[Transcript] Emma Pinchbeck: Will net zero destroy the economy?

The Chief Executive of the UK’s Climate Change Committee explains how our lives will change by 2050 if we continue to cut carbon emissions.

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Rob: So Hannah, when you picture Morocco, what first comes to mind?

Hannah: Sunshine?

Rob: Yes, great opportunity for solar and they're also blessed with these strong and consistent trade winds. So I've come across this company Xlinks that sees the world as one grid and their idea is to connect places with abundant renewable energy like Morocco to areas of high demand.

Hannah: Just like us in the UK. How will Xlinks get the energy from Morocco's solar and wind facilities to cold, rainy UK?

Rob: via subsea intercontinental cable.

Hannah: So sending electrons under the sea.

Rob: And they've already received competitive tender responses on all their major capital expenditure. So if you want to know more about Xlinks Morocco to UK Power Project, you can visit xlinks.co or you can check out their LinkedIn page by searching Xlinks, which is all one word.

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Hannah: Welcome to Solving for Climate, a podcast where we chat to scientists and innovators developing solutions to climate change. I'm data scientist Dr Hannah Ritchie.

Rob: And I'm Rob Stewart, an entrepreneur who's interested in scalable climate innovations and the people and the science behind them

Hannah: On today's podcast we're chatting about carbon budgets with Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee Emma Pinchbeck. Before this job Emma was head of Energy UK, the trade association for the energy sector. As the cost of living crisis began this was no mean feature.

Rob: It's the CCC's job to run the numbers and offer independent advice to the UK government. And if you're listening outside the UK and thinking, why on earth do I care about that? Well, Emma has an answer that might surprise you.

Hannah: Indeed, because we'll be asking wider questions like is hydrogen dead? And have they overestimated how much we're willing to change our own carbon consuming habits?

Rob: And as an entrepreneur, I'll begin the episode by outlining the benefits of independent advice and why it's important in our time of shifting geopolitics.

Hannah: And with my hat as a data scientist, stick around till the end of the interview, while I be unpacking the CCC's recently published carbon budget to see if the numbers stack up.

Rob: So Hannah, the Climate Change Committee or CCC, these were one of the first climate councils in the world. What's their job?

Hannah: Yeah, so the CCC in the UK came out of the UK's Climate Change Act in 2008, which was quite progressive, right? It was kind of the first kind of, we frame it as legally binding, I'm not quite sure what the legal implications of not meeting that are. But it was a big success story, as the UK in terms of leading climate action. So the CCC was set up, they are an independent body from the government, so they're not politicians, they're not members of parliament. And they have two main jobs, right? The first is to track how the UK government is doing, basically saying, yes, you're on track on this, you're way off track on this and way behind where you need to be in order for us to get to net zero. And then what they also do is offer advice, right? They offer advice in the form of what they frame as these carbon budgets. So they do this tracking and scrutinizing every year, and then every five years they publish these carbon budgets, which basically try to say, for this given period of time, this is what we would need to do.

Hannah: I think the point of the carbon budgets is that for a country to set out, we're gonna reach net zero by 2050. It's really hard to take that seriously, like over 30 or 40 year time scales, and it's very easy to kick the can down the road, right? So what they do is set these five year budgets so that we keep going along this pathway to hopefully get to net zero by 2050. So that's their two jobs. You have the entrepreneurial hat. What do you make of the CCC? Do you think it's useful for businesses?

Rob: Yeah, I think it is because if we just focus on the innovation part, which is going to be provided by is and increasingly provided by business in terms of tackling climate change, then one of the things they like to know is to as good a extent as possible, what is coming down the track, right? So the CCC enables them to have that reasonable amount of surety about what the winners and losers are.

So it allows capital to understand where it's best to deploy.

Hannah: Yeah, I guess part of that hinges on the CCC giving advice, but then also the government taking that advice, right? Exactly. And whether those two are in sync. And we can speak to Emma about whether that has been the case or whether she expects that to be the case, or are the CCC just producing nice reports that the government say, great, and then completely ignore?

