82: Countdown to the UK General Election: next steps for net-zero

A different episode format for you this time round - Matt and Fraser dissect the key highlights from a recent live panel discussion in Edinburgh, titled Countdown to the General Election: Scotland’s next steps to net-zero.

The next general election is widely expected to take place during 2024. Political parties are already spending significant time developing their manifestos, where energy and climate change are likely to feature heavily.

Scotland lies at the heart of this debate. Both Scottish and UK governments have been warned by the CCC that there is no clear delivery plan to meet its 2030 and 2040 interim carbon targets.

Featuring insights from:

Charles Hendry, President of BIEE and former UK Government Energy Minister (chair)

Vicky Kelsall, CEO Scottish Power Energy Networks

Chris Stark, Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee

Professor Janette Webb, chair in Sociology of Organisations, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh

Chris Birt of the Joseph Rowntree foundation

Episode Transcript:

Matt:  Hello, it’s Matt and Becky here from Local Zero. Just a quick note to say, before the episode starts, that from April 2024, Local Zero will be looking for some new funding to keep it going. 

Rebecca:  We never imagined, when we started three years ago, that we’d rack up tens of thousands of listens across 130 countries and with a website hosting over 80 episodes.  

Matt:  We’ve also met and worked with some incredible people including Chris Stark, Hannah Ritchie, Jim Skea, Hugo Tagholm and so many more. We’ve been able to showcase so many amazing local climate initiatives from all over the UK and far beyond. 

Rebecca:  But sadly, keeping the pod going costs money. If you or your organisation would like to partner up with the pod as we move into an exciting new chapter, then do reach out to us. You can contact us via our email LocalZeroPod@gmail.com. Alternatively, you can contact us on X (formerly Twitter) @LocalZeroPod or on LinkedIn directly to Matt Hannon or Rebecca Ford. 

Matt:  Finally, to help us in our quest to secure funding, we want to hear positive stories from listeners about how the pod has influenced your life and your work and we hope to do a very special episode on this too. 

Rebecca:  So please help us continue the fight against climate change and bring local climate action to doorsteps across the world. Thanks for listening and now back to the pod. 

[Music flourish] 

Fraser:  Hello and welcome to Local Zero with Matt and Fraser.  

Matt:  Yes, this is a slightly different format for Local Zero today. No live guests but we’re bringing you edited highlights of a really fascinating panel discussion I was involved in organising last month at the University of Edinburgh’s Business School. 

Fraser:  And it was a great discussion as well, Matt, wasn’t it? 

Matt:  It was, yes. We’ve recorded the whole event and we’ve picked out some chunks, juicy tidbits, from the event which was titled Countdown to the General Election: Scotland’s Next Steps to Net Zero. This is to give a flavour of what was nearly a two-hour session and in this episode, we’ll play out those clips and have a chat about them amongst ourselves and give a bit of thought to the themes that come through. 

[Music flourish] 

Fraser:  Certainly, lots and lots to get into and we’re looking forward to it. First up though, as always, just to say thank you so much for giving this episode of Local Zero a listen. Whether you’ve been on board for a while or this is your first time listening, please do subscribe to Local Zero wherever you get your podcasts. 

Matt:  And it’s always brilliant to get your feedback so please, please rate and review Local Zero in your podcast player. 

Fraser:  And if you want to get involved in the conversation yourself, you can check out our website, LocalZeroPod.com. There are transcripts there for all of our episodes as well for anyone who is interested in that. Please also follow us on X (Twitter) @LocalZeroPod and Mastodon at #LocalZeroPod. 

[Music flourish] 

Matt:  Hopefully, soon blue sky... it’s all splitting and disaggregating so we’ll bring that to you when it is primed. 

Fraser:  I don’t know where anyone is anymore. I’m just going to live outside in my garden for the rest of time... 

Matt:  It’s probably best. It’s a bit of a mess. 

Fraser:  ...and talk to nobody [laughter]. 

Matt:  Hey ho, we’re here. You’re listening to us. This is old-school audio and I just wanted to flag, Fraser, a really nice email we had from Alex Clayton. At the beginning of this pod and every other pod, a plea to you all to let us know how Local Zero has informed your lives and work and Alex has risen to the challenge and provided us with a lovely email. Alex, until recently, was Head of Geography at Winchester College and any points, Fraser, for a very famous alumnus of Winchester College? 

Fraser:  I’m going to pretend that we didn’t discuss this before the show, Matt, and say please enlighten us [laughter]. 

Matt:  A bit of rapid googling but our very own Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was a student there. Alex was very kind to say how important Local Zero was in terms of informing his work. He’s recently Head of Geography there but he’s also really involved in decarbonising Winchester College’s carbon footprint. They feed, for instance, 800-1,000 students every day. They’re looking at decarbonising their entire transport fleet and putting solar on-site. They have a really big challenge on their hands and it was so nice to hear from Alex about how Local Zero has informed their strategy there but also their curriculum. So thank you for that, Alex. That means a lot. 

