower-income households who just look at all this stuff and think, well forget it, mate, you know, I’m not going to be able to do that. I worry about also the whole idea of kind of a single solution that suits everybody, because there are a lot of terraced houses, and having a heat pump outside the back of every terraced house is simply not going to work. It’s not, I don’t think it’s going to be very effective either…

TH: …Why not?

BS: Well, terraced houses don’t necessarily have very large back walls or wherever you’re gonna put it. It would be much simpler to have a district heat network in those circumstances. I do know of good, a really interesting national project called Net Zero Terraced Streets, which is in the fairly early stages of trial. And that, I think, if it could be rolled out nationally, would be brilliant.

TH: And what, sorry, briefly, what are they doing?

BS: It’s, it’s a district heating system, where they dig up the street outside a long terrace, and they put ground source heat pumps in, and then people can buy into that or not. All they’ll need is the connection across to the house. But they’re also including in it energy efficiency within the house in the first place, so that people are gonna buy a complete solution, if you like. And the people supplying the heat pumps will become their energy suppliers. [I like Bob’s lateral thinking, but I’m not convinced that digging streets up is a great idea. Do we not have enough roadworks already? Also, this neatly side-stepped the issues associated with Rebecca’s spiel, which merited much more detailed analysis, in my opinion].

HC: So I’d like to move on to just how we think about all this in the future, and what we do in order to do all of this constructively. And to start with, I’m interested in how we talk about the subject, because it seems that even though a lot of these technologies are better, in the long-run they’ll be cheaper, they’re definitely better than the alternative, all of that, [Where’s BBC Verify when you need them?] we’re stuck, right. We’re kinda stuck in this debate a little bit. It’s not really working as a debate [this programme certainly isn’t!]. So how do we re-frame it so that this becomes something that we all get on-board with, just like, you know, mobile phones turned up, computers turned up, and we went, oh that sounds like a good idea, let’s do that. How do we do that with this transition? [Helen, you have just unwittingly nailed it. Mobiles were cheap and people considered that they made their lives better. Ditto computers. People embraced them because they could see the advantages, and there were no great downsides. That is far from the case with Net Zero. It’s not how we frame the debate that’s the issue. The issue is Net Zero itself. The public understands that, even if you don’t]. Rebecca.

RW: I slightly dispute that we’re stuck. I think the media and political debate is more toxic than it needs to be right now. People are pretty much willing to get on-board with this stuff [so you keep saying, but there’s little sign of mass take-up of EVs and heat pumps.] So, what should the media and political debate be about instead? I mean, we ask this to [sic] our Citizen Panels that we convene, and time and again they come back with the, the same things. The first one is that they want a clear sense of government leadership, they want to know what the direction travel is, and they want to know what government’s doing, what business is doing, and how individuals can contribute as well. So that kind of clear sense of direction. And then coming back to something we were discussing earlier, they want to know that it’s fair. So, people’s ideas of fairness obviously vary from person to person, but there’s this really strong sense that they don’t want people to lose out. In reality that probably means thinking really carefully about which parts of the country that you invest in to make sure the jobs, you know, the low-carbon jobs are going to the right places. It also means doing things like making sure there’s support for people so that they can benefit from better insulated warmer homes, electrified heating and so on. So there’s lots of ways in which fairness plays out, but I would start to worry if we don’t have that sense of leadership and we’re not articulating how this is fair. [Isn’t it interesting that the Citizen Panels convened by Rebecca reflect her views? Perhaps this is why Net Zero people are so keen on Citizens’ Assemblies? What better way to “educate” the panellists and to ensure that the recommendations they make to government are the ones that the convenors desire?].