Hannah: Emma Pinchbeck Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee. Welcome to Solving for Climate.

Emma: Thank you for having me.

Rob: No, lovely to have you here. Been in the role now for over five months. I think a good starting point is what has surprised you most so far?

Emma: That's a really good question. No one's actually asked me that one yet. It's not really a surprise. I anticipated it a bit, but the strength of feeling people have about the organization one way or the other. You know, there are people with very strong views about the climate change committee because they think we're this brilliant body that is going to save the world on climate change on the one hand, and others who think that we're, you know, we have too much power and we...

shouldn't exist, frankly, and just the strength of feeling about what is actually a technocratic body of about 60 people doing analysis is really a remarkable thing. And what I spend most of my time on as Chief Exec one way or another is that engagement with the public, with politicians, with others who've got views on us. And that has been a surprise, I think.

Rob: And is it just before we move on, just on that kind of public scrutiny piece, know, people have strong opinions, like you say, some of those and some of those are negative and you end up kind of finding yourself in publications, perhaps being, you know, kind of selectively quoted. Is that something that you had given much thought to before taking the job and whether or not you had that kind of robustness to deal with it?

Emma: Yes, lots. It was the biggest kind of conversation that we had. Because I mean, I've been in the media for a long time. In that before doing this, I was the chief executive of the energy trade body through an energy crisis. So so well used to being in the public eye in that way. But I think for the first time, the difference is people have opinions about me as a person. And I'm seeing that in the press quite often, because that goes with the territory with the job.

Rob: Look, we're obviously going to unpack the carbon budget, which gives recommendations to the UK government on how it can reach net zero by 2050. But we have lots of listeners from outside of the UK. So I suppose the question that is worth posing is why should non-UK listeners care?

Emma: The Climate Change Committee is the first of its kind, but there are now 26 other bodies like us around the world. I think despite the fact there are other bodies like us around the world, we're one of the ones which has had the most success in terms of delivering what we're meant to do, which is helping governments who set out their ambition for decarbonizing within their countries actually work out how you might get there.

We exist because some of that conversation can get quite political. And so what we're there to do is provide the evidence base for politicians with all kinds of views and values to then use it to make their own decision making. And the UK economy is the first to halve its emissions from 1990. We're the first to prove that you can decarbonize whilst delivering on economic growth. We are the first industrialized nation to turn off coal-fired power stations.

Emma: And in the time that we've been decarbonising, we've built some world class industries, most specifically our offshore wind industry, which is where we've got the second biggest market in the world. And what's interesting about all of those things is they were possible inside our carbon governance framework, which is this series of carbon budgets rather than hard targets for technologies all by decade. And it's demonstrated this beautiful mix of private sector innovation and transformation and delivery and surprising stuff that no one, including the organization I work for, anticipated, like offshore wind but also delivered genuine emissions reduction in the economy through adopting new technologies across different kinds of government. We've had lots of political turmoil in the UK over the last 10 years, and we've continued to deliver under carbonization. So that's why we matter, because we're the sort of proof point that you can do this. And our governance is seen globally as really important and other countries are beginning to copy it.

Hannah: What would your vision be of, I don't know, a high street or a street in London say in 2050 and how would that be different from today?

Emma: A lot of the people that I know in the climate movement are like radical optimists. So what they're imagining is something different, like very different to today, because different for them means better and therefore safe, right? But one of the massive success stories, I think about the carbon budgets is we outline a future that looks pretty much like your life now. But but better in some ways like cheaper and more efficient and easier. So the line that has been quoted that apparently I must have said somewhere is like in 2050, you know, you can still drive a car, you'll still go on your annual family holiday, you'll still eat meat in the carbon budgets, you'll still heat your home and be comfortable, you're just displacing the technologies that you're using and making some choices already in line with what people are doing. So let me just unpack that a bit.

