Welcome to this afternoon’s session of the Energy Security and Net Zero Select Committee. This is the fourth session of the Committee’s inquiry on building support for the energy transition. We have a single panel today, which will explore the role of public institutions communicating the energy transition and countering misinformation and consider whether more should be done to tie the case for the transition to co-benefits such as improving health and protecting nature. Welcome to our panel, and if you would introduce yourselves briefly we will move into the questioning, starting with Emma.

I am Emma Pinchbeck. I am the chief executive of the Climate Change Committee.

I am Hugh Montgomery. I am professor of intensive care medicine at University College London and have a bunch of other roles but one is being co-chair of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change.

I am Eric Wolff. I am a professor at the University of Cambridge in climate science, but I am here in my capacity as the co-chair of the Royal Society’s Biodiversity, Environment and Climate Committee.

Thank you all very much indeed for being here and we look forward to your evidence. I will start with a question about the current state of Government communications about the energy and net zero transition. How well do you think the Government are communicating to the public about the rationale for the transition to clean energy on one hand and to net zero more broadly? Who would like to go first?

I think there are two issues. I do not think the Government are communicating about the threat of climate change. I can understand why that might be. We are told that climate change is a vote loser if you mention it and what I hear as a member of the public is energy security and bills but I do not hear threat of climate change. Perhaps that is something to address this afternoon. We do need to get that message front and foremost out there that the reason for this transition is the threat and it brings a raft of co-benefits: economic, military security and so forth as well, and health, but we must get the climate threat message out front and foremost in my view.

I agree with what was just said. I think that all of us, not just the Government, have taken the view that there was now a consensus that there was a need to do something about climate change and that the public were with us. Of course, that is quite shallow support from the public. They agree that climate change is a bad thing but not necessarily that they want to do anything about it. We have become a little bit tied up with this concept of net zero, which has become a jargony phrase rather than an explanation of the simple logic that if we do not reach net zero then climate carries on warming forever. One day we must meet net zero and it is not complicated. It should not be controversial. The date might be controversial, but the idea that we must reach net zero is a simple scientific fact.

Do we have a date?

It is not for me to say whether we should have a date because that is a policy question and not a science question.

Hang on a minute. You are here to give your opinion.

We have a date in the sense that under our international obligations we are supposed to keep climate change to below what would be dangerous, which has been defined by the Paris Treaty as well below 2°C. That implies for the UK a date of about 2050, but obviously a Government can take a view that they do not want to avoid dangerous climate change.

Okay. Emma, before I come to you, Hugh, should we have a date?

Yes, I think we absolutely should. I think the threat is very much worse than we are hearing articulated. Just the change in albedo, that issue of low altitude cloud and ice and snow reflecting heat back, that change has multiplied the radiative forcing we have seen in a matter of only the last four years, so we are leaping up to the equivalent of already 62 terawatts of power gain. We are at around 8.5 watts per square metre now, which was the high emission scenario, and things are running away as we see positive feedback loops. I think we should have one and not only should we have a date for it but we should have a trajectory for it as well. Thank you to Emma for the work that her team does because we need that. Having an aspirational target is a failing. I would go further. Thank you for the links that your team sent for previous evidence. I agree very much with Roger Harrabin that the term “net zero” is not understood by the public and is very largely unhelpful. We need to aim now for real zero and drawdown, and we should be setting some targets for that.

Thanks. Emma, how are the Government doing?

I think they have published their public participation strategy this morning, which you might ask us about in a bit, but what I thought I would do is say what we found during our research for the seventh carbon budget, which is that people do want proactive information from the Government and they want guidance in particular on some of the choices that they are going to make and for the Government to dispel any misinformation about low-carbon technologies. Interestingly, in the panels people did not often understand why they were being asked to adopt particular technologies such as the electric vehicle and make that connection to climate change. Then over and above that the deliberative process that we ran for the seventh carbon budget, this idea of panels where people have time to listen and question, where it is a two-way dialogue, not just a Government-to-the-public dialogue, has been very important. I think if you look across the social research and the evidence of people such as Professor Becky Willis, who I know has spoken to this inquiry, the most common recommendation from citizens that have engaged in processes like ours or like others, which are deliberative, are that there should be more processes like them and that the public needs to have more information about climate change. As a bit of a spoiler for the forthcoming adaptation advice in the spring, we have just run our citizens’ panel for the adaptation advice and it was stark that people did not understand that climate change impacts were not reversible and that they did not understand the science on climate. Once they had spent time through the process and speaking to experts they were very clear that other people needed to have that same experience and needed to have that information.

Should the Government be addressing misinformation more effectively?

Again I think I just said this but from the research we did it was a point that came back from the citizens’ panels. I think it is not just about addressing misinformation. It is about being clear about which are the choices that the Government want people to adopt. Our No. 1 one recommendation on communication is that the public said to us that at a household level they wanted to know that it was a heat pump that they were being asked to consider. Being vague about what choices were available was not helpful to them. They wanted a clear articulation of the benefits of those choices, so what it would mean for them with costs and bills, what it would mean for emissions reduction, what it would mean for wider benefits, and that again it should preferably be a deliberative process but also using trusted actors. It did not just have to be the Government but they thought the Government should be the driver for that conversation. Those are the things that we have said really matter. It is not just about correcting misinformation. It is about giving clear information and recommendations about particular choices that the Government think people should make. That came back very clearly from the public.

Hugh, I think you will probably have quite a lot to say about this.

I do. I think there are three elements to this. The first is information, misinformation and disinformation. There is the ignorance that we have heard about, with which I concur, and I think that occurs across the suite from the patients I might see on a ward right the way through to C-suites and people in the body politic. There is an astounding level of ignorance about the climate science, what it means, why it works, what they need to know. There is misinformation, which is lack of understanding, being communicated by various actors and then there is very clearly disinformation designed to derail particularly British policy and politics. We have had that made clear by the United Nations’ report by the United Nations Secretary General, by NATO reports for two years between 2022 and 2024 that there are state actors spreading disinformation. We know from what we understand of the psychology of disinformation that the best way of counteracting it is not to go retrospectively and fight the argument that has been put out, but to inoculate with information first. We need to be on the front foot and get people to understand it first and that makes them more impervious to disinformation from malign actors.