Fraser:  It was a lovely email and, Alex, also if you do happen to know the prime minister personally, give him a shout. We have a couple of things we’d like to ask him. 

Matt:  Quite right. Now, any other news? I mean this has been a very newsworthy period. In fact, every week seems to be but as I understand it, Fraser, you became stuck and, hopefully, are now unstuck from one of the many recent storms that have flown through. So I hope you and the family are okay. 

Fraser:  Yes, we live right in the middle of rural Angus which was the red weather warning zone during Storm Babet (or Storm Babet if you’re from South of Hadrian’s Wall). It was an interesting experience over that time because we get hit with some kind of storm usually about this time most years but a couple of weeks ago, Storm Babet was a really, really bad one. The red warning came into force on a Thursday from 6 pm and we took the executive decision to leave and head for the in-laws on safer ground just before that came in. We managed to escape via the last open road from our house which was then closed for about four days and got back to minimal damage. Power was off and wifi was off but we didn’t have any sort of flood damage, thankfully. Around about us, we’re maybe ten miles South of Brechin which, as you’ll have seen on the news, got hit really, really badly. Yeah, it was a challenging one. Did it affect you, Matt, really down in Glasgow at all? 

Matt:  Not so bad, thankfully. As you say, I think it was the East Coast mainly but I was travelling back yesterday in some pretty dicey weather through the Highlands coming back from an event up at Trees For Life in Dundreggan which is, basically, 10-15 minutes Northwest of Loch Ness. It just seems this autumn has been three or four days of quiet followed by a blast of vile weather. Now, as we speak and as we record, there is another storm smashing the Channel Islands so, hopefully, any listeners there have managed to get away unscathed. I do think this is another example of this shifting baseline of expectation with regard to climate change and how we assume bad things are going to happen in autumn and winter now. It’s not just those seasons either but we’re starting to have to adjust to this. I remember growing up, Fraser, and I was born in 1987 so the Great Storm of ’87 happened outwith my consciousness. That was often framed as a once-in-a-generational event. Now, this doesn’t feel so once in a generation or once every few years. I do hope this fuels an appetite for action because it is catastrophic when it hits our homes and workplaces. 

Fraser:  It is and I think I would say around these parts like Angus, to start with, there was a bit of a narrative of – ‘Oh, we get this every year. It’s fine,’ but then you have a thousand homes that have never flooded before which are now a few feet underwater. You have businesses having to close that might not reopen again. You have roads that are ruined. You have rivers that have burst their banks and you’re talking millions to repair them in some cases. It’s worth saying as well that it wasn’t just Storm Babet. We’ve had pretty much constant, heavy rain since then as well. It’s just not technically a storm at this moment in time. That lasting legacy and the aftershock have been just as bad in terms of road closures, in terms of businesses getting out and doing stuff and in terms of people getting out of their houses. These are people who are stuck miles away in the glens with very limited resources or capacity to get out. 

Matt:  It seems to come hot on the heels after extremely warm and dry periods. On the one hand, you’re kind of swivelling from drought warnings to flood warnings. For any listeners out there affected, I hope you’re okay. I think today really is about digging into a discussion that talks about how we deal with these issues around climate change as part of the forthcoming General Election; so really trying to frame these concerns in a more positive light. We have an opportunity, I think, to put in place some of the foundations to tackle this in the UK and beyond. We had some fantastic panellists who were able to shed light on this. So just a reminder that this is a different format than usual and rather than having live guests, we’re going to grab a few selected clips and talk through these. I think it’s worth noting who was on the panel, Fraser. The event was chaired by a colleague of mine through the British Institute of Energy Economics, the former Energy Minister during the UK Coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, Charles Hendry. He has a wealth of experience in how this works. We also then had Chris Stark, Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), who has been a guest on the pod before all the way back in early 2021. I couldn’t name the episode number but... 

Fraser:  No. Before it was cool. 

Matt:  ...bonus marks if you can [laughter]. He was then joined by Guy Jefferson who is Chief Operating Officer for Scottish Power Energy Networks. There was Professor Jan Webb who is chair of Sociology of Organisations and she works at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. Finally, there was Chris Birt who is one of the directors at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and in a former life, was Head of the Policy Unit for Nicola Sturgeon. His work at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is very much around fuel poverty, poverty in general and how we can support low-income households to live happier, healthier lives basically. That last point, Fraser, I think has pervaded much of the discussion around the cost of net zero. So keep your powder dry because we’re going to come on to that. Just to note, the event started with a ten-minute introduction from Chris Stark. We’re going to cut a few of his points there and reflect on those and I think we’re also hoping to make the uncut version of the event available as well. So for any of you wanting to dig a little deeper, that will be available in your feed but for now, let’s begin with clip one. These are some words from Chris Stark. 

