The UK’s Climate Change Act was one of the first in the world to be passed in 2008 and is part of the reason the nation became a leader in cutting emissions. But now, as the UK faces an energy shortage, has a new government in power, and a climate-champion King, the Act’s strength and flexibility will be tested. Bloomberg Green reporter Akshat Rathi talks to Baroness Bryony Worthington, one of the authors of the Act, about the unique political moment that led to its passage, how she envisions it will face up to multiple crises, and why other countries have copied the framework.
Read more about a key institution that keeps the UK on track to meet climate goals.
Read a full transcript of this episode, here.
Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. It is produced by Christine Driscoll and Oscar Boyd. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net.
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I'm at a senior reporter for Bloomer Green. Welcome to zero. Now let me take you back to an extraordinary heat wave in London this summer. The air felt like it was straight from a desert, and as a reporter, I took the opportunity to go out and talk to people about their feelings on climate change and how it's affecting them. I feel like there's just this impending doom. I'm constantly anxious about it. If it's causing this heat wave, then it's making it very hard to sleep. They're worried, and it's not hard to see why. Just look at what's happened since talking to them in July. A third of Pakistan has been flooded, California has been pushed close to blackouts by a heat wave, Europe has suffered spectacular wildfires, and the Yangtze River in China dried up. The climate crisis is reshaping everything around us, and it's a crisis caused by US. We have pumped out huge amounts of greenhouse gases in pursuit of growth, changing the climate in the process. Look that growth has been broadly good for us. I grew up in India and when I look at my own family, I see that every generation has lived longer, We've had ever growing opportunities, and fortunately that's helped each generation become richer. That story, well, my story is shared by hundreds of millions of other people around the world. But how true will it be for future generations? Because the very things that powered progress over the last few centuries are starting to reverse it. You can blame many things, fossil fuels, power structures that resist change, politics that ignore the vulnerable. I can keep going. The good thing is that we know the solutions that we must deploy. These won't just save coral reefs and polar bears, Don't get me wrong, I love, but we'll also ensure that humans continue to thrive. The goal is clear. We need to cut emissions as close to zero as possible, as soon as possible, and that's what this podcast is about. Each week you'll hear from leaders, scientists, politicians, thinkers and tours about the tactics and technologies taking us to a world of zero emissions today, energy crisis, climate laws, and yet another British government. Let's go back to the people baking in the London heat. My next question to them was who they thought should be tackling the climate crisis, and one answer came back more than any other. I think this is a governmental responsibility. I think governments have to play at governments in the global Nordy government has to actually make policies. Until the government decides to make is string changed. Then there's not really much we can do. Government. They've got a point. Government, wherever you live, will play a crucial role in tackling climate change. That's why for this first episode of Zero, I wanted to talk to someone who has been instrumental in shaping climate policy, Baroness Brianie Worthington. Today, Brianie sits in the UK's House of Lords, but she began her career as a climate campaigner before finding her way to writing the UK's signature piece of climate legislation, the Climate Change the Act of two thousand and eight. As Friends of the Earth have said, the world's first climate change law will also be a world class climate change law. The law received extraordinary support. Out of the four hundred and sixty six members of Parliament who cast their votes, only three voted against it question time as many as that opinci. The law commits the UK to a massive ten emissions. The country is legally bound to achieve net zero by twenty fifty, and many other countries have followed the UK's example in creating their own climate laws. Now, with a new Prime Minister in office and a climate champion King, this law will play an even more important role. That's because there are real challenges to the net zero target, record high energy prices, a climate skeptic energy minister, and plans for more drilling in the North Sea. In today's episode, Briany explains why this historical law will hold up against these challenges and how the UK can go beyond net zero. Briany, welcome to the show. Thank you. Actually, it's delightful to be here. You've just come from hearing King Charles give his first speech to the Parliament and that's come just a week after the UK got a new Prime minister. Lisztruss, it's a busy time in the UK. Huh oh. Yes, it's been a pretty turbulent week. But some politics is often and quite turbulent, and that's partly why you need good laws to keep them focused on the things that matter over the long term. So that's what we're going to talk to you about today the Climate Change Act, and I want