On your specific question, for sure we should all be countering misinformation and disinformation. I think scientists are one of the more trusted set of actors in this, so there is a particular focus on us to deal with misinformation. The Royal Society has been much more active in recent years in putting out statements about net zero and countering the idea that climate change is nonsense that was put out by a leader of another country recently. We still need to do more of that. I think it is probably a little hopeless to expect the public to really understand climate change, but I just think we need to get out that very simple message that until we, that is either the world or the UK, reach net zero we are still contributing to making the problem worse. I think that is a more effective way of presenting it than just saying net zero and thinking that they know what that means.

I will pick up the phrase “malign actors”, which you used here and you have touched on it, Eric, as well. We as a Committee have heard very recently about the very serious threat to oil tankers, LNG tankers, oil pipelines, gas pipelines, oil installations, gas-fired power stations from Russia if the war escalates. How much of the analysis should be about the energy security threat?

I personally think a lot should be for a bunch of reasons. First, it is very important, and on the malign actors I was referring to, I have no domain expertise in this—it is only secondary sources—but the United Nations and NATO did refer specifically to Russian-sponsored actors in spreading disinformation. Energy security is not just us generating our own means and having political liberty from others that might wish to force us down other lines because of our dependence on fossil fuels, but we know that distributed networks and distributed nets of energy generation provide energy security. We have seen that with the increase in the 1,500 megawatts reduction of energy by distributed renewables in Ukraine that has made Ukraine more resilient to Russian attack. It is very much harder to take out every single wind turbine and every single solar and every single battery. Those are good reasons for security to act on it but secondly it is a messaging issue. Actioning this issue of climate science has been cast as fluffy nonsense and a “nice to have” and a bit tree huggy as opposed to being hardcore, and I think sometimes when it is presented by actuaries, defence and intelligence and so forth, it is taken more seriously.

I was going to raise this as a separate point in the inquiry, but one of my observations about the previous sessions and indeed this one is that the energy transition is not wholly about net zero and the inquiry is about how to communicate the energy transition. I would say from my previous experience, which was 15 years in the private energy sector, that some of the best communicators in that world are the private businesses that must talk to the public about things such as their energy bills all the time. It is the energy regulator that must think about this when the price cap goes up, and some of the messages that were the most powerful for the public over the last 10 years were about things such as domestic energy security because of what we saw in the gas crisis. They are about understanding broader elements of energy including affordability and I think it would be important in this inquiry for you to catch some of that beyond how you communicate about net zero and climate because it is a slightly different framing and I think there are specialists in the energy sector rather than in the climate world.

Do you have anything to add, Eric?

I think that question is a little bit outside the remit of what science can do for us, which is my expertise. What science can do is assess in a non-judgmental way the different solutions, of which having a distributed energy system is one, and tell you how realistic it is. There are certainly things that can be asked of the science community to help make sure that the messages that are going out are all well-validated messages that chime with the facts.

Thank you very much. Lizzi Collinge has joined us just in time. Lizzi, we just had Professor Eric Wolff tell us that scientists are trusted, which I think is a topic that you are going to pursue.

Yes, I would like to pick up the role of scientists in communicating what is happening with the climate and potential solutions. It is a two-part question. First I would like to know what you all think the role of scientists is in the discussion around the energy transition, but I would also like to get your thoughts on the levels of scientific and mathematic literacy in the country and in Parliament to understand what is being said and your thoughts on the level of understanding of different types of clean energy in particular. I have two nuclear power stations in my constituency and I am very interested in people’s understanding of all the different types of technologies but particularly nuclear; for example, the fact that nobody in Fukushima died from radiation, which I think is not well known. I am interested in thoughts of the panel on that.

Obviously I would say this because I am representing the Royal Society. I think that science has a huge role in this question. We are apparently well trusted according to surveys, not according to me, perhaps more so than other communities. The science is involved not only in explaining why we need to get to net zero but also in exploring the possibilities of how we get to net zero. For example, the Royal Society has not only done reports about climate change but also in the last few years has done reports about the solutions, about battery technology, about the need for large energy storage perhaps through hydrogen, about whether net zero aviation is a reality or not, and so on. For all those things the expertise is there and ready to be used and people would feel better about the things they are being asked to do if they knew that they are going to work and the scientists have said that they are going to work. There was a follow-up question there that I now cannot remember.

I was wondering about the scientific literacy of the country and I think later on, Chair, there might be an opportunity to talk about the different ways in which people take in information. I was wondering about the scientific literacy of all the people and the ability to understand the evidence and how that is communicated.

We would very much like there to be greater scientific literacy, and the Royal Society does education programmes with preparing sections of syllabus about climate, for example, and engaging with schools. I do not honestly think that the basics of climate change are all that complicated and that people do not understand them. I think people need to understand the scientific method to know how it is that we have come to our conclusions, but I think they need to understand that method of evidence-based decision making in all areas of life, not just in climate but in economics and everything else. I think it is more to do with that idea of the use of evidence to come to conclusions rather than scientific literacy in this case, much as I would like people to be more scientifically literate.

Thank you. That is very helpful.

I agree with the first bit that it is not a difficult story to tell but I do not think it is being told. The first issue, if you look at the media outlets, one of the things that you first learn as a scientist is you are told there is no science just sitting as news, there is only a story, and if you say, “We have something to tell you about climate change,” they say, “Yeah, we did that story last month.” The vector to getting it out is difficult. I think scientists have been very poor at communicating science. It was always in p-values and things that people don’t really get. I think we have failed there. I agree completely the story could be made simpler and can be much clearer. I do not think it is well understood. When I talk to school children, right the way through to much more senior people, most of them really do not understand that this is about gain in radiation, that it is a gain of long-wave radiation. We have used the wrong numbers because does 1.5°C sound a lot? It does not sound dangerous to me until you work out how much energy that is to cook an entire planet by 1.5°C. They do not understand what the implications for that are and why it would matter that if you evaporate and hold 7% more water in an atmosphere per degree that the energy that goes in comes out as a storm. These things I do not think have been well explained, and the people that I talk with a lot just do not get why even 2°C might be in any way dangerous. I think that applies across the body public. I think it definitely applies across C-suites and in politics. That is not as critical as it might sound because the people that go into high-end business have a different set of skills than I have and they have trained in those disciplines and they are really good at it. To get into politics you must have a very different set of skills again. It is not a surprise there is a lacuna in that understanding. I think we should move forward on the front foot. I do not think it is difficult to explain this in a very easy way. We need to do that across the public. We need to convince the body politic and industry and with the public behind that creates the permissive environment into which politicians can also act. I do think that on your final point, what the role of scientists is, it is our job when we understand it to explain it clearly, not just to be scientists in a lab.