[Music flourish] 

Chris Stark:  My summary of the political context that we have at the moment is that we have probably seen the sugar-rush period for net zero come and go now and that real drive for corporates and countries to sign up to net-zero pledges. It’s been really tremendous to be part of that period but we’re now in what you might call the buyer’s regret phase I think. I think that’s inevitable. To some extent, I actually think it’s desirable. We’ve got to get to reality and real steps on how we deliver net zero but, of course, this is the point when you really need political leadership. That’s the point really for this next election. We need a government that is willing to put its shoulder to the wheel on decarbonisation. It, of course, needs to do so while acknowledging the real costs and the real practical barriers to be overcome in all of that but that is political leadership and that’s what must come. That is what we didn’t get from the prime minister a few weeks back. There is a very different version of Rishi Sunak’s speech that he gave in Downing Street on net zero that would make those very same points I think but also embrace the enthusiasm that we need for that transition to happen because, frankly, it’s worth it. It’s worth it for the country. You will like it when you get there. That would have been a speech I think that would have carried a lot more of us along with him on some of the tougher points about the need to be pragmatic in the near term. We did not get that speech. 

Matt:  So, Fraser, Chris there suggesting we didn’t get the speech we needed if we were to be looking for some political leadership around net zero and climate change. The speech that he is referring to is the speech given by our prime minister on 20th September which involved a set of delays to key policies, whether that’s the phase-out of internal combustion engines, boilers and all the rest. Is Chris on the money here? If we do need political leadership, what does that look like? 

Fraser:  I think he’s bang on the money. I do. I don’t necessarily know that I agree with the buyer’s regret point. I don’t think we necessarily regret it. I think we’re swithering a little bit but I think we’re beyond that, to be honest.  

Matt:  You may have to unpack ‘swithering’ even for me who is somewhat integrated [laughter] into the Scottish vernacular now. 

Fraser:  Okay, swithering means that we’re kind of flip-flopping a little bit back and forward saying, ‘Okay, we understand we need to do this. We’ve come so far in our commitments to this but now the problems have become really knotty and we actually have to solve them.’ I think that’s where we are. I don’t think it’s necessarily buyer’s regret. I think it’s an understanding of the magnitude of the problem and the complexity of the problem which, as Chris then goes on to highlight, is a good thing because now we can get into the actual stuff we need to be dealing with. I think the point on political leadership is bang on. This is where direction ultimately has to come from at this stage because we have a lot of disparate commitments. Whether you knock those commitments back five years here or ten years there, that does have an impact in terms of when people are looking at you saying, ‘What is your position on this?’ But a really, really easy way to counteract the backlash, even if you do want to slow a couple of things down, is to make clear that commitment and to show that leadership, whether that’s to industry to say we’re committing to heat pumps over hydrogen, for argument’s sake, or we’re committing to bringing 10,000 jobs from the production of electric vehicles to the UK. That kind of thing helps whether the prime minister wants to acknowledge that or not. A lot of this is about knowing there is an election coming up but whether you want to acknowledge that or not, what we hear time and time when we talk to people in this sector is that leadership and vision will get us there at this point. The people working in the industry, academia and communities on the ground understand these problems inside and out now. We need to be pulling together in the same direction to solve them and that’s what I think we’re missing. 

Matt:  I think the point Chris said there is that he could have had a very different speech and he was kind of pointing, in my view, to some of the underlying principles. In fact, if you read the transcript of Sunak’s speech, he makes the point, basically... I’m paraphrasing here that there are some very difficult decisions to be made. There will be costs incurred. The conclusion he draws from that is that we need to step back, go a bit slower and be a bit more tentative. You could make the same point and say let’s be honest about the costs but let’s be honest about the benefits... 

Fraser:  Of course. 

Matt:  ...and let’s stay on this. Let’s stand firm. I think that was Chris’ point and an absolutely critical point for the forthcoming General Election and the manifestos. We’ve got another snippet which I think feeds neatly into this point around the policy changes and whether these amount to much and, indeed, whether this is more of a change in politics rather than policy. 

Chris Stark:  Let me now turn to what he said in more specifics. We, in my institution, are trying to act, as Charles says, as the independent body that looks at these things and we did that with his speech. We looked at the content of that and we tried to run the numbers on that. We also wrapped into that analysis some of the other things that have happened over the summer and there are some surprising results from that perhaps. When we wrapped together his speech with the wider developments that we saw over the summer, notably including a failed offshore wind option but also some really positive stuff... we’ve got a major new package of support for green steel production in Wales at Port Talbot. We’ve got a new mandate on auto manufacturers to produce more electric vehicles which is now being implemented. When you wrap that together with what the prime minister had in his speech, it’s basically a score draw. The impact that comes out of all that in terms of future emissions trajectory is that there is not much change at all. He relaxed the consumer signal on EVs and moved that date from 2030 to 2035. He removed, more importantly, the obligation that he was planning to implement on landlords (outside of Scotland, of course) to make their rental properties more energy-efficient for their tenants and he shifted some of the phase-out dates for fossil-fuel boilers. The net effect of all that is effectively no change from where we were when we made our last assessment in June. That’s to say, basically, we’re still off-track pretty substantially. So no worse than before is probably the best thing I can put around that. 