At the moment, you probably have a gas boiler in your home. If you're listening to this in the UK or somewhere else in the world, you've probably got fossil fuel boiler or furnace. You will likely have a heat pump in the future or some kind of electric heating technology. That thing will be A, more efficient and B, if your house is more efficient, if you've put some loft insulation in, the running costs of it will be really good and you might be able to automate it. So you might be able to put your heating on remotely from the office and make sure your house is warm when you get home.

Things like condensation at the windows, which I've got in my house in Gloucestershire, these sort of impacts of like not very efficient, quite old fashioned energy technologies will be gone for you. If you've got a car, you'll have an electric vehicle. I have an electric vehicle, it's already cheaper to run. You'll be saving 700 pounds on your fuel costs by 2050. The second you get an electric vehicle, you'll start saving money. You'll be able to charge it on the street because there'll be more, you know, charging points in car parks and on roads that might be different. You might see them in lampposts and so on driving around, but you'll also be able to charge at home or in the office. And you will love your electric vehicle like it's your, in my case, third child, because it's like brilliantly reliable, costs you much less money to maintain than a traditional vehicle. You know, quiet, efficient, brilliant way of getting around. You might cycle a bit more if you can or walk a bit more if you can and there should be more decarbonised public transport around for you but ultimately if you depend on your car you will still have one and it will be a better car. If you fly on holiday every year with your family and that is really important to you to get away you will still be able to do that and those planes will by 2050 in many cases be running off some kind of sustainable aviation fuel that will exist by then. Other people might be flying less, but there should be transport links available to them to get around and they will probably be paying a little bit to fly more if they want to. So that's how we've done the modelling so that people that are flying a lot are paying bit more for that because they buy more tickets than others. But importantly, you can still go away and have your family holiday.

And for diet, which is the other thing that happens in the countryside. Over the last 10 years, people have been reducing their meat intake by about 10%. And we've kind of carried that trend line on. So again, looking forward, people will be eating a bit less meat as they already are. But we're saying if government follows our advice that vegetables, alternative proteins, that delicious alternatives should be more available to you in your corner shop, in your supermarket, everywhere that you go. And so that

people are able to have healthier, more nutritious, tasty, cheaper diets. And that will start to be reflected, I guess, in your restaurant and your corner cafe and so on. And I don't think that future is radically different to the world that we're in now. And I think sometimes there's this desire for me to say, we need to change the world and people hear that to be a fundamentally different way of living. But I think we win when we can make it a straightforward, simple and not that radical thing for people to be doing actually. And that is what the carbon budgets show. You can have a great quality of life and save the planet. How's that for a pitch?

Rob: It's good. It works.

Hannah: It's very good to me, but I guess it's worth having a look at how the UK has done so far. Like, is the UK on track where we need to be? Are we falling behind? What's our track record?

Emma: The track record is really good to date and most of our delivery on decarbonisation, the 50 % reduction against 1990, has been delivered through decarbonising our power sector and working out how you get off coal and now gas into renewables. Ten years ago, when we were thinking about this quite hard in the energy sector, everyone thought we'd skip from coal to gas and then to renewables. What the government did was set out a

an architecture for decarbonizing the power sector, which rather than focused on procuring specific technologies, procured a kind of outcome, which was low carbon generation in the system. And they ran these things called contract for difference auctions. And off the back of that, we actually went much faster on renewables cost reductions than we thought were possible. And so we built a lot of offshore wind in this country. And that meant we didn't skip from coal to gas to renewables, we've gone basically coal to renewables and that

is where most of our emissions reduction has come from to date. What I'm getting to is what we've been less good at and what we have been less good at is decarbonizing other sectors of the economy. And I'd argue that the leadership that the UK can now show is how you do the demand side of energy. And by that, I mean like our homes, our transport systems and the uses of energy on the other end of the system. And put bluntly, we've got to electrify surface transport which are vans and cars

and we've got to electrify our heating over the next decade. And we've known that for some time and politicians have found that one harder to deliver, if I'm honest. So we've got a ZEV mandate for our vehicles, which is good.