to start with your involvement in it. You were an English grad who got to write this law. How did that happen? I started out really caring about wildlife conservation after I had finished university and I was a member of different charities, but I also started as a fundraiser for a charity. Then I got interested in policy because I could see that it's basically needed to find ways of creating systemic change that affected everybody, rather than trying to do individual site battles or species battles. So we started working on a piece of legislation called the Wildlife and Countryside Act to try and update it and make tougher rules to protect species and habitats. And I was sitting in a meeting with a civil servant from English Nature and they said, oh, well, of course by the time in staws passed, this will probably become irrelevant because climate change is coming. It's going to change everything. I remember thinking, well, if that's the case, I need to work on cimate change. If there's the late nineties, so you could get access to data quite easily on the internet, so I was able to find the UK's inventory look at where the emissions were coming from, and it's really clearly coming from the power sector and from energy. So I kind of thought, right, I just want to work on that. So I ended up working for Friends of the Earth and they may be their UK climate campaigner, and that was fantastic. Now, when you got into the work of trying to get legislation passed on climate, let's first just understand why there was a need for climate change legislation in the UK at all. Well, I was really clear that we had a kind of approach to tackling climate change which wasn't working because if you look at the data in the nineties, late eighties, early nineties, there was a discernible trend down because we were closing down coal stations and replacing them with gas stations, and they were both newer, so they were more efficient and less polluting. And then something happened around the sort of mid nineteen nineties where it stopped happening and emissions started spiking up with again. And because the power sector is so dominant, such a big portion of the emissions, if the power sector starts to emit more, the whole economy starts to emit more. And it was basically down to coal. Coal was coming back online because gas was getting more expensive, and the Labor government had come in and said moratorium on any new gas stations. We want to hold onto the coal industry for political reasons. So it was clear that the government had no policy on this and because of us, this big swing happening on commodity prices between gas and coal. There was nothing in the sort of tool kit that addressed that. So I just kind of decided we needed a whole economy approach and we needed to make all of government responsible. There was a mood in the UK at that time where we wanted to act. Around the turn of the millennium, there were lots of news stories, headline coverage back climate. There was a heat wave early two thousands that really shocked people with a lot of deaths in France. In a period of six weeks from late July to the end of August, over fifteen thousand people were killed in France by heat exhaustion, dehydration and heat stroke. The atmosphere was in favor of something big being done, and that's why we launched the Big Ask campaign, and that's with the Friends of the Earth and there was a very specific, clear ask in the big, big ask what was it? That was the asking? How did you come to it? So myself and a couple of colleagues sat down and that's all good. I did start, you know, just with a blank piece of paper and drew out some graphs and said, well, what do we actually want? And what we wanted at that time was emissions to be constrained under a linear path, and we wanted a three percent peranum reduction. That was really what we wanted. The timing of the emissions cuts matters. It's the area under the curve that creates the risk. So we didn't want to leave it or the last moment and then suddenly dashed towards zero. We wanted to start early and put constraints on the total emissions because that's what determines the risk. So that was the kind of slightly the esoteric thing that we were asking for. But we created a campaign which was much more basic, which was just saying we don't have climate laws, we should have climate laws. And you know, we had an advertising agency working with us and they produced really great little short videos and we got celebrities involved, and then you know, a sort of snowball started to really build and it just caught a moment in time. Yeah, Radiohead made its way to the Big Gas campaign. It was wonderful. Tom York rang Friends of the Earth proactively and he would he would. He just said, I'm feeling I'm feeling sad about this. I'm depressed. I want to know what I can do to help. Can you tell me what I can do to help? And so we said, you can help us, and he did. He helped us launch the campaign. To be perfectly honest, the best thing about the Big Ask thing for me is the fact that there's no longer this sense of powerlessness and three is what I had for so long about it all. The government is the only place where you can actually sort of say, this is what's going to happen. Everybody's going to have to deal with it. I'm going to get on with it now. When the Climate Change Act passed, only three members of Parliament opposed the bill, while four hundred and sixty three boarded in favor. Every party supported it. Why did