Matt:  What Chris goes on to talk about is that this may be a change in policy which doesn’t amount to a hill of beans essentially in terms of the actual emissions changes but it means everything in terms of politics. That’s the frame of net zero as a cost for households and, crucially, something that folk should be sitting around the dinner table being concerned about as a cost – not a benefit but as a cost. 

Chris Stark:  Let me make a distinction between policy and politics. In policy terms, the prime minister hasn’t changed much but in political terms, he has changed everything. He characterised net zero, effectively, as a sort of threat to household budgets as a cost to be managed and something that people require protection from. That, for me, is going to narrow the politics. I think that is a mischaracterisation of where we are on the economics of it, certainly. That narrowing of politics is important because that will affect all the political parties. Labour, SNP, the Tories, of course, and even the Lib Dems and the Greens are going to have to think twice about offering that kind of full-throttle support that we might need for policies for net zero. We do need a lot of policy to hit net zero and the path to net zero. That, for me, is my greatest regret in the prime minister’s speech in that he’s now made it more difficult for those policies to come through. Maybe I’ll make an additional point which is that I fear that we are, again in a sense, leading the world on this. In terms of world leadership, indeed, we are showing that again and this time in a much more destructive way on the climate issues. There is a global audience that listened very attentively to what the prime minister said in Downing Street. We have a cousin organisation in Canada and today, I spoke to the chief executive of that organisation today. They are making an announcement today that’s similarly about softening the targets and mentioned the fact that the UK is doing that. So you’re seeing that leadership playing out in the wrong way, of course. That is, to put it mildly, a matter of some regret. 

 
Matt:  This really matters just before a General Election. Fraser, in your sense of this, do you see the politics and the weather vane of politics around net zero changing and how do we navigate this given that we do need to tackle climate change and deliver lasting, meaningful climate action? 

Fraser:  I think that’s a fair assessment. I don’t know that the wider politics has shifted on it. If you look at any of the opinion polls that have come out since, public opinion very much sits the same way as it does but people are thinking a lot more about what it might cost and where the benefits might be. I think this is what is really, really important here and I think it’s particularly important for Labour because the Conservatives have identified what they think is a useful dividing line for the election. I don’t think that holds sway when you talk to people generally. People understand that we have to take action on climate. People understand that a lot of that action will be quite radical and support is there for it. I think what we need to see is rather than getting mired in a discussion about cost, because there will be some cost associated with it, of course, it’s about shifting into the conversation about the opportunity of tackling climate. This is where we’re at now. In terms of the targets that we have set, the signals just now might not push us back on 2050 but it means that progress is likely to slow. It also means, as we discussed before, that the actors and the stakeholders that we need to move in that direction like industry and the wider sector don’t have any clarity and don’t have any real sense of ambition or urgency which is where we’re at. Climate change isn’t going to wait around for us to decide this is now as cost-effective as it ever will be. 

Matt:  The unspoken part of this is that the slower you go now, the faster you have to go later because we still need to get to that point. 

Fraser:  That’s it. We have the analysis already but all analysis shows that the longer we wait, the more expensive it gets. Imagine you’re a smoker and you smoke a hundred cigarettes a day, that’s a lot of cigarettes. If you smoke a hundred cigarettes a day and you go to the doctor who says, ‘Right, you need to stop smoking cigarettes now or you will die very, very shortly.’ You say, ‘Okay, I’m going to smoke fifty cigarettes a day instead.’ It’s still going to have a massive impact on your health but it’s just going to take longer, be more expensive and more painful by the time you actually get to stopping if you get to stopping in time. So it might not knock back those targets but every day that we wait, the price of taking that action is going up because the impacts of climate change are going up as well. I don’t even think of it as grabbing the nettle. It’s versus if you seize the opportunity now for that big transformation, you can do a whole lot more in the process. 

Matt:  We’ll come on to that as a later clip about framing this as an opportunity and not a cost. Yes, the costs will be there and I think that the next clip we want to point to really is about those households that are already experiencing huge burdensome costs of day-to-day living, whether that be food, rent or fuel and, of course, their energy bills. After those initial words from Chris Stark, we broke into a panel discussion and there was a big focus on fuel poverty not least because, as we speak, bills are expected to be riding to at least twice what they were before the invasion of Ukraine. We heard from Chris Birt of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation which is an anti-poverty charity. He starts to talk about the pressures that households are under in terms of cost and starts to ask questions about how climate action can address some of those broader structural issues. 