Hannah: And ZEV is?…

Emma: Zero emissions vehicles and largely electric vehicles. So there's some room in the policy for hybrids and they've just updated it because of what's going on in world with tariffs. And we've got a big automotive sector that will be exposed to tariffs. So there's some understandable changing in that policy. But there's been some thinking about transport. I think we feel pretty confident about transport decarbonisation in general. The harder thing in the UK, which successive governments have really, if I'm honest, ducked making difficult decisions on is heat decarbonisation. And again, we're confident it will be electric heating. But the UK has got a lot of people using individual gas boilers. And we've got a gas network and, you know,

people are not used to electrified technologies. We've got some low efficiency housing stock. So there's just a series of things that make it complicated here. And that's where we need to see a lot more political attention. So we're off track on delivery on that stuff. By the way, if you ask me to diagnose the UK economy, we'll be here for like two hours.

Hannah: I was going to jump in on the, especially the transport and the heating. So when you read the latest carbon budget, what comes through, I think most strongly out of everything in the report is how strong a lever electrification is, right? So shifting from petrol and diesel to electric cars, shifting from gas boilers to electric heat pumps. Could you explain why electrification is such a crucial and strong lever in this?

Emma: Yes, this is I'm very glad you picked that up, because I think it's my one big contribution to the carbon budget, having arrived very late in the process as the new chief exec, and I came over to the CCC from the energy sector. And what I was expecting to see in the analysis for the seventh carbon budget, which is like the late 2030s and 2040s, was frankly a lot more about land use and agriculture and trickier areas of the economy.

I didn't expect to see in the numbers when I was showing them just such a strong narrative about electricity, which is there. And broadly it's there because over the last 10 years, the technology choices for transport and heat have become much more certain that it is about electricity. And that's for two reasons. One, the efficiency of technologies on that end of the system. So an electric vehicle, the costs

drop in batteries, the range on electric vehicles, the ability to operate them just saves you so much more money than it used to and so much more energy than it used to across the energy system that they become the economically rational choice. And similarly with heat pumps, although they're an earlier stage technology in the UK and other markets, they've sped up in deployment. So again, we can put them into more houses than we thought that we could, and they save people money earlier than

we thought that they could in terms of savings. So electricity just becomes the sort of fuel in the future, of the future in our modelling. And the other really important thing is system wide, if you're using electric technologies on the end of a system where you're generating a lot of electricity, that in itself is efficient. So if you are very worried about your exposure to like gas imports or cost of gas, which the UK economy is, we're really exposed to those things

it’s a very good news story economically, if you can use energy efficiently. And we halve energy losses across our energy system by having lots of clean generation on this end that we're then using and electrified technologies at the other end. And so that's also where we get a lot of our cost savings from in the model. And our mandate as the Climate Change Committee is to basically find the most cost effective, least socially disruptive route towards delivering net zero.

So if you've got a technology that saves you money and is efficient, it's what the model tells us to do. So yeah, there you go. 60 % of the emissions reductions are electricity. I'm like electricity's biggest hype machine.

Hannah: The report has this really nice, what we'd frame as like a Sankey diagram, so for people who know it's like a Sankey, it's like a flow, how energy flows.

Emma: Yes!

Hannah: And I think what people really underestimate about the energy transition overall is how inefficient our current system is, right? So when you're burning fossil fuels, the majority of the energy is wasted, which means that...

You're burning tons of energy and the energy services, which is what we care about, right? That's like the actual heat that we have in our homes, that's the actual light you get out the bulb, the actual distance you travel in the car is actually a relatively small fraction of that. And you have this nice diagram where if you electrify and also switch to the lower carbon sources of power, so many of those losses just completely disappear.