You might want to comment on this. I am also interested in the transition. We have talked so far about the science of climate change but then there is the whole conversation about the transition. Can we talk about that?

We have talked a little bit about that already and I have highlighted that the two things are quite different and how you might communicate them. As we started on climate I will add that it is important to communicate to people about climate change, but if the underlying question there is, “Would that help with support for the transition and actions by Parliament?”, for example, it is important to remember that in most polls the public do understand that the environment and climate change are the top five issues, if not the top three. There is no sense that talking to them more about climate will change that prioritisation. It is already a priority for people. When we ran our citizens’ panels for the seventh carbon budget and again for the adaptation work we are just doing, I have already said that there are some aspects of climate science that are not well understood. For example, people are unaware that the impacts were not reversible if we took action and that then did change what they thought about adaptation actions, for example, and how they thought about some of the trade-offs. Because of that they recommended that more people have access to that information, that that be led by Government and preferably that it would be deliberative. When we do those sessions our scientists do go down particularly well. People trust scientific expertise and technical expertise. They also understand it if it is presented simply—often, we are talking about not particularly challenging concepts, articulated well—and that is what my team help support our scientific experts to do. Moving back from that, though, communication will not be enough for the energy transition. You must get the incentives right. It is all very well to talk to people about how important this is. They already know it is important. What is difficult is asking people to adopt low-carbon technologies when the electricity price is high, for example. Just in the energy transition space, yes, the public when we did our social research said that they wanted more clarity about the options available to them. It surprised them to know that at a household level the two most powerful actions are, in fact, buying an electric vehicle when your car needs replacing and not before, and getting an electric form of heating, a heat pump in most cases, when your boiler is no longer functioning and not before. They just had no idea that it was an energy technology solution at household level that was the most important action from a climate point of view. They had lots of questions, particularly about electric vehicles, most of which were not necessarily rooted in the evidence. They wanted to query things such as cost, range anxiety and those kinds of things. If you look more broadly in the energy transition, the energy regulator has just done a survey of the public and they do not understand how their bill is put together. I would say that chimes with my experience in the energy sector. There is a lot of information you can give people about energy technologies, but fundamentally what I have always said about this is that if the technologies are cheaper, then people will buy them. If you get your market and incentives right, people do not have to know that they are doing it for a climate reason to want a cheaper and more efficient heating system without any of the indoor air pollution that comes with a boiler. As a first principle, we would say that communication is very important, but it is also about getting the right incentives in place for the public to be able to do this.

It strikes me that we really ought to hear the full detail of what the science shows and what the consequences of the science are that perhaps goes to some of what all three of you have been saying is missing from the public discourse. Hugh Montgomery, you talked about albedo. Tell us what the latest evidence shows these findings will mean in practice. This point about explaining in an easy way struck me from what you said just now.

The way I would explain things very briefly is that greenhouse gases let short-wave radiation through that sunlight and they trap long-wave radiation, that is heat. We are adding 350 million years’ worth of carbon back into the atmosphere very quickly, north of around 50 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide, that is 50,000 million tonnes and each tonne is 1,000 kilograms and each kilogram is north of 500 litres. It does not go away very quickly, as we have heard, and the rate of rise is going up very steeply and it is increasing. It is going up for two reasons.

Is that new information?

It is new information this last year, particularly because not only is it going up steeply as you would expect when you burn more carbon into a defined and constrained atmosphere, but it is going up more steeply than we would have anticipated. It is going up around four parts per million now per year and that is because we now know from papers published this year that the carbon sinks, the ability of the planet to draw down that carbon particularly into land sinks, is beginning to fail.

If it is going up four parts per million this year, what was it going up before?

If we go back maybe eight years, it was around 2.4 parts per million, so it has accelerated quite substantially. So we are adding more and it is lasting longer.

What does that mean for human life, and indeed for the planet more widely?

It means that the energy gain we are getting is now accelerating into what is becoming a positive feedback loop, and on top of that we have a bunch of other positive feedback. For instance, if we look at heating rocks that hold cold stores of methane in carbonate rocks, for instance, as clathrates methane is being released, which is 83 times as powerful a greenhouse gas in its first 20 years. We are releasing it from frozen tundra, we are releasing it from seabed, we are losing forests, which of course by fire are releasing carbon dioxide from desiccation of forests, the forest floors are respiring to release carbon dioxide, we are releasing carbon monoxide from those fires, which breaks down OHs, hydroxyl radicals, which normally strip methane out of the atmosphere, so extending the atmospheric half life of methane. So there are lots of these positive feedback loops in play. On top of that we are losing this phenomenon of albedo, which is essentially where bright white stuff and shiny trees, shiny surfaces, reflect light back into space. As we melt ice from land, we have lost nearly 9 trillion tonnes of ice just from land glaciers. As we shrink sea ice, we expose more dark soil in ocean to absorb that heat. On top of that we are now getting a change in low altitude cloud and that is partly because we have changed shipping fuels. We have cleaned them up so that the particulates coming from the smokestacks are not condensing out droplets of water to create reflective cloud. That change—and there are three papers this year suggesting it to be the case—has made a radical difference to energy gain particularly over the Pacific Ocean and it has produced a multiplier in terms of the energy gain. It might only be a change in this albedo of around 0.5%, but over an entire surface area of the globe that is a lot of energy gain and it has moved us up from the 2.5 watts per square metre to now approaching 8.5 watts per square metre, which was the original high emission scenario. In other words, we have revealed the heating potential of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to be much higher than we thought that it currently was. We are now at an accelerated trajectory with positive feedback loops in play, and for everything that Eric will be able to explain as well that is the reasoning. That is why we must not only get our emissions down low but remember that Paris also suggested that we should be actively drawing down carbon dioxide as well. It is why some climate scientists, such as Jim Hansen in the States, are now actively promoting geoengineering, saying that unless we start doing stuff to our atmosphere to reflect more light back in, this is no longer a battle we can win.