Chris Birt:  We are essentially in a very divided world admittedly. We are seeing these modern systems of energy production and use now offering more than just climate benefits. They’re offering security and greater prosperity to those countries in the world that choose to develop them as well as these climate benefits. I think that is what matters, ultimately. We need fewer statements like the prime minister’s a couple of weeks ago because, frankly, for a government to stand on the steps of Downing Street, or any steps, and to say, ‘We need to take a step back on our climate ambitions because people are struggling to get by’... we published a report earlier this week that showed that 4 million people in the UK currently experience destitution and a million of those are children. Now, a decent chunk of those are due to the cruelties of the immigration system which I’ll leave for another day but a large chunk of that is caused by government policy over the last few years, particularly to wither away the Social Security system so that when we have the outrageous spike in energy bills which we saw over the last couple of years, that is punishing. Fuel poverty stats basically broke over that period because of the outrageous cost which was put onto people. I take, not with a mountain of salt, warnings from the present government that net zero could add to the pressures that households are under. They are causing the pressures that households are under. 

Matt:  We’re now going to hear a little bit more from Chris Birt who starts to connect these systemic issues around poverty and how climate change and addressing climate change, whilst also dealing with other issues such as the inefficiency of our housing stock and our energy bills and shrinking those, can effectively deal with multiple problems at once. We’ll hear that just now. 

Chris Birt:  We need more social housing in Scotland. We are, I think, in the foothills of a housing emergency and it starts in this city. We need more affordable social housing. We hear from families all the time who have moved into new, energy-efficient, warm, cheap housing which ticks both of those boxes. I think the Scottish Government are a wee bit stuck on the heat in buildings transition. Partly, that is because it’s big and it’s difficult and partly, that’s due to restrictions on their budget. Again, that’s why we need to have these grown-up discussions about this transition. We need to prioritise spend. At the minute, I think we do too much general support to people. We should be targeting that support at those who need it the most and, frankly, those households who are going to have to bear this cost at some stage will do it anyway and they can afford it. 

Matt:  There’s a couple of things happening here, Fraser, that I’d like to get your perspective on. I think that the first is about ensuring that net zero is just and we’ve talked about this many times before about making sure that it’s socially equitable and really targeting support to those that most need it. But something else came out, not just from what we’ve heard there but from the broader panel discussion, was about how climate action often should be framed as the second objective of every policy. The first objective is something else that resonates in somebody’s life, whether that’s housing, healthcare, work or employment and actually, the foundations of that policy are also about decarbonisation. I just wanted to get your take on that. Did you recognise a lot of what Chris was saying there? 

Fraser:  Yeah, absolutely and it’s good to hear it reflected back specifically from an anti-poverty charity as well because I think that embeddedness is really important. If you just give me one second, that’s the sound of me just dusting off my soapbox to get up on top of it. If we could edit that to make it sound more impressive, that would be great. This point that we can’t do net zero too quickly because it might cost households on the lowest incomes I think is so short-sighted as to be offensive in a lot of ways. Number one, that’s because net zero and things like increasing fuel poverty are not separate issues. Energy prices have skyrocketed because we’re so dependent on fossil fuels before you even get to the impact that fossil fuels have on the planet. That’s unequivocally hammered lowest income households most sharply and caused fuel poverty to rise. So straight away, the net-zero conversation and not taking action on net zero up until now has been a big driver of poverty and inequality in this country and around the world, especially if you take the global outlook. The flip side of that, and this is what Chris is getting into in a second point, is that net zero is also the biggest opportunity that we’ve had, I wholeheartedly believe, to address some of those historic social and economic injustices in this country as well. We’re at a formative moment in history. I don’t want to get too grand about it but it really, really is and everything is up for grabs like housing, energy, land, transport, economy, industry and agriculture. Anything and everything in between is changing and has to change to combat the climate crisis. We can absolutely change those things in a way that tackles poverty and inequality and that all has wider benefits as well. That’s things like insulating houses to bring down emissions or making them more efficient as Chris mentioned. That brings down bills for people. It also reduces strain on the NHS because people aren’t living in cold, damp homes and getting respiratory issues on the scale that they have done before. Clean, cheap, home-grown renewables feed through onto bills. That also creates industrial opportunities and also jobs, etcetera. The chance to reshape society and reconfigure things with net zero is enormous. I think that’s where the focus of this conversation really, really needs to be. You can talk about it being a cost and you can get lost in that sort of who pays, who wins and who loses. That’s all important. These knotty issues are important but let’s not pretend that somehow net zero automatically has to harm lower-income people or those already struggling because it’s nonsense. 

Matt:  I think your point there is that everything is up for grabs.  

Fraser:  Of course, it is. 