Emma: Those Sankey charts in the whole of the carbon budget advice, and there's 400 pages of it, we've got charts like you would not believe in the office as well as the ones that made it into the report. Of all of it, those Sankey charts, I think, are my favorite in the document, with the exception of the one that I think we're making reference to, which shows how important electricity is across all of the emissions reductions 2040. And essentially,

electricity, like the use of it in the economy and the generation of it is something like 60 % of the emissions reductions 2040. And there's a chart that shows it relative to other measures. And there's just this huge big chunk of orange and yellow, which is how we do all of the stuff that uses electricity. And it's so powerful. The thing that's powerful about it, by the way, back to people having strong feelings about the climate change committee politically, is you can have strong feelings about climate change, or climate governance or, you know, climate policy, but

pretty much every politician I've ever met cares about energy security and energy costs. Sort of regardless of how you feel about climate change, the energy transition is coming and is happening and clean electricity is beating fossil fuels. So there is a positive narrative for doing this, which is entirely about the future of your industrial strategy, your economy, what people are paying on their bills. And off the back of the gas crisis, I think that's extremely powerful. That's why I like those diagrams.

other than that I, you know, like sankeys.

Hannah: Just to wrap up the road transport and heating, the CCC's guidance is very strong that the main path is electrification. I think lots of people that were bought into hydrogen for a long time will be disappointed. The CCC was quite strong on this, they basically said hydrogen for road transport and heating is dead. How did the CCC come to that conclusion?

Emma: It's the economic efficiency thing again. The issue that hydrogen has is you have to make it, so you have to have enough excess generation if you're making green hydrogen to make hydrogen, or you have to make hydrogen from blue hydrogen. In the case of blue, there's a slight worry about dependence on imports for the gas stock and there's things like fugitive emissions and so on. For green hydrogen, how much excess...

capacity you've got from your renewables to make the hydrogen through electrolysis or other processes. And we got concerned there was a limit basically to the input for hydrogen. And then every time you do that process, every time there's a process in the energy system, you're losing energy anyway. So there's also you're losing expensive energy through the system. And then lastly, on the other end of the system, it just became, it looks like it's becoming cheaper to make

things with batteries in or electric technologies that can off take the electricity. So rather than a system where you are making a product and losing energy, moving the product around and losing energy and then using it on the other end of the system in less efficient technologies, you're just generating a thing, moving it around and using it. And that is just, it's a simpler model. I think there's a really…

It feels common sense simpler to be able to put gas into an existing gas network and that's been part of the attraction for hydrogen for heat for a long time. But the reality is that even if it feels counterintuitive, electrifying heat will be less disruptive for people and offer more benefits and is least cost for the economy overall.

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Hannah: Alright Rob, I’ve got a new word for you.

Rob: Love new words, what is it?

Hannah: Dunkelflaute. There’s going to be lots of emails from angry Germans because I didn’t pronounce it correctly.

Rob: What does that mean?

Hannah: So dunkelflaute describes this period of time when we have very little solar or wind.

Rob: Ah, just like the UK right now.

Hannah: Precisely. But we know that renewable energy from wind and solar will be really important in helping us reach our climate targets which is why Xlinks are developing the Morocco to UK power project that they say will support the UK's emission reduction target of 81 % by 2035.

Rob: That'll be generated from xlink's new solar, wind and battery facility in Morocco which will transport energy to us through subsea intercontinental cables.

Hannah: And xLinks says that they were able to provide enough power for 7 million homes in the UK.

Rob: So the Morocco Power Project doesn't actually require government investment and instead the project is expected to invest around £5 billion in UK procurement.

Hannah: It already has connection agreements with the National Grid and North Devon. So if you want to know more about Xlinks's Morocco to UK power project, visit xlinks.co or check out their LinkedIn page by searching Xlinks. That's all one word.

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Rob: So a question I have is on intermittency, right? So sun doesn't always shine, wind doesn't always blow. We know that. We can generate a lot of renewables, but they're not always there when we need them. What is the view of the committee in terms of how we're going to be able to solve that problem over time? You bullish on kind of battery technologies and stuff? I mean, ultimately we need to see quite big progress in that area, right?