Okay. What are the consequences for human beings and more widely?

Catastrophic. The work we focused on originally on human health impacts related to the things you might expect—heatwaves, simple starvation, spread of infectious diseases, dengue, zika, malaria, salmonella in food and so forth, and I no longer really believe those to be the major threat at all. The big threats are societal because most of human health, whether you are poor or wealthy, is determined by socioeconomics. If you look at the reports in the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, they are saying in their foreword to their Climate Scorpion report that without immediate transformative action there will be no economy. We have had papers in Nature ranging from a guaranteed loss of 19% of GDP in the coming 19 years going up to potentially around 60% of GDP within 30 years. We are looking at 2°C and most papers are saying we would lose around one third of species to extinction and as that progresses, it is more again. These consequences to society when you get loss of food, large sections of the surface area of the planet no longer habitable—we know within 20 years around 18% of the world’s surface area currently occupied by humans will be uninhabitable—you then start getting socioeconomic collapse, mass migration and with those you start getting conflict.

You are saying within 20 years?

I think it is quite likely. I think we are seeing these things already. Lieutenant General Richard Nugee, who you may or may not have had evidence from, from the Ministry of Defence and who wrote the climate report for the MoD is not alone in raising this issue. He says when I asked him that question, “Well, we are already seeing it. We are already seeing wars as a result of climate change. We are already seeing migration and society starting to collapse.” I would have to defer to him and to his expertise, but he feels that these threats are very real and immediate.

Maybe I could just put a little bit of an envelope around what Hugh said. I think what we are saying is that as you get towards 1.5°C and then 2°C you are starting to get into the territory where you have a lot of impacts. First, you have places that are too warm, maybe not to live in, but certainly too warm to grow the crops that you have been growing and to have the livelihood that you have been having. That, of course, means migration and things like that. You are getting heavier rainfall, which has obvious problems with floods, but at the same time in areas that are dry because the water has been taken out of the soil you are also getting drought. You are going to get the ice sheets melting, which happens to be my special subject because I am an Antarctic scientist. Maybe more helpful than me drawing out a lot of extra things is just to come back to that question: is 2°C large? Twenty thousand years ago we were in the last ice age, when there was an ice sheet over most of northern Europe and most of North America and that was only 4°C to 5°C colder than today, so 2°C is a very large proportion of an ice age, but in the other direction. It is a big number. It makes a big difference to everything on earth, including the ice sheets. The problem for the ice sheets is that there are clearly tipping points where eventually the Antarctic ice sheet, the Greenland ice sheet, start to disintegrate and cannot be recovered. We do not know where those are but we have a fair bet that they are somewhere in the range of 1°C to 3°C at least for Greenland. We just do not want to go there. Every one-tenth of a degree matters. I know I would not give you a number for when we must get to net zero, which is what determines what temperature we get to before we stabilise the climate, but all I can say is that unless your appetite for risk is quite high you do not want to go near 3°C.

It is important to also state that there are impacts on the UK beyond the global impacts that affect us, including things such as migration. In the adaptation progress report this summer we said that one third of rail and road kilometres are likely to be affected by flooding and heat by 2050, a quarter of the housing stock being built on flood plains and at risk of flooding, significant portions of our agricultural land already experiencing flooding and that will increase. I think we are talking about up to 50% of our best agricultural land. Just to catch something practically for policymakers from what my colleagues have said, there is often an assumption that impacts are linear, where what happens is as warming increases those impacts become less predictable and they are non-linear. One of the reasons to move earlier rather than delay action is that it gets harder to predict what those impacts will be the higher the temperature increase goes but they will almost certainly be higher cost and more extreme because it is not a linear progression. The other thing we often hear is that this is a global problem and the UK is only a small contributor to emissions. It is useful to remind people that one third of countries internationally are responsible for around 1% of emissions, like the UK, so if everyone that was responsible for less than 1% of emissions did nothing we certainly would not be able to stay inside a safe temperature increase. As colleagues have said, it is the case that there are significant impacts beyond 1.5°C and towards 2°C.

To pick up, I agree with Eric’s point and that 3°C, for instance, would be catastrophic, but we know from the report this year that the banks are already expecting 3°C and are working on that as a base assumption that we are going to go way beyond 3°C. The actuaries report suggests that that would potentially lead to 4 billion deaths, that is half the population of the planet, and I am quoting directly from memory, substantial extinction of higher order life on earth. To the tipping point, I think Emma is right; people do tend to think of this being rather a linear thing. To Eric’s point that we can keep going and at some point we can decide to change and then things will just stop at that point or get better: they will not, because some events in climate physics are like flicking the switch and you do not go back. The one that is most often talked about is this Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which transports vast quantities of heat from the Pacific and then up past us as part of that, as the Gulf Stream, and then cold meltwater sinks and the current goes back. If we start dumping, as we are, light water, as it were, not salty water in from melting ice in the north and for other reasons too, we start slowing and potentially collapsing that circulation. When that happens, that is not something that goes back when you just stop emitting. You are stuck with that for geological timescales, and the impacts that Eric can talk to much more eloquently than I would be catastrophic for agriculture. We may be getting pretty close to that. We have had three papers this year saying we are likely to be getting to that territory within 30 years without immediate action. We had one paper, interestingly, saying that we are in the 20th percentile of risk of having triggered that collapse in 2023 if we were at RCP8.5, so 8.5 watts per square metre, and I would remind you we are now at 8.5 watts per square metre. We are now into the territory that Eric has pointed to. We are in really dangerous territory, and it is not something where you can go back once that impact has been triggered. The final point on that, of course, to draw from the work of Tim Lenton and the Global Tipping Points group at Exeter, is that, tragically, he is pointing out that we now are committed to the loss of all the world’s coral reefs. He says the only way we can keep them at all would be to massively draw down carbon dioxide, stop emitting immediately and draw ourselves immediately back down to less than 1°C of temperature rise. If that does not happen quickly, which it is unlikely to, then for the next generations there will be no coral reefs. That matters because bigger fish eat smaller fish, people eat the fish from the coral reefs, barrier reefs protect soil from ocean ingress and salt ingress. These have very big impacts to society and we are now committed to that already, irreversibly.