Matt:  I really like that because this is a moment of transformational change and the question is what change do we want? It’s not just about tackling climate because we sure as hell know that there are other problems out there and the majority of households are feeling those. I think the question is are we going to take this opportunity to implement lasting, seismic change and which political parties are going to make that point in the General Election? What I’m sensing from a lot of the parties is that they’re flagging the problems, or the opposition parties are, but identifying the solutions as quite incremental rather than transformational but you don’t get to net zero without transformational change and you don’t deal with issues such as what we’ve heard there in terms of poverty and housing without transformational change. So unless the manifesto is transformational and it’s focused, for me, it’s wide of the mark. We’ve got a few more to get through and on that note, you mentioned industry and we hear a little bit more about the opportunities in terms of jobs, industry, skills and how net zero could be a real catalyst for this and could really birth a new economy. 

Chris Stark:  I think it would be a grave error for the UK now to step off this ambitious plan that it’s had for some time and go slow on this transition because it’s the economies that decarbonise fastest that will benefit first from this transition. The production lines for EVs will be built in the next five years. If you’re not one of the places that have those production lines, you will not have jobs in the automotive sector. So it is about moving quickly on some aspects of it at least. The US gets that, the EU gets that and China certainly spotted all this a long time ago but so too have the Gulf States. This is going to be interesting COP because they’re going to confront some of these issues. The issues of what the future looks like after we reach that peak will be front and centre in Dubai.  

Guy:  We are finding ourselves more and more having to go outside the UK to get the people that we need which we don’t want to do because it’s expensive and those people are not what I would call sticky. They’ll come, they’ll help us deliver in the short term but they won’t be here for the longer term and this is a long-term issue. This is not going to be solved in a couple of years. It gives us a good start and gets us moving but we need to develop our own people. So some sort of underwriting or some sort of skills and manifesto to deliver this would be good from my perspective. 

Matt:  The first voice you heard there was Chris Stark talking about the need to capitalise quickly on these economic opportunities to make the most of them and the second there was Guy Jefferson from Scottish Power Energy Networks talking about their capacity and ability to hire many of the people that they need. Actually, Guy’s point elsewhere in the panel was very much about some of the success that they’ve had in terms of hiring individuals but their question mark about whether they can do that every year, keep expanding and bringing in more people and how sticky those people are. Really, it’s the sticky jobs we want. Whilst we’re talking about a low-carbon transition or net-zero transition, we don’t want transitional jobs. We want as close as damn it to permanent and long-lasting jobs. Fraser, what are your initial reactions to that? 

Fraser:  I think that’s a really, really interesting point. I liked Chris’ point that things are happening now, people are gearing up supply chains in industries to make this transition and if you don’t move, you end up left behind as a country which hasn’t seized this opportunity. I think that would be a real tragedy but that point about sticky jobs is interesting. As everyone knows I’m sure at this point, I live in the Northeast of Scotland and I’ve got friends and family who work in oil and gas. If you’re thinking of someone who is aware that they’re in an industry that is probably going to have to phase out if not soon then in the next few decades and you’re looking at the jobs that we’ve created so far in renewables, they’re not there at any scale or certainly not the scale that we envisaged they would be. As you rightly say, Matt, and as Guy alluded to, they’re transitional jobs. They’re not longstanding jobs. So are you really tempted at this moment in time to make that big jump to retrain for a whole new industry, appreciating that some of the skills are transferrable, into jobs that might only be temporary even if that is a few years? I think that’s a really, really important point. It harks, again, all the way back to that idea of vision and really accelerating that action to make sure that those jobs are in place, the skills and the training opportunities are in place at scale but to give those signals to industry that we are serious about getting this done. I don’t know, Matt. What was your reflection? 

Matt:  Yeah, I completely agree. As we record this, I’ve just come back from a green finance summit in the Highlands of Scotland and listening to a number of big investors and their take on investing in nature-based solutions; so outwith energy but very much about land use. I can’t tell you how much the signals that we got from our prime minister in September have affected their thinking. Industries are not born overnight. There was a lot about expectation setting and direction setting. We’re not going to have these giga-factories of electric vehicle assembly and manufacture in the UK unless we have a plan. That plan really must be built on a bedrock of certainty and good faith. The good faith point is really important. Industry doesn’t like to U-turn and if you’re pointing in a direction and they start to gear up towards that (no pun intended on the EVs), you can’t then pull the rug from under them otherwise, you lose faith and then you lose momentum. That’s really dangerous. I think we’re straying into that territory now. So it’s about opportunity but it needs to be captured. We’re now going to move on to something entirely different [laughter] looking at councils and local authorities. We hear from Jan Webb, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, who has done a lot of work... in fact, I’ve worked with Jan over the years on the role of local authorities in supporting local energy and climate action. She’s really trying to reflect here on many of the net-zero targets that we’ve heard from councils and we’ve reflected on that extensively in the podcast here and whether that is matched with the resources that are being made available. If not, what does that mean? 