Emma: There's a few answers to this question in the energy sector. But I'll tell you what we've got in the committee model. So we have modeled the UK power system for with a security lens as well as a carbon one, which means we've considered low wind days and other kind of weather conditions actually, and come out with a mix that we think covers us for what then is intermittency caused by lower wind or less sunshine and so on.

The solutions we've got are, you have a technology mix, so we've got nuclear still in our overall system model. We've got at least another gigawatt scale, a big nuclear power station sized thing in the model, which we're assuming might be Sizewell because that's in process at the moment in the UK. It's the next big utility scale nuclear station.

It's quite far advanced in discussions, we understand. And then you've got the potential for other nuclear as well, which could be big or small nuclear. So we've got about that much nuclear in model. We've also got what the energy sector calls flexible or dispatchable generation, which basically means stuff you can turn on and off, regardless of what the weather is doing. And for that, we're decarbonizing gas plants, either with hydrogen or carbon capture and storage, or we're using bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. And that's energy from waste plants. So you have to imagine like a big…

This is not what carbon capture and storage is. Don’t write into me. I understand. But for people that don't know what carbon capture and storage is, imagine a dome capturing the emissions that come off something like a incinerator or a big power plant. And that's what we're doing with it. And you're putting that on existing power plant, like a biomass power plant or an energy from waste plant or onto gas.

And that's the solution we've come up with. It's actually, less of that in there than the previous advice, I think, from five years ago. And that's because the technology's improved. And one of the things that's really improved is the last chunk of things, which is flexible energy storage and using energy flexibly. So being able to put stuff with high demand next to where you've got supply and move energy around the system more efficiently. So using it when it's needed and not wasting it

and or putting batteries at all different kinds of levels on the system from small electric vehicle batteries right up to like big batteries and pumped hydro power stations. And again, the UK is great because we've got all of the above. We're not a single technology power system. We've got this kind of ability to have a mix and most system models, ours included, shows a sort of portfolio of choices for the UK.

Hannah: To come back to this question of behaviour change, I actually think that reading the report people have very different reactions. I think some people would say that the CCC overestimates people's willingness to change. They won't switch to electric car, they won't switch to electric heat pump, they won't reduce their meat consumption even a little bit. So I'm wondering whether you think that that's ambitious and how you convince people to make those changes. From my end reading it, I...

was surprised by how small the behavioral change expectations were, often because I don't see switching from a petrol car to an electric car as a big behavior change, right? A behavior change there for me would be like not having a car. And some of the pushback I get, and I could see the CCC getting, is that too much of it is framed as around...

Often I'm framed as a kind of techno-optimist, right? Because you're just looking for the technological solution that means that no one has to change what they're doing. They just switch to something that's the same but of a different technology. And as you said, it's not radical enough. I'm wondering what your perspective is on this. Like, are you overestimating people's willingness to change? Are you actually just quite underestimating because you don't think they will change?

Emma: You're right. The first thing to say is you're right. We've talked about it. A lot of what we need to do is a technology solution. And I think that's not techno-optimism. That’s just emissions in our economy tend to come from burning fossil fuels in technologies like power plant, industrial plant, cars. And so if you replace the technology with something that isn't using fossil fuels, that is your problem solved. Now,

I would say within that, I've tried to communicate this and variously get into trouble for it, but let me try. I made a, there was a national newspaper headline that said net zero Tsar struggled with her electric vehicle. So let me just say that's not what I was saying. What I was talking about in the story beneath that headline was that adopting new technologies in itself requires change.