It is important, and sorry to issue a clarification on this point, but the reason that the insurance market and the private sector is preparing for over 3°C is not that they anticipate that being the outcome. It is that they are planning for the worst possible outcome on a risk basis, which I am sure will be familiar to some of you who have been in the private sector. The Climate Change Committee just gave advice to Government on this basis and said that for the UK economy we should be planning for an outcome of between 3°C and 4°C, but we still expect that it is possible to stay within the terms of the Paris Agreement well below the 2°C target. You plan your adaptation outcomes, and if you are a business your risk strategy, for the worst possible outcome and internationally most policies from national Governments put us on track for around 3°C of warming. It is important to say that if you just look at the energy transition, and this is an inquiry about the energy transition, the pace of the energy transition is going at a rate where it looks like the emissions curve can bend inside 2°C, so I just wanted to be clear that there are a range of outcomes possible here.

Thank you for that light relief.

I thought we might need it.

If I could start with Emma, I want to talk about the role of the Climate Change Committee. Do you think it should play a more prominent role in the debate around the energy and net zero transition and do you see any conflicts or do you think that others might perceive any conflicts of interest if you took a more public role with your advisory role?

No, I do not think we should be doing more public engagement on this. If you go back to the Climate Change Committee’s framing document and the Climate Change Act, we are predominantly a body that is designed to give analysis and information and accurate evidence to people like you so that you can be the ones to go and have a prominent role in the debate on the move towards net zero. We do communication, but it is with the purpose of the advisory bit in the Climate Change Act, which is making sure that you have the information. To that effect we do relevant media when appropriate, usually when we are releasing advice as a public body. You can, of course, ask us to do more than that. There is space for that in the Climate Change Act for national authorities to ask us to do more than our advice analysis information provision remit. Then it would come down to resources, and the nature of being an institution with a fixed resource base is that I would have to move resources away from analysis to do more of that activity, so I come back to no, it is probably not for us to be more involved in the public debate.

If you went beyond resources—imagine a world where you have the resources—would you still feel it is not the right role?

It is quite clear that we were designed to give information and most of the staff that we have are analysts. I think the folk who sit on the Committee, including scientists who have given evidence to you in this inquiry, are scientists and experts. That is what we are set up to do. I would add that when we do our social research, it is quite clear that there is space for that expertise to be put to the public, but the public said to us that they think it is Government’s job, so that is what we can say to you from the frontlines of what the public want. The other thing I would say, again coming back to the energy transition, is that there are lots of actors that are perhaps not the immediate first thought who are great communicators on this, such as the consumer groups and charities, the money-saving expert, Martin Lewis—no one has mentioned him yet in this conversation—people who are trusted actors in that space, companies who are working with communities on the frontline where they are building infrastructure. There is lots of effort put into the private sector there for working with community groups, things like community benefit funds, researchers and pollsters who specialise in this area, some of whom you have heard from. Those intermediary voices are very important, too, and perhaps this is a good question for them about what more could be done on public engagement, on net zero, but also on the energy transition specifically.

You talked earlier about the citizens’ panel that you ran. I think you said it was valuable. Would you like to briefly explain why you thought it was valuable and explain whether you would like to do more work in this area? If so, what would be the implications for your resourcing?

It was extremely valuable. I would love to do more. They are resource intensive, so there would be implications for our resources if we did more than we do. We tend to do one around a big strategic piece of advice, so the carbon budgets on the mitigation side, on the climate change risk assessment, on the adaptation side. What makes them valuable is the deliberative approach, so being able to spend time and bring in experts and have a two-way exchange of information. I have already noted this in my evidence today but that is so important that it is information exchanged, not just one-directional briefing. What we use the citizens’ panels for is a complement to our analysis. Where there were trade-offs, where there were choices to be made about, for example, regulations or incentives in recommendations we were making to policymakers, we modelled different choices and talked to the public about them and they gave us pretty clear steers, which then fed back into our advice, for example, on flying or energy. I can tell you exactly what they said about energy, for example, which was that the public said they supported the need for help with that up-front cost for heat pumps even if the running costs were favourable, so there was a strong need for help on the capital costs. They were very strongly supportive of reducing electricity costs, which is why it became one of our primary recommendations. Their preference was to fund grants and a reduction of electricity prices through general taxation with only some taxes on fossil fuels, and we reflected that in some of the analysis we put into our distributed impacts assessment, which looked at a mix of policies for different household types. They were also very keen on fairness, so making sure that different households had different kinds of support. The other thing that we got back from them on energy, which I mentioned earlier, is that they were not clear on particular energy solutions and why they were being asked to adopt them and they wanted clearer information about the choices being offered. It is extremely useful for building out the next layer down of our recommendations and testing some of those trade-offs. We did not necessarily always come down on one side or the other, but being able to offer that to you as policymakers alongside the analytics on cost I think is helpful. Naturally, when you are thinking these issues through as parliamentarians you are thinking about social as well as economic benefits and trying to give you some of that information is important. Coming right back to the Climate Change Act, we are required to look at social factors as well as economic factors.

Can I follow up on something that you said earlier when you were talking about the citizens’ panel, which was that you found that people came into it not believing they knew enough and that the process they then felt they were informed about and it did change their views? It was interesting this morning there were some people who already had quite clear sceptic views and who believed not that they did not know enough but that they did know enough and those of us who do believe in man-made climate change were wrong potentially. Did you find that there was a subset that even when you did your much longer process, and we obviously did this morning, that that was always the case?