it get so much support? It happened because we had this populars who were educated, Because we had the media carrying good stories about climate change. We had NGO's putting out really good information on climate change, we had scientists, We've got a lot of scientists in the UK work on climate change, so there's a steady stream of information. And I think there was a feeling that if you didn't take this seriously, you'd be punished in the polls or it would be seen that you weren't a serious party. And also David Cameron had come in as leader of the Conservatives, and he'd obviously realized that he needed to rebrand them and came up with this concept of an oak tree as their new brand, and obviously done lots of polling and went out famously to Hugger Husky. And so when Friends of the Earth went to him and said, look, we really want a new comprehensive set of laws on climate change, he was like, yeah, okay, I'll deliver that if you let me into government. That then meant the pressure was on the other party's to degree you kind of hit a lot of lucky circumstances. But then more broadly, the bill itself is pretty hard to object to. It's not utopians, it's not saying shut everything down. It's just saying let's have a sensible framework and let's keep ourselves focused. That wasn't that much you could really object to, and it had a really good run through Parliament. It's got strengthened in Parliament, which was fantastic. Now I want to move to the current moment. Trust as the new prime minister. It's only been a week and a bit and the most pressing challenge for her is orchestrating the government's response to record high energy prices. What would you do if you were a prime minister? It what a lovely question. Well, I mean, fortunately, now we are in a situation where the solutions to climate change and the solsion to air quality and the solutions to high prices are all the same thing, which is, you use less energy and you use cleaner energy, all the errors appointing the same direction. So what you would do is you'd run a massive campaign of insulation so that our homes become less leaky, and you would double down on the fastest to deploy clean electricity sources, and you'd get building. Now she's got the last bit about getting building, But unfortunately, for whatever reason, the things they're going to build are going to be more oil and gas potentially, and that's a sort of false solution unfortunately, but you can see where it comes from in the party. But she has also promised to cap energy prices, which is sort of going to give a blank check to oil and gas companies. Yeah, I mean, we're going to pay at some point, aren't we, Whether it's through higher taxation in the long run or worst credit ratings. We just don't know what the full consequence will be of this big intervention into the market. The problem is it's really hard to change energy pricing because it's a global market and we don't have global rules at the moment, so every country is trying to struggle with this. And we get our gas About forty five of our gas comes from our own sources in the North Sea, but we can't control those prices because it's not state owned and those companies are charging what they can get away with. So really we've got to find other sources. But over the last twenty years, we've basically been investing in offshore wind because I believe it or not, the UK is the Saudi Arabia of wind, and we've been harnessing that in ever more efficient turbines and developing a whole new source of income and stability from the North Sea. So that's where the future is and that won't be stopped. That will continue. But politically, of course, it's an easy message to say we're going to take every last drop of oil and gas out of the North Sea. That's not the long term answer. I didn't expect you to use a Boris Johnson phrase on wind energy power. We want to be the Saudi Arabia of window, the Saudi Arabia. That's that's not Johnson, he's borrowed. That's at ye potential. I mean, we've got over a huge, huge gas of wind. Now, what are the mechanisms within the Climate Change Act that make it an effective piece of legislation today. There's a few. Then. One one is the what I call the legal tronome, which is you must do this action by this date and if not you can be judicially reviewed, you need to be taken to court. And that requires them to set carbon budgets, report on budgets, set policies for budgets. The carbon budget is just a limit on the total amount of emissions that the government can emit in any five year period and every five years that limit is decreased so that eventually they'll reach net zero. Yeah, so that creates a framework which they are legally obliged to stick to no matter what's happening in the political cycle. And that's important because these net zero goals there are decades out and having a timely requirement which fits within the sort of political cycle will keep the politicians honest and accountable, that's right. So famously, long distance targets are easy to sign up to because they're not in your term of office, and it sort of keeps the momentum because setting a long distant target and then forgetting about it is a disaster as far as the climates concerned. And so the legal metronome really is like a time bound thing. And that's one mechanism. What else is there in the Climate Change Act? So there are a number of other really important features, not least the creation of the Committee on Climate Change, which is an