It doesn't require changing how you live once you get used to them. Warm house, you're driving a car, but they are different and you have to A, believe the evidence-based technology is worth your investing in, isn't going to cost you loads of money, isn't going to be too difficult. And secondly, you have to work out how to use it. Now, the story that I told was I hadn't driven in years and we moved back to a rural area with our two small children and we got an electric vehicle and it was cheap

and very efficient. We were very happy with the electric vehicle and we just forgot to plug it in one night because it was, you know, busy after we'd moved. And as a consequence, we didn't have enough charge on it to go and get our children from nursery who, because of the nature of childcare in the UK, were like 20 minutes away, which is the closest nursery we could get. And we had to get my father-in-law to go and get them

who immediately made fun of us because apparently he'd been waiting for us to forget to charge the car from the second that we moved in. And we did it once, we've never done it again. The car is very reliable. We've driven it very long distances. It's been brilliant. But I tell that story because even an informed audience when you're busy and you've got something new and you have to learn new habits, it can take time. And I think that's it's fine to acknowledge that that in itself is change. And that in itself can be a barrier to people worrying about how they deal with that. The outcome was fine. My

children, if anything, just got extra cake that night from their grandfather. But like, it's a useful story, I hope. And similarly, we've got family that have got heat pumps, and it's taken them a while to understand that they just, they're slightly different from a gas boiler. You tend to have them on constantly rather than turning on an up and down for a peak. You don't turn them up for a cold day. They're just different. And I think that is a kind of change, even in the technology choices. 75 % of the...

change we're expecting at household level comes from the choice to get a heat pump when your boiler expires and the choice to get an electric vehicle when your car expires. So it's a big chunk of what we're expecting. The remainder is more behavior change. And just on the behavior change side, again, there we've tried to make it about choice and be a bit realistic about what people will do. And so the two big things within that are diet and flying, bluntly.

And for diet, what we've assumed is not putting people off meat by prescribing their access to it or making it more expensive or some other thing or kind of on the other end, forcing farmers to give up livestock. What we've done is follow existing trend lines for diet and try and push them a bit by making alternatives more accessible and tastier and cheaper. And we think that will be enough. And so

you know, a 10 % reduction in meat over the last decade does not feel that ambitious to extend out. And we haven't also looked into different demographics and we know younger people are eating less meat. So it is expecting a change, but it's pretty much in line with like health advice and other trend lines. So again, Hannah, to your question, it doesn't feel like something that challenging for people though it is a choice. Flying is the one where it's hard to explain the approach that we've taken.

But again, it relies on sort of prices and choice more than prescription.

Rob: I suppose we are entering a different phase of climate, right? And what has seen to be quite sort of steady measured environment in which all of this work has been going on is definitely different now for anybody who's following stuff that's happening in the US. How do you interpret what's going on this kind of new vibrations in the global sense?

Well, one answer is to lean heavily into the energy transition, you know, the improved economics for a lot of this stuff, because whilst it is true that it's a much harder environment in terms of geopolitics, and honestly, I think people, everyone is a bit weary after a global pandemic and a long and ongoing kind of challenging period in the economy.

I mean, people are worried about climate change, actually. I really think they are when you ask them, they really care about it. But what happens in challenging times is it drops from being in the UK a top three issue to being a top five issue. And other things come above it like cost of living or, and I…. or geopolitics, security. And I think that's fine. like, I think the reality is like, that's how all of us think we're trying to, you know, live

often in our own small way and it's hard to think beyond the end of the day, let alone in 30 years time. I don't know if you've got kids, but I find it almost impossible to imagine my children in 30 years time. They're so immediate.

Rob: Yeah, same.

Emma: And so the good news is, think underneath that is the economics of the energy transition are such that people will do some of this stuff anyway. People will buy electric vehicles because they are cheaper than an internal combustion engine.

time.

by the 2030s. We will be doing some of this stuff just because that's the sensible thing to do. On the wider, what does this time mean? The merit of having a climate change committee is we are the medium to long-term people. So I get asked the question all the time at the moment, like, are you worried about net zero? Are you worried about climate change? And actually, I was much more worried about the kind of political mood.