SE: I, you know, I think, in terms of that wider narrative, we have already seen a big shift in how government’s talking about it. You know, this idea that, that clean energy is a way to have home-grown power; that basically energy security is the same thing as taking action on climate change. The UK used to get a loss of fossil fuels, we used to have, you know, extract a lot of coal, we used to get a lot of oil and gas from the North Sea [we still could – instead we import most of it]. Those are dwindling resources. [True, but they’re good for more than a few years yet if Government would allow those resources to be exploited] We have lots of other resources, renewable resources, and those are things that we can get here [also true, though we do import the vast majority of the solar panels and wind turbines that we use]. And big picture, we’re gonna electrify, which is much more efficient, and therefore reduce the amount of fossil fuels we have to import from overseas [we’re importing them from overseas because our government won’t issue new extraction licences in the North Sea and has concreted over fracking wells]. That’s also good for the, you know, balance sheet of the economy because we’re not having to pay so much for, you know, imported oil and gas. [Policy to date has been terrible for the balance sheet].

HC: And Bob, when it comes to the people that you’re talking to, what’s the language that would really make a difference? Or what’s the thing that would help you convince people to do things on the ground? [I suggest that if Net Zero was self-evidently a good idea, people wouldn’t need convincing. They didn’t need to be convinced to move from horse-drawn carts to internal combustion engine vehicles, nor – as you point out – did they need to be convinced to embrace computers and mobile phones].

BS: I think that finance, you know, you can’t avoid it, finance plays a big part in this. People want to make their houses more efficient and stop heat escaping from their house. But, it’s an expensive thing to do, so channelling some money into that sort of thing would be, I think, enormously helpful.

TH: Just on that finance thing, I, I’ve no doubt you’re absolutely right, but there was an interesting observation made to me a couple of years back. People will spend £20,000 on a kitchen re-do, and no one ever asks, you know, how quickly is that gonna pay back? In what form? Is it admiration from my neighbours, is that how I get the pay-back? Or is it better dinners? I mean, it is a bit perverse, isn’t it, that we particularly ask this on energy cos it’s like something we don’t want to do. [I’ve never spent £20,000 on a new kitchen, and I don’t know anyone who has. I suspect Tom moves in different circles to most of us].

BS: I totally agree, actually, and I don’t hear so much about pay-back as I used to, [you should – it’s a very real issue] but it used to be kind of the big selling-point. You had to tell people what the pay-back period was. But the, the truth is a lot of people have done these things with no hope of it ever paying back.

HC: [Moving hastily on from that last, extremely telling, point] Simon, one of the other things that we don’t hear about, talked about very much, is the cost of not doing this. It’s always presented as here’s a thing, it’s gonna cost you, you know, £5,000 to, to, you know put in, you know, a heat pump or whatever it is – it’s more than that, I’m sure [you’re right!]. But we don’t talk about if you don’t do this, in the long run it’s gonna cost you so much more. That is part of the argument. Why doesn’t that ever break through? [Probably because it isn’t true.]

