Chris Stark – thank you for all your immensely important work with the CCC. But I’m totally non-plussed by “you can still fly off on holiday each year, and you can have a steak if you want to. There’s not a huge shift here”.

I’d genuinely welcome an explanation so I understand. The message to the people consuming this news sounds rather like “no need for behaviour change, technology fix is going to allow life to carry on as it is – no pain, all the gain”.

The Telegraph lost no time in getting the extended quote in an article, along with many other news outlets:
“if you’re a person going about your day-to-day life in Britain right now, I don’t think your day-to-day life will be that different in 2050 when we hit net zero.
You will still be driving your car, you’ll still be warming your house, you’ll have a job which is probably very similar in its nature to the one you have now.
I wonder if the way into this is to say this is just the normal course of things, it’s not frightening, you can still fly off on holiday each year, and you can have a steak if you want to. There’s not a huge shift here.”

The article goes on to say:

He said he was not dismissing the need for change, but suggested the idea of a big shift had been pushed too hard, when it was just going to play out in a “much more normal way”.

Meanwhile, Chris Stark explains outside of this article:

“Net Zero as a term has been captured by culture warriors”
“The benefits to achieving Net Zero for this country are immense”
What did you make of THAT speech last autumn by the PM (rowing back on Net Zero): “My honest answer to that is that I think it set us back” … “The diplomatic impact of that has been immense”

So rowing back on technology fix is the problem, while ignoring the role of behaviour change is not?

Honestly wanting to make sense of this as I feel as though I’ve lost the plot.

#climatechange

#flying

#eatingsteak

#BAU