independent body that's outside government and provides independent advice on the setting of the targets and the budgets. And they can be called on for all sorts of advice, and they also keep an eye on the policies to see if they are adding up we also Part three of the Act is very enabling. We took a bunch of enabling powers that future governments could use to bring in different policies that we're kind of help them get to the targets. So we I think part of the reason why the bill was so popular was that we didn't dictate the precise way in which you could get to your targets, but we gave them mechanisms and so that was way of selling it to people. Now the UK has met the first, second, and third carbon budgets. Yes, they're said three at a time they bore out fifteen years out. Yeah, the first three for a second have been met or the third they're about to meet this year. Yes, just closing now, isn't it. Twenty three is the start of the next one. And then there's fourth and fifth and sixth carbon budget which they are not on track to me now, So what happened to keep them on track for the first, second, and third and why are they not on track for the fourth? The first things they sat really very loose budgets within government. They persuaded themselves that they should go easy at the start, which is completely the wrong way around. And thinking about it. If you think about climate, you should go hard at the start as fast as you can get all the low hanging fr other way, because then you're gonna have a lower emissions curve over time. But that's not what happened. They set three very generous budgets. So now we're back onto a property directory where we're setting tougher targets that are more in line with the long term goals, and that's why they're harder. And so if the first three carbon budgets were easy enough to meet, we've kind of picked the low hanging fruit. And the UK has done really well on offshore wind, which has made the technology cheaper and that's allowing the deployment to happen, not just in the UK but elsewhere in the world. How big a deal do you think this decarbonization of electricity has been. Yeah, so it's been interesting watching the power sector transition, and we shouldn't skip over that. What's happened in off shore wind is incredible. And the fact we have now floating platforms, you know, that's it is. It's truly transformed the industry and we've kept we've done sensible things, we've kept nuclear, we've always had hydro. You know, we've done electricity. Well, now it gets into the point where what do we do about the other sectors. And actually, the reason you start with electricity is twofold one. It's not really a traded commodity, So you're not going to expose to really competitive distortions if you do things to that market, because you can't just upsticks and get your electricity from somewhere else. The second reason you do it is because electricity is the enabler of decarbonization in the other sectors. So electrify everything is a pretty good proxy for how you sort out climate change. Decarbonized electricity and an electric everything, and we're starting to do that. And then you get to heat, and again it was a big debate, you know, oh, well are we sure? How do we how do we decarbonize build buildings that need heat? And actually, now it's becoming really clear that it's heat pumps, an electric heat that's going to sort that out too. Hydrogen may play role, but again I think just the physics of it are not going to really make it competitive, and so the really hard stuff is going to start hitting things like agriculture, industry, transport. Tell us what the government can do with the legislation it has in plays and whether there's need for future legislation to meet these goals. So we do have these enabling powers I mentioned, and they are going to be used to bring in, for example, the hundred percent clean mandate and transport. So we're going to Michael go famous he said he was going to ban the sale of ice vehicles vehicles, and he was the Environment secretary, he was the environment sectorally at the time. And the way that's going to actually be brought in to bear is through an obligation to sell electric vehicles and that was enabled through the powers that were already in the Climate Change Act. So that's a good example of where the whole segment of the emissions is going to be hopefully now tackled. Finally, there are other mechanisms that government has that don't require legislation. So, for example, in agriculture, it's kind of unique in that it has a huge amount of public money going into already in subsidy, and that same Michael Goo famously said that they would only make payments now for public money for public good and one of those public goods is the climate. The big thing there is livestock and how do you get slightly well, a lot fewer sheep and cows in our landscape. That's going to be the big challenge, and that is coming, but probably won't be the first thing they try and tackle now. The UK is also being forced to keep coal power plants open through the winter. It's giving out fossil fuel licenses. The Climate Change Act has survived all sorts of crises in the past, financial crisis, Brexit, multiple prime ministers, COVID recession, but now feels really dire. The UK's energy crisis and inflation is really making people question whether we keep on the track. Do you think the current moment pauses a challenge to the Act itself. I don't think so, because I think the solutions