We are about to publish our advice on adaptation, including the citizens’ panel research that we have just done. I will not be able to give you it all, but I will say that it is quite typical for us to encounter sceptical views from the public in the first sessions. The process is that you have multiple sessions with the same group looking at the same issues through different lenses, being able to test and challenge. Quite a common first question is: “If climate change is happening, how much is man-made and due to our actions?” I think, and I am happy to follow up on this in case I am wholly wrong based on what we have just found in the adaptation research, but generally speaking what people say is they are surprised by the evidence. When they see the evidence they often change their minds or they request that more of the public get to see the same evidence. That is a very clear recommendation. They think the process is incredibly valuable. When you look at public participation strategies and citizens’ panels beyond the work that we do, that is quite a common finding, that people are surprised by the evidence. The first thing they say is that this has been a real journey, this is valuable; could you do this with other people, please? I think it is important to reflect that and I think Professor Becky Willis, who is a member of the Climate Change Committee as an adviser to the Committee, has said similar to you in her evidence because this is her specialist area of research.

If I could just quickly open it up to the other two members of the panel, could a standing citizens’ panel be valuable to the Government in terms of testing potential policies before final decisions are made on the implementation? How would that work and would there be a danger that over time they become professionalised and therefore less representative? What would you think of a standing group?

This is quite a long way outside my expertise. We have heard that the citizens’ panel that Emma used did help them to define policies, but it is not obvious to me how you would use that in the more general way you are talking about. I think you are probably right that they would become perceived as being part of the establishment after a certain length of time. I would like to come back on what you were asking earlier. As a scientist representing the Royal Society, I think we are very lucky to have the Climate Change Committee and for it to be independent and therefore not to have the role that was first being asked about of trying to proselytize for its findings. I think that we have this target that is based on the scientific evidence about what is needed to avoid dangerous climate change and then we have a mechanism for working out how we can meet that target that is to some extent independent of policy deviations. I think that we probably should not mess with that.

I will comment briefly. It is outside my area. I tend to agree with you. I am a great believer in citizens’ panels and I think Emma’s work demonstrates their value. I think if there are enough of them and they were of a greater geographical spread, they do act as a nidus in seeding for change in community thought, and I think that is great value. My personal feeling is it would be great to extend those as well into the business communities. Oddly enough, I was talking to a gentleman just before I came in and we were talking about that opportunity for people across the suite in business with engineering expertise and knowledge to be able to say, “Okay, now I understand the problem. Now we can really start trying to map out how together we can make those changes,” so I am a fan of them. As to whether a standing one is the way forward I would tend to agree that maybe it would turn into another perceived quango.

It is worth noting that in the public participation strategy that came out this morning—and I caveat this with we have only just seen it, so these are not therefore comments from the Climate Change Committee—they note the need for two-way communication, which suggests something deliberative and that is welcome. There is also a commitment to a youth climate and nature panel, which sounds like a standing body of the kind you describe. Our first take, though, is that these are welcome things but there is not much in terms of their actions, resources, how they plan to use these bodies and how they are going to resource them, and that may be something to push for. They are time-intensive, resource-intensive processes that run in our case over months, so it is good to see that acknowledgement that there is a need for it—that is welcome—but we think that we need more detail on how these things are going to work.

Might I just make one point? To refer back to the Chair’s comment very early on, we must be careful because we have seen very deliberate disinformation campaigns again from state actors and others to try to deviate British policy on climate. We have seen this through other sources working against judicial decisions in other countries and these are very well funded and very effective. If you know who people are to target in some of these well-documented cases abroad, jurors, if you know your target you can get a very different message to people and start skewing their views. If we are going to do these things, we need to be very cogent about the potential interference that might be targeted at those individuals and defend them from it.

Winding up on what you have just been saying, your citizens’ assemblies, for years I was a member of the Electoral Reform Society. They were always saying citizens’ assemblies are so effective in engaging, but it is a weigh-up for Government how much money and resource you want to invest in that. I would say information is always good, knowledge is power and so on, and it is better to have an informed public than a disinformed or misinformed public. I think it is very useful to hear from you when you say misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation nobody can be blamed for, but then people are more susceptible to disinformation, and I think it is important to keep that in mind. This morning what I took away there is that people were saying that if we cannot all be informed about everything, the Government must be very transparent about decision making. Sometimes maybe the public just want to be told what to do rather than being asked too many questions because it becomes too complex, too complicated and too scary. Therefore, if the Government make decisions those decisions must be incredibly transparent. I think that came out of our panel and is probably worth keeping in mind. Now I am asking my question.

Thank you for giving evidence to this Committee.

It is a discussion and it is also feeding back to what we heard and that is the co-benefit with nature. Nature is to one effect also very much affected by climate change so a lot of species loss, a lot of habitat loss, but at the same time nature can also be a saviour of a lot of things. How would you see that relationship and the co-benefits between nature and climate action?

First to note that we have relationships with the Office for Environmental Protection, which does a similar job on the environment side, and with the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, the bodies that look after and audit action on the environment. We share research information and data in the way that you would expect as public bodies. There is also quite a lot of nature in the advice that we have just given Government on the balanced pathway to delivering net zero in the seventh carbon budget. Just to give you some examples, land use is a considerable area of transformation in the seventh carbon budget. If you think about peatland restoration, we go from 27% of peatland unwetted and unrestored to 76% of peatland restored by 2050. In the seventh carbon budget peatland is a vast stock of carbon, which is why we are interested in it for emissions reduction. These are also unique habitats and provide space for an assemblage of plants and animals, help regulate water flow and so on. If you look at woodlands, we go from 13% woodland cover to 18% woodland cover in the seventh carbon budget out to 2050. Most of that new woodland in the seventh carbon budget is not agroforestry but native broadleaf. We also include things such as hedgerow planting and other native species. The idea there was to improve biodiversity and the resilience of any tree planting that we are doing to climate change impacts in the future and some of the pests and diseases that might come. Those have co-benefits again from emissions reduction, from helping prevent flooding. There are a lot of trees in our adaptation advice because they are one of the ways that we can provide natural shading but also flood defences. Then if you think more broadly about what we are recommending in land use for farming, lots of the measures that we are recommending in agriculture help reduce the impacts on water quality because they help prevent run-off into watercourses. There are measures that will enhance soil health, there are increased livestock welfare measures and they enhance biodiversity, so lots of co-benefits in the nature space from what we are recommending in land use. The other thing that we say very explicitly in the seventh carbon budget is that you must do all that but also protect existing natural habitats. Many of them are already carbon sinks but they are important for biodiversity. Those carbon sinks will have taken millennia to form so will be difficult to recondition if we lose them. It is vital in the inventory of carbon emissions and how we do our calculations that they remain. That is the picture. Although we are not explicitly given nature as something to look at in the Climate Change Act, it turns up in the advice because many of the measures are in the land use space and therefore are about natural spaces.