Jan:  We’re up to around 80% now of our local authorities that have declared climate emergencies and have produced plans to meet 100% of their energy use from renewable sources or clean sources. Some have in terms of extremely ambitious timetables which I think are set perhaps without really understanding what might be involved there. They don’t have the means or the resource backing to do that. Nevertheless, we see some very ambitious and very effective innovations typically around some of our combined authorities but also around cities like Bristol where there is considerable investment in more localised and tangible, perhaps, energy resources which draw people in locally as well to that debate. There is also I think a problem of trust which is understandable given the history of relationships between our central governments – I would say plural there – and local governments. That is not helping us in terms of creating that journey towards net zero across our different scales of government. 

Matt:  So there are two things happening here. I think the first is the erosion of funding. We can point to various studies, for instance, from the Institute for Government that highlights how, year on year since the Coalition government, local authorities have received real-term cuts to their budgets which then hollows them out in terms of their operational spend, i.e. the staff that they have to do stuff, but also the capital spend, i.e. what they can invest in to build things out. Jan then points at the end about the erosion of trust and that this may be a spillover effect from an erosion of trust in central government. I think that has been well-documented about various issues that have fallen out, whether that be from Covid or the cost of living crisis and whether that’s starting to affect local authorities. I certainly have seen one or two pieces that have suggested that whilst local authorities, once upon a time and not that long ago, were framed as one of the most trusted organisations and institutions, they’re starting to maybe be treated a bit more warily. So, Fraser, local authorities are where the rubber meets the road in terms of net zero. There are two potentially show-stopping issues here. 

Fraser:  Agreed. Wholeheartedly agreed. I don’t necessarily know that they’re separate issues in that it’s really hard to maintain strong public and community ties on a dwindling budget. That’s quite a difficult thing to do to keep up your outreach capacity and keep up that level of engagement that you might be used to before. We’ve done a lot of work at Regen as well with local authorities and we hear often about grand ambitions without the resources being in place... not just resources not being in place to match them but often resources falling by the wayside from central government. It’s true also that, in Scotland, local authorities have been developing their own Local Heat and Energy Efficiency Strategies at the direction of the Scottish Government. They’re moving on to plans now to actually get to implementing them and raising finance which is a really, really positive thing but it’s still a case that even with strong government direction, you really do need the resources to be able to match it. Another development, Matt, just quickly is that in the energy system, we’re starting to think more locally as well. Ofgem is moving towards what we’d call a Regional Strategic Planner which would bring local authorities, energy networks and the system operators together to shape these local authority plans and really think about putting them into action. That, objectively, is a positive step in my opinion. If you bring more democratic accountability to the energy system, you start to better support the implementation of those ambitious plans but the point will always fundamentally remain that if you don’t resource local authorities to deliver this and you give them all this responsibility without the resources, they’re going to struggle to do it. I’m assuming, Matt, that you hear similar in the work that you’re doing. 

Matt:  Yeah, quite right and whether they are Local Area Energy Plans across England, for instance, or the LHEES (Local Heat and Energy Efficiency Strategy) in Scotland, there’s no point in having a plan unless you can implement it. To implement it, you need to be resourced and trusted. So Jan, for me, hits the nail on the head and I think these are two key issues that need to be flagged in the next General Election. Give them the powers but back that up with some resources. So, Fraser, we’re coming to the end but before we do, there are a couple more pithy observations from Chris Stark that got a really warm welcome from the audience. The first is that the challenge we face in trying to tackle net zero could be handled easily enough if only we had the ambition to change things and the sort of ambition that the Victorians had as part of the Industrial Revolution. 

Chris Stark:  There’s a particular project I like in Glasgow. Sometimes we go out and visit Loch Katrine which is an amazing megaproject that the Victorians just decided to do which takes a dammed upper loch and takes this freshwater. I think the figure is that it drops half an inch a mile through sheer gravity and takes the freshwater to Glasgow. That was basically to deal with a cholera problem in Glasgow at the time because we needed Glasgow to make stuff. I don’t think the Victorians would have blinked at this net-zero transition because it’s not like it’s that difficult. It’s just that a lot of stuff needs doing and the quicker we get around and do it the better. 

Matt:  As I sit here, this glass of water is full of water that has fallen into Loch Katrine and has been transported 30-40 miles south. This idea that the Victorians had this degree of ambition to have got things done... do we need to be more Victorian, Fraser? I mean they weren’t perfect but they did get stuff done [laughter]. 

Fraser:  They weren’t perfect. I think the Conservatives have tried to be Victorian but it’s just on the wrong things [laughter] like the Victorians’ social policy and not modern-day, austerity-based net-zero economics. I think if we could flip the two of those, we might be on to something. 

Matt:  I find it quite refreshing hearing Chris saying we just need to get stuff done and then people will understand the benefits that flow from that.  