are the same to the problem. Right, So, why we've got a problem, it's because fossil fuels are very volatile and we don't have enough indigenous fossil fuels to meet our energy needs. Even in gas where we have the North Sea gas, fifty percent of what we consume is imported. So there is no real scenario where we are independent on fossil and that anyone who thinks that fracking is the answer is nuts. Really, the UK's geography and social kind of structure doesn't allow it. So the answer is more indigenous sources. And our indigenous sources are We're an islanded nation with offshore wind that can provide a huge amount. We're going to interconnect to all parts of different parts of Europe so that we can dock into a transmission network that acts as a battery for us. Will build nuclear because that will be domestic and secure and it won't come on stream for the next couple of decads. It's not a fast solution, but it's the ultimate solution to fossil fuels, to have renewables and nuclear providing you with large amounts of clean electricity, and then transmission connectors to improve your interconnectedness, so that narrative is not going to change. And well, we forgot to mention energy efficiency. If you're facing really high fuel bills, people will find alternatives and work out how to reduce their use, so that demand destruction will also happen. And just at the time when you know petrol prices are through, the roof evs are coming to market and they're proving to be popular and cheap and affordable to run. And fun to drive. So you know that lonely hasten the long term shift to electric transport. What happens if the UK falls off track and does not meet if uture common budget? There could be lots suits right absolutely that, yes, as we've already seen the first one be successful. There would be I'm sure judicial proceedings brought potentially by green groups and that would then require a judge to decide what the reparation is that the government has to make. And we were always hoping a sensible judge would say, well, you have to pay to find money from the treasury to pay for the over emissions that you've allowed to be emitted, maybe against the social costal carbon, which would be the sort of the price that academics think h Ton is causing in terms of impact. And of course in July twenty twenty two there was a ruling the judge did not ask the UK to pay, but it did say the government has to outline how exactly at zero policies will achieve the emissions targets it has. And the people behind those lawsuits were civil society groups like Friends of the Earth and Client Earth and the Good Law Project. Yeah yeah, yeah, So I've Alrea had he had our first example, and that was interesting because that was a court case about future action, not a retrospective. You've already failed. So I think clearly that civil society values this piece of legislation, is watching it carefully and doing what's necessary to keep the government honest. Let's take the worst case scenario. We've talked about how climate laws, once in place, can help hold a government into account, but laws are also made by government. Could the new government scrap the Climate Change Act altogether? They could, but they've got their hands full with other issues, and I really think why would you pick that fight right now? It's still got huge support amongst the public, and huge support Amoks, backbench MP's, and they also know that we've still got that civil society group out there that if this were even really ever to become a serious problem, you'd see people mobilizing. And we all know els it's not the root cause of the problem. So you'd be creating all this pain for yourself without actually helping. So why why do it? I think it won't rise the tough of anyone's agenda. Is that One reason why one of the first things that the new Prime Minister did was to set out a review of how the government is going to reach its nancier target. Secondly, we will conduct a review to ensure we deliver net zero by twenty fifty in a way that is pro business and pro growth. So I think the review of net zero is actually not a bad idea because if you think what's happened is the government's made interventions into markets to try to correct for the externality of climate change. So you start interviewing one way, then you have to do another intervention and another intervention. There's an energy bill going through at the moment which is bringing in an further intervention in favor of carbon capture and storage. We have a Nuclear Financing Act that was passed, so there's been a lot of government intervention and I suspect what the government wants to do is have a little look at how does this all this inter relate. Is there a simpler, more effective way of doing this to give clarity about what our intentions are. But it's not a bad thing for us to keep asking ourselves, are we doing this in the most efficient way possible? And so this you don't think is pandering to the climate skeptic audience that is there in some wings of the Conservative Party, but also in some political margins the UK broadly. It could have been, but I don't think it is. And what's good about now is that the incumbency has shifted. There are people out there who now are very vocal about how beneficial net zero is and they will put forward their evidence. And the power companies, the electricity sector has really shifted in the last twenty years. They used to be a huge impediment because they were mostly running thermal