SE: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really interesting that if you look at the, the Climate Change Committee’s latest advice, to Government on how to get to Net Zero by 2050, they said basically long-term electrifying, erm, you know, EVs, heat pumps, would cut household bills for energy and motoring by about £1,400 a year. And then looking at the economy as a whole, they said that the total net cost over the next 25 years, of getting to net zero, would be about £100 billion. That’s over the course of 25 years, so not £100 billion a year. And that’s about 0.2% of UK GDP. People that, will, you know, often tell you that Net Zero is stupendously expensive. [Interestingly, only today David Turver has published a piece) arguing that the Climate Change Committee’s 7^th Carbon Budget is a work of fantasy. Also, it shouldn’t be forgotten that when Philip Hammond was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he put in place a study which concluded, conservatively, that the cost of Net Zero would be £1 Trillion. Most objective observers think that was always an unrealistic low-ball, and that the real cost is nearer £3 Trillion]. And what they’re doing typically is four or five different things all at once. They’re presenting the capital, the up-front capital investment that you, you need to make – most of which is going to come from the private sector [but which is still a real cost, that has to be paid, and since the private sector isn’t a charity, and wants a return on its capital, we the consumers will end up paying that cost] – as if that’s the only part of the equation. They’re also ignoring the cost of simply building new power stations, which we’d need to do anyway – so the cost of business as usual [that’s a better point]. They’re ignoring the savings, the financial savings that you can make through having, you know, for example, an EV which is much cheaper to run thatn a petrol car [only if you have a home-charging point, which millions of people don’t, and only because ICE vehicles pay vast amounts of fuel duty, from which EVs have untile recently been exempt – but what happens when we all have EVs and the Chancellor of the Exchequer has lost £30 billion a year tax revenue?]. And finally, as you said, they’re ignoring the costs of not taking action. Time and time again when people [like Simon] have looked at the evidence on this it’s, it’s very clear that failing to take action on climate change will be much more costly, will be much worse for public debt, for the global economy in the rounds than investing now to bring down emissions. [This is the biggest argument of all – even the Climate Change Act Impact Assessment says “It should be noted that the benefits of reduced carbon emissions have been valued using the social cost of carbon which estimates the avoided global damages from reduced UK emissions. The benefits of UK action will be distributed across the globe. In the case where the UK acts in concert with other countries then the UK will benefit from other nations reduced emissions and would be expected to experience a large net benefit. Where the UK acts alone, though there would be a net benefit for the world as a whole the UK would bear all the cost of the action and would not experience any benefit from reciprocal reductions elsewhere. The economic case for the UK continuing to act alone where global action cannot be achieved would be weak.” I wrote about that here].

TH: I ust wanna put one argument we hear a lot from those who are opposed to moving to Net Zero, and it comes to the fairness thing anyway – it’s more of a global thing. In effect, why should you, the bill-payer, the energy-user in the UK pay more when we are just 1% of global emissions [0.72%, actually, less than the annual increase in emissions from the rest of the world every year] and China is still building loads of coal-fired power stations? [Not just China – India is pretty keen on them too, though I’ll grant that China is the main culprit]. How do you answer that? Rebecca.

RW: I would question the statement, because, erm, the cheapest form of electricity right now is, er, renewables, so wind and solar…[Not true. The marginal cost of renewables is cheaper, but by the time you take into account whole-system costs – up-front capital costs; renewables subsidies; balancing the grid; building pylons and cables to bring electricity from absurdly-diverse locations; giving gas a subordinate place on the grid so that is has to ramp up and down on demand, making it more expensive than it would be if it enjoyed the priority access given to renewables; the cost of BESS, etc – renewables are more expensive, considerably so in the case of some that are being supported by the UK government, such as tidal and floating offshore wind].

TH: …But we’re not feeling that, we’re not getting that benefit of it, as bill-payers…

RW: …Yeah sure, so…

TH: …You know, I can see an extra tariff for green stuff on my electricty bill, and it’s fair for people to ask, why should I be paying this while the Chinese are building loads of coal power stations?

RW: Yeah. So, the, in terms of the costs, the best way we can reduce our energy bills is to stop being dependent on imported gas, so actually, you’ve got cost savings and carbon savings going hand-in-hand. [Not true – it’s now been demonstrated beyond peradventure that renewables costs are adding much more to electricity bills than using gas to set the electricity price is doing. Even then, this is surely an argument for exploiting our own gas resources?]. More widely, why should the UK lead the way here? I mean, there are really strong economic arguments as to why we should do this, because it’s really interesting to see the pretty solid consensus among the business community [a consensus that seems to be crumbling, faced with ever-increasing energy bills, the most expensive industrial electricity prices in the developed world] that Net Zero investments make sense; that Net Zero investments are beneficial to our economy. Again, I think the costs of Not Zero (laughs) are much higher than the costs of Net Zero. If you look at parts of the country that has, that have suffered in the past from job losses, from – for example when the coal mines closed down – what you need to do is put in, you know, really solid economic strategies, regeneration strategies for those areas and invest in the, erm, industries of the future which are those Net Zero ones that are starting to pay off. [Really? Where’s the evidence?]. So it is, it is a question of investment, yes, but even in our straitened economic times our Chancellor is saying there’s a real need to invest in order to strengthen the UK economy and to prepare us for the future. [Am I alone in finding that word salad to have been borderline incoherent and to have failed to answer the question?].