So climate action and nature protection are not running against each other but very much work together?

We certainly would not see it that way. Whenever I talk about the climate change solutions, 60% of emissions reduction from here to 2040 is about the energy transition, electrification, infrastructure. It is very important that we remember that, but whenever people ask me about the most important measures, we talk about things such as electric vehicles, but we also talk about trees because they are a very important climate solution. Although they are not a technology class, they are up there with technologies that we need for emissions reduction.

When you were engaging with the public in your citizens’ assemblies, did you find that it was easier to engage with the public on nature issues rather than on electrification and energy transition?

Again to slightly foreshadow what we might say in the adaptation advice in the citizens’ panels, yes, people like nature-based solutions. They like trees. Interestingly, we are not always sure why that is but they score very highly with the public. That is not the only thing that matters to the public and we have talked about it elsewhere in the evidence session. It is the cost of living, the cost of technologies, energy bills; these things matter at least as much to the public at the moment. Nature is something that matters to the public but it does not necessarily make the conversation about the energy transition easier. People are not saying you should do trees or electric vehicles. They are interested in the full range of solutions that we have offered.

Can I follow up on that? Have you taken into account the Government’s draft land use framework when looking at these things?

We will do when we come to score things such as the progress reports. When we do our progress reporting we look at Government policy and offer a view. We will be doing that in June of this year. We have relationships with Departments, so in developing our land use advice, the recommendation that we made to Government then was that we must get the incentives right under the new agricultural schemes and under the land use framework. Below that we would not give detailed recommendations because you start to get into policy formation, which is not a job for us. We will then look at the land use framework and whatever the Government do on agriculture or on funding nature-based solutions when we come to do our progress report and give you a view about whether or not we think it is substantial enough.

Briefly, I am interested in the use of nature in urban spaces. We often talk about nature in the countryside, and I have a lot of agricultural land in my constituency, but I am interested in how we can build climate positive nature solutions into urban environments. My experience of talking to my constituents is the assumption is that urban environments are not nature rich. Could you talk about that?

Yes. This is one of those answers where I say you will have to have me back in the spring once our advice is public, but suffice to say there are nature-based solutions that we are looking at for urban as well as rural environments, things like green spaces in cities, which we know make a difference to urban heating. What we are going to try to do is, as we always do in our advice, look at a range of solutions, the cost involved for those and give you a sense of different kinds of solutions, some of the trade-offs and some of the costs rather than just picking one. I will confirm that nature-based solutions are there for urban as well as rural environments. Have me back once we have published our adaptation advice.

We will certainly do that.

If I might chip in a little bit on that, I do not know what the contents of the report are, but I agree with you that nature-based solutions in cities have a lot of advantages to health anyway. They have a lot of advantages to protection. They do need to be very well thought through. I was talking with someone who is involved in policy recently about cities and protection from heatwaves and they were asking how we would protect against five days at 40°C. Having trees would be good because they would provide shelter and reflection, all a good thing. The problem you have, though, is that if you start looking at that in London, where do you stick the trees? When you stick them in, we are already approaching, according to the London authorities, 30% of buildings in London will be affected by subsidence within the next four years due to clay desiccation. If you stick more trees in, you suck more water out of the ground, you have more pollen burden if you have the wrong sorts of trees, you have the risk of them blowing down and there are the leaves, so it becomes a complicated issue that needs a lot more thought than just sticking up a bunch of trees.

Is it different between dense urban environments like London or towns like Morecambe, which I represent, which are not very dense, they are urban but bulk, and how?

I think the right solution in the right place is pretty critical for adaptation, and you will again see that in the advice. We have Professor Natalie Seddon, who is an expert in nature, on the Climate Change Committee’s Adaptation Committee and you could always call her as well if you want more information about what nature-based solutions can offer for adaptation.

We started talking about the health benefits of nature solutions. What should we be doing to make the case for the energy transition helping people’s health? You talked about this before.

I think it is a very strong argument. First, because you are talking about trusted vectors, we talked earlier that defence and security are trusted and we have heard that university departments and scientists are generally still trusted. In your first session, I think you heard that there was about 85% trust in those groups. There are health benefits to action on climate change. Even independent of climate change, even if you deny climate change exists at all, the low-carbon living that you can engage in has profound benefits to health and not an enormous impact in terms of cost; in fact, often with savings. Take three issues, and Emma Pinchbeck has pointed to a couple of them: getting rid of particulate pollution, which might come from the combustion of fossil fuels coming out the tailpipe of your car, and actively commuting so that you are not even getting the tyre wear, the road surface wear or the brake dust and decarbonising your gas boiler and your gas cooker to get rid of those particulates; the physical activity of moving; and moving towards a plant-based diet or a plant-rich diet. Those things save money by and large and they have enormous impacts on health. If you were to get women in urban cities able to cycle the average distance a woman in Copenhagen can cycle a day, which is around 1.3 miles, you will get around a 12% to 13% reduction in cases of breast cancer. That is a really big impact. Small changes in diet have similar sorts of effect. Given that diet is the largest impact on obesity, in Britain now 62% of our population is either obese or overweight compared to Japan at 3.7%. Many other countries that have legislated on food are much less. That dietary change, if we were to address the obesity epidemic in Britain, would take £127 billion of benefit to the economy from lost economic output, taxation and the cost of health care and social care. That is 12% of the base rate of tax. These are things that play well to the purse, to the public perception of economy and to health. We know from discussions in health that there are diseases that worry people more, and many of those are also linked to high carbon lifestyles. Breast cancer worries people, bowel cancer and colostomies worry people, dementia worries people. These sorts of low-carbon living have enormous co-benefits. On top of that, we have talked about the impacts of climate change on health. My perception is that that does not play nearly as well, because while we do know there are thousands dying every summer now from heatwaves, it is very hard to point to them because they tend to be people dying actually not of heat stress; they die of renal disease or a stroke or a heart attack. If the person is your family member, it is hard to go, “Oh, they died because the temperature was high”, so I do not think that those messages play nearly as well as the potential co-benefit of action, which is economic as well as health based.