Fraser:  Victorians might have laughed at us messing about on net zero but their heads would have exploded if you showed them an iPhone. If we create a time machine, let’s not go all the way back. 

Matt:  Fair enough. Okay, we can borrow the best bits. The final clip is from Chris Stark again. The panel were asked about how to tackle issues about anti-data and anti-science, i.e. those who won’t be cajoled into action and a sort of railing against many of the issues that we’ve framed like climate breakdown being catastrophic which the science suggests. Really, we need to take a bit of inspiration about reframing that question and he points to a couple of stars from the world of music. 

Chris Stark:  One of the most impactful things I’ve seen in the last couple of years was a lecture that Brian Eno gave. Brian Eno, you might know, is a music producer but he’s a sort of a Renaissance Man. He’s done all sorts of things. The thing that stuck with me was what he said at the start of the lecture to a roomful of climate folk. He’s a climatey person himself and he said, ‘You’ve all got it wrong.’ He was at Imperial College with a bunch of engineers and people like me, wonks basically. He said, ‘We’ve collectively all it wrong. We think if only the analysis was done a bit harder, then we’d get the movement to change. The point is that the idea comes first and then people look for the analysis.’ We’ve slightly got that wrong I think so we’ve been working really hard at developing all this evidence of how bad climate change is, which is all there, and how easily the transition could happen if only these policies were in place but we’ve slightly forgotten to put the idea in about why we want to do this in the first place. What’s the exciting thing or the nugget that people are interested in? They will then seek that data and that analysis and it will support the things that we need to do. I’m all for that. I think that is the way to do it. I’ll bring in another artist if I can. Björk is my favourite artist of all and she says a similar thing which is to imagine a future and now be in it. That’s exactly the same sort of thing. This isn’t some woke rubbish from someone like me. I think that is the thing; that we have the data to show you what that future looks like but you’ve got to want it. I think that’s the key thing, back to the story of politics, that we need leadership to demonstrate what that might look like so that people have something to strive for. 

Matt:  So you’ve heard it here first, Fraser and listeners; the Eno/Björk hypothesis that we must be more positive and creative in our visioning of the future and that is where we should throw our evidence at. I take the point that often when you start to doom and gloom, people glaze over. For all of his flaws, which were multiple, our former Prime Minister Johnson was very boosterish around the values of net zero. Maybe some of that has been lost and maybe we need to be a little bit more positive about what the vision holds. So, Fraser, how do we go about this? Do you agree with the Eno/Björk hypothesis? Are you on board? 

Fraser:  I’m on board with it. I do wonder how much of a problem it is that the Head of the CCC’s favourite artist is Björk. I wonder if that’s a culture war in a nutshell [laughter]. I’m only kidding. We love Chris Stark on this podcast. I think that’s right and, again, it’s something that we hear. I find that if I’m talking to people in communities – we even see it online and in media – you can do all the doom stuff... the climate crisis is important to communicate but that vision of what we’re working towards is critically important. I think that the opportunity piece, and we’ve mentioned this before, is a real lightning rod for support and mobilisation even if it is just to get people enthused about the transition. As much as we’re doing it out of necessity, it’s a huge opportunity. Speaking back about the Election framing, which this conversation was originally about, I think that opportunity and that vision is a massive open goal for Labour, in particular, but for either party if they want to seize it going forward. What’s your final takeaway, Matt? 

Matt:  Just that I think all of our leaders of political parties should settle down with curtain drawn... log burner on... 

Fraser:  Where is this going? [Laughter] 

Matt:  ...knee-deep into some Eno and Björk and then write their manifestos. That’s all I think I have to add. It was a really fascinating panel and I really enjoyed listening to that and chewing the fat with you. Thank you to all of you for listening to Local Zero. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, the single best thing you could do right now is to suggest it to people you think might like it. Why don’t you copy the link to listen and send a few WhatsApps? 

Fraser:  If you’re feeling generous and if you listen on Spotify, please do take a second to rate our podcast five stars, of course. Any less is a personal affront [laughter] and if you listen on Apple, please leave a review as well. It really does help us climb the charts and get the word out. 

Matt:  Yeah, and for the extremely keen, we will put a more or less complete uncut version of the British Institute of Energy Economics and Edinburgh University panel discussion that you’ve heard snippets from online in the next few days. It will be a long listen and a deep dive but it’s definitely worth it. 

Fraser:  And if you haven’t already, please take a minute to find and follow us on X (Twitter) @LocalZeroPod and also email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com if you want to share some longer thoughts. Remember, do just get in touch with us to say why you enjoy Local Zero and how you’ve used it in your work as we strive to secure funding to keep everyone’s favourite local climate action pod going but for now, thank you once again and goodbye. 

Matt:  Goodbye. 

[Music flourish] 

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Transcribed by 

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