SE: Just on your 1% point [0.72% actually, Simon] there are so many countries around the world that only emit 1% of global emissions. If we all basically said well, we’re only 1%, then we would never solve this problem. [I have some bad news for you Simon – that basically is what most of the rest of the world is saying, including those like China who are responsible for 30%].

TH: I think we’d better leave it there . Thank you very much indeed to Simon Evans, from Carbon Brief; to Rebecca Willis from Lancaster University and also an adviser to the Climate Change Committee; and Bob Sherman, from the Low-Carbon Warwickshire Network…..[yes, what a great point on which to leave it – case closed, apparently. Oh, hang on a moment – let’s round it off with the sought-after conclusions].

HC: So, lots to think about there. I am really interested in that thing about the [wholly imaginary] silent majority needing to speak up. I think this is so pervasive, that people think other people don’t want to do this, and it is clear [er, no it isn’t] from what we’ve heard that the evidence says that generally the majority of people do want a cleaner, a greener society and that we should all speak, if you think that, you should speak up, because then you’ll encourage other people. Just talking about it might actually be a big step forward. [Just talking about it? Good grief – the BBC does nothing else!].

TH: Yeah. Bob did say quite an interesting thing. He thought often big targets were a bit off-putting as a way of communicating it to people. It needed to be something more within their homes.

HC: That’s, that’s interesting, isn’t it…

TH: …or their lives, perhaps…

HC: …Yeah. You want to feel that you have some agency. That something you can do can make a difference and, you know, a whole planet is such a big thing that you feel you can’t make a difference, but in your village, you definitely can make a difference…

TH: Yeah.

HC: …and it’s shifting that emphasis, isn’t it, saying yes, there’s a big thing going on out in the world and it needs policy-makers and the IPCC and all of that. But actually, if you just look at your patch, everything you do helps. [It’s a nice thought, but actually, if you’re concerned about climate change, as opposed to local environmentalism, then that simply isn’t true].

TH: Yeah. We talked a lot about how to make this popular again – whether it feels popular, I suppose – and one of the things was we have to make it feel fair to people. That they’re not the only one paying the bill for saving the world, and I think finding ways to do that – and that is partly about government action, collective action – but overall there seemed to be a message they were saying – and all of us, we’re slightly preaching to the converted here [oh no you’re not, you’re keen to convert the unconverted and the doubters] – politicians and businesses should sort of hold their nerve on this…

HC: Yeah…

TH: …and not be put off by some of the noise.

TH: Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Rare Earth….[production blurb follows].

HC: To find out more about the challenges of our journey to Net Zero and to find out how you can make more of an impact, head to the BBC Rare Earth web page and follow the links to the Open University.

TH: Next week, what will the energy and water and environmental costs be of those huge datacentres growing as a result of our apparently endless appetite for Artificial Intelligence? Join us then.

Conclusion

How much more interesting – and informative – might the programme have been had someone who didn’t subscribe to their groupthink been allowed to participate. Frustrating though that was to listen to, I discern a very large light at the end of the tunnel. The fact that the BBC feels the need to propagandise ever more fervently in this way (with a 53 minutes long prime slot science programme) demonstrates that it is all too well aware that its pet project is coming off the rails. The BBC, as well as much of the UK establishment, may be keen to keep the Net Zero gravy train rolling along, but they are undoubtedly failing, as their increasingly desperate efforts demonstrate all too clearly.

Postscript

You can read more about Simon Evans here.

You can read more about Rebecca Willis here.

You can read more about Bob Sherman here.