plant and didn't want anything to happen to change the profitability of those plants. And now nearly all of them have got a diverse portfolio with a lot of clean in it, and some of them are solely clean. And they're going to have an influence and they're going to want to make sure that their investments don't get derailed. I think you'll have. It'll be good because it'll draw out the evidence and that's probably what a new cabinet needs. Despite the challenges, the UK has got more emissions than any other major economy. What can others learn from how the UK did it? That's coming up after the break now. One thing that many people will find surprising is that the UK has got the most emissions among rich countries in the world. Its emissions have declined forty percent since nineteen ninety. Yeah, he's seen the lovely graph of how we've decombanized their electricity system faster than any country on the planet. It's brilliant. Yeah. Now, how much of that is because of the Climate Change Act? Oh? Well, yeah, the Climate Change Act is a long term thing, and that decombanization was already underway. And that's an interesting story in itself because in the late nineties, actually early nineties, you were starting to see privatization of the electricity sector, which was putting enormous pressure on the nuclear industry, and so they lobbied very effectively for a support mechanism that would mean they could still compete in an open market, and it's called a non fossil fuel obligation and that was widened from beyond nuclear into all clean and that gave a market in wind and that piece of policy really kickstarted an ann immersive industry that's now you know, at the giguat scale through successive policies, and that was helped by the European Union passing renewables targets, legally binding renewables targets on all member states, and the Climate Change Act provided a good framework, but I couldn't to hand on hard. It wouldn't have happened without the Climate Change Act. What the Climate Change Act come where I think that comes into its own is ensuring that this is not just about one sector, but it's at all sectors, and we don't just stop at one. One thing we shouldn't discount is the soft effect. And I've seen this sort of firsthand. Really, a project that was being discussed by a power company was coming in with the economics of it was a clean energy project, hydro project. The economics were marginal, but in the deck that they used to come to a conclusion on whether to invest, they had a slide on the Climate Change Act, and really the message was all things being equal, given the Climate Change Act, clean power is going to have a premium in the future. So that helped tip in favor of the project. So it's had a transformative effect of the direction of travel is clear, and it's illegally backed, so there's no doubting that that's going to be in place. With all the political backing that it has. We've seen similar acts being passed in New Zealand, in Sweden, in France. Just last week Australia's new climate legislation was passed, So it's not as comprehensive as the UK's, but it's at least set a target that the country is now legally bound to meet. What have they taken on board? And are there things that they've done that are interesting and different? The Swedish ones interesting because they've gone early. You know, they've gone to zero early, and I believe that they're planning to go negative, so they've already gone beyond that. Because really, what countries like the UK should be thinking is not just our own flow of emissions on an annual basis. That's relatively straightforward. We're not a big emitter. What we should be doing is thinking about the historic the liability that we've built up over the one hundred plus years post industrial revolution. So we've got to be paying back and that's the equitable way of doing it. Because if you go to a country like India and say hey, you know we've decarbonized and now you need to they're like, well, hang, we didn't even carbonize, so you know you've got rich on the back of this. Now you're telling us to stop. That seems a little unfair given up capita emissions are tiny. The UK has too, I think embrace the fact that we're going beyond zero. I think New Zealand's interesting because they've got a very different emissions profile. Most of their emissions come from land use sector, whether that's livestock or a forestry, so they've have been grappling with the problems of methane and how do they really do land us well and they've done some really interesting things. They've put some senses into their forests to try and work out genuinely empirically which the forests that are sinks which are not, so that they base it on science and that's really interesting. We're going to have to do something similar suspect the land used and land used change. Parts of the budgets are a little fuzzy and they're used by countries because they're not very precise. So that's going to have to be a lot more fine tuned and New Zealand's probably at the forefront of that. Knowing what you know now, is there a generalizable formula that you would apply for a climate act that any country could pass. I think there are some features that So one is try to make it a technology agnostic framework, because the minute you get into picking winners at that level, you get into fights, and so everyone's got their favorite idea of what the solution is going to be, So try and keep out of that and put in a framework that's