The positioning, the framing, the enthusiasm for net zero in my last job because I was trying to move a lot of private investment into the UK, largely for things like renewables or batteries or electric vehicles. And investors read headlines and they're very short term people. Or can be, unless you're a pension fund. So there's a, like the immediacy of what's going on right now is actually much less relevant for the climate change committee because our job is what does 2038 look like?

I'm living my life at the moment 12 years ahead and in 12 years I don't know what the world will be and the point of our body is to try and help politicians keep an eye on that long-term thinking. And what I do know is it won't look like it is today. And the purpose of our analysis is to be right and useful and feasible regardless of what's going on in the kind of political context because it's so heavily driven by economic truth.

Rob: Emma, thank you so much.

Emma: Thanks, I'm just trying not to mess it up. That's the thing that you get to be as chief executive of the climate change committee. It's like the, I think all the time about the Peter Mandelson analogy of like carrying the Ming vase and at this time in this climate, in every sense climate, you know, it feels like quite a fragile thing sometimes. Hannah, by the way, I recommend your book to absolutely everyone. So this is nice for me.

Hannah: That’s very nice, thank you.

Emma: You're welcome.

Rob: So Hannah, from a data science perspective, how did you find Emma's interview?

Hannah: I broadly agree. Like I think if I look at the pathway in the latest carbon budget, I think there is this mix which I also struggle with but probably always end up on the same side as the CCC and Emma. Like I feel like a lot of the answers she was giving, I've given in some very, very similar format and I've basically said almost exactly the same thing. So almost like listening back to myself. But I think the most challenging part

there and I think in a broader climate conversation is around this like mix of pragmatism versus the kind of utopian world that we might want to see or someone might want to see, right? And I think it actually comes back to this like blend of technological solutions and behavioral change expectations. And as I said in the interview, like I'm very much on the kind of side of

I think the most credible way we decarbonise road transport is switching to electric vehicles. But that ultimately often does lead to this kind of framing of you're just looking for the technological fix, which I'm now comfortable with, but I think is a struggle in this kind of climate communication of like pragmatism around what is ambitious but might seem credible.

Rob: No, I get it. The bit that I see trickier, and I guess this is sort of coming from not just a business perspective, but also from a human perspective, is about how we decarbonise heating at home. It's refreshing to hear that when they do those panels that people do care about climate change. I absolutely buy that. But I think people are largely rational actors. They want to make decisions where they are better off, where upside for climate is a nice to have as a result.

Hannah: I think one of the most staggering statistics that I think illustrates how quickly a lot of this technology is moving and means that there needs to be frequent updates of messaging and how much this is going to cost is that they did the same exercise in 2020 right in the previous carbon budget and the latest carbon budget the net costs for the UK were 73 % lower

than they were projecting in 2020, right? And that's in four or five years. Like it feels like 2020 feels like yesterday for me. And the costs have shifted so dramatically in such a short period of time. And I think there is this always this challenge that is very, very hard for your worldview to keep up to date with how quickly a lot of this stuff is emerging. And the risk is that people are still talking about this in the way they did in 2015 or something, right? And we're in just a completely different world and it's moving pretty quickly.

Rob: So thanks for listening to our third season of Solving for Climate. We'll see you next week for another episode. Bye.

Hannah: Bye.

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This podcast is sponsored by xlinks.

Rob: So Hannah, what do the UK and Morocco have in common?

Hannah: Hopefully some intercontinental subsea cables for transporting renewable energy.

Rob: Well now that all the necessary preliminary permits have been granted in sunny Morocco for Xlinks Morocco to UK Power Project, then yes, it's just the final survey campaigns that are ongoing for the cable route through four major subsea canyons.

Hannah: And they've got some exciting people on board too. So Xlinks have pulled together a team of experts with a wealth of experience across big projects like the North Sea Link and Ouarzazte solar power station.

Rob: So if you want to know more about Xlinks Morocco to UK Power Project, just visit xlinks.co or you can check out their LinkedIn page by searching for Xlinks, which is all one word.