truly just about the outcome, not the means. I think the probably the other thing I learned was that ambition and flexibility correlated. So if you put a lot of ambition into something, you need flexibility and vice versas. So why we have five year budgets is it gives government five years to sort themselves out, not a single year. And that's why we could get three of them. You know, it was a trade off. I wanted nine, I got three. And so you know, there those flexibilities that make it possible for politicians or for civil servants to go, Okay, we'll live with this, And that's an important thing to bear in mind when you're drafting. So when the Climate Change Jack passed, the target was to reach eighty percent reduction in emissions relative to nineteen ninety levels by twenty fifty. Lots of numbers by the target was eighty percent reduction that then got upgraded to net zero by twenty fifty. In the process, other targets had to be changed, and so the new UK target is a nearly eighty percent reduction by twenty thirty five. Is that down to the act? Is it down to the politics? I think it's done to a few factors. I mean, one is the fact that the crisis is getting ever more pressing and evidence is piling up everywhere. But I also think that the technologies that we were going to need to make the transition coming down in price, and they're becoming more trusted and more normal to investors and stakeholders. So we've got potential to move faster now. And I think public pressure on politics isn't going to go away. I mean, we've broke up people who we know who have been hit by the impacts of climate change. I mean, Pakistan is currently still underwater and it's there. These are events that I don't think when I started out thirty years ago, I was expecting to see now maybe twenty forty towards the end of my life, not right now. So everything's happening on a much more curtailed time scale. The field scientists that you speak to are pretty freaked out at how fast this is going. So that pressure to keep doing more is just going to keep increasing. The original target has been brought forward fifteen years. Is that going to happen again? Oh? I hope. So I really think that the UK is really well placed to show that you can continually ratchet. I mean, that's what the whole of the Paris Agreement is based on, is that industrialized nations, once they get going, you're going to realize, actually, this isn't as bad as we thought. In fact, it's saving us money in certain places. Let's go faster. So if that's the case, there's absolutely no reason why we can't get to net zero before twenty fifty. And you remember that this is a global challenge. So I would love the UK government to acknowledge that they can go beyond zero by helping other countries decarbonize. And the UK, among industrialized nations, probably has a bigger responsibility given it was among the first to industrialize. With all that call that went out, I mean, the historical emissions if we take a cumulative that puts this small island very high up top in its historical impact on YA crisis. Now I'm glad you've said that, because when we were trying to discuss the need for this legislation in government, we would be a lot of economic analysis thrown out us that said there was no point in the UK leading because the farmers that supposed to be a fast follower when the costs of the technologies had already come down and we'd benefit from them. But we would go back to that with a moral argument and say, for we didn't do that with the Industrial Revolution. We led the world into this problem through the Industrial Revolution and we we benefited hugely from being the first first runner, So why would that not be the same now? And that's what we managed, i think, to persuade government of that there was upside and there was an absolute moral imperative to act. Now you're making me change my mind a little bit about politics here by saying morality counts, well, you know it does, doesn't. It's the primacy of all of this detailed economic analysis. It's been shown to be a little bit inadequate for the complexity of how you look after the world or how you look after your country. Even you know, it's a much more complex problem than the economists would have you believe, and therefore morality and judgment absolutely comes into it. So it matters who your leaders are. It matters who the sectory state is, and who the junior ministers are because they're going to be making judgment calls, and it matters who the captains of industry are they also make judgment calls. You know, there's an awful lot of non technical decision making that happens, and we need that to be done with an eye to history and an i'd the past, and it is a moral question. That was a great conversation. Thank you, Branny, well, thank you, Actually I really enjoyed it. Let's good to go down memory line but also to think about the challenges ahead. So thank you. The UK has seen many governments since this law was passed, too many if you ask some. Yet in that time the UK's climate targets have only become more ambitious. That's the stickiness of laws and why having them is so important. Thanks for listening to Zero. If you like the show, please rate, review, and subscribe. This episode was produced by Oscar Boyd and Christine Driscoll and hosted by me Akshatarati. Our theme music is by Wonderly. Have a suggestion for our topic someone you'd like to hear from Email us at zero pod at bloomberg dot net. We'll see you next week.