Thanks very much. We have heard about the Warmth and Wellbeing scheme in Dublin. I do not know if any of you are familiar with it. Do you think we should learn lessons from their scheme and do something similar here?

I do not know about the scheme in detail, but I do know that it came from a combination of health policy and energy intervention. It is not dissimilar to schemes that I have worked on in the past. There was a pilot in Sunderland in the early 2000s, which did something similar. The Energy Systems Catapult has a similar trial. The basic premise is that you work with the homes of people with chronic respiratory illnesses and in areas, in the Dublin case, where they had a below average socioeconomic status as well. You essentially prescribe energy solutions to help make the home warmer. Now, not all those energy solutions were low carbon. They included more efficient boiler upgrades but it did also include insulation and double glazing. The purpose of the trial is to establish whether or not by giving people with chronic respiratory illnesses warmer homes you get sufficient health benefits—reduced admissions to acute health care—to mitigate the cost of the intervention. Lessons to learn from these schemes are, first, that there are cross-departmental impacts from the energy transition, which are often poorly understood. I would reflect health as a key one of those co-benefits. These schemes have demonstrated that it is not beyond the wit of man for Departments to work together across government on schemes of that kind and to get the costs and benefits aligned across Departments, which requires thinking about how the government machinery works together and machinery and about budgeting, impact assessments, and so on. The second thing—and this I think matters given that the Government are about to publish the Warm Homes Plan—home upgrades that included energy efficiency as well as the heating system were important from a health perspective. Increasingly, we think electrification is the important thing for emissions reduction with minimal fabric intervention to make the heat pump efficient, but in this particular case doing more on insulation was helpful to a health outcome. Another takeaway from the Dublin scheme is a lot of these pilots have been at local level and working out how to scale them up across different, for example, NHS deaneries or different local authorities is harder to see. I think this pilot has not been taken forward to be nationwide. I would recommend speaking to the Energy Systems Catapult about the work it has been doing on this. I know it had at least one pilot here on that. Beyond that, I cannot tell you much more from a CCC perspective.

That is quite a lot. Professor Montgomery, this is probably your area of expertise. Tell us more.

I think it is worth doing. It is partly about making the case. The argument that is always thrown back about these things is the nanny state argument. This is Government fiddling around with people’s freedom of choice. But we do not have free markets, thank heavens. We do legislate against child prostitution and cocaine distribution and many other social harms, and this is yet another of those. There is a narrative that can play again across the entire political suite, because if we were to, let’s say, change dietary policy to a way where agriculture therefore has the benefits that Emma Pinchbeck has alluded to, it lowers our carbon footprint enormously, but it also brings with it huge health benefits. If we deal with things like particulates, there is a very strong association for hospital admissions. I work in an intensive care unit, and indeed was until just this morning. There is a strong association with particulate concentrations in admissions with asthma and COPD. It triggers a big slew. Nearly a quarter of the acute health budget is due to those respiratory diseases acutely in hospitals every winter. We can prevent them. We in Britain love the NHS, and I do. I am an NHS lifer. If we want the NHS to survive, we have to turn the tap of disease off and one very quick way of doing it is a way that also just happens to benefit climate. I think we can sell these policies very strongly on the fact that, first, we want a viable NHS and, secondly, that the hard-working man and woman of Britain is not having their taxes wasted in supporting something that is preventable.

You have neatly moved on to the economic impacts, which means that Torcuil Crichton is now going to take on the questioning.

We would not characterise what we need to do for net zero as people giving things up. If you look at the seventh carbon budget, in many cases what we are talking about for the vast majority of emissions reduction to 2040 is people choosing a different technology to the one in their homes today and getting the market incentives right so that when they do that there are benefits. We estimate that assuming the Government take action on electricity prices, the underlying efficiency of a heat pump is such that by 2050 a typical household’s energy bill would be £700 pounds less than were they to stay with a gas boiler, that their driving costs would be £700 pounds less with an electric vehicle than were they to replace their car with another internal combustion engine vehicle. There are distinct benefits for households in making these changes so long as the market is right for them to do it, and that is the real heavy lifting and what people need to do. It comes back to something I said earlier, which is that communication is important. When we do our social research, the public quite clearly tell us that they wished other people had the opportunity to interrogate science and to hear from experts but they also point quite clearly to the need to make this as straightforward as possible. Our advice is always communication is important, but it goes hand in hand with make electricity prices cheap, please, because then people can make these changes regardless of what they think about climate change. I would definitely contend that it requires a sacrifice approach.

We need immediate action. I do not think anyone is questioning that. The immediate action for Government is on things like getting the electricity price down. You then have a roll-out of technology rates, using the fact that these technologies are cheaper, which look very much in line with what other European countries have done with international experience. We are confident that we can reach net zero emissions by 2050 with technology change, and yes, some behaviour changes. It is a very achievable road map. For ordinary people, the two biggest choices that we are asking them to make are when their car needs to be replaced, and not before, and when their heating system needs to be replaced, and not before, that there is an alternative available to them, which is electric, and offers them these savings and operational costs. Honestly, that gets you down the curve, 60% of emissions reduction to 2040, the majority of which comes from electrifying the demand side. Then the other changes we talk about, things like tree planting, if I had advice for policymakers about what is urgent right now, it is, as I frequently say, get the electricity price down and start planting some trees. That is what urgent action looks like in order to get on the road to 2050.

That is an interesting point. We can differentiate policy from individuals. It is catastrophic. I remind you potentially of Roger Harrabin’s words, that he was terrified for his children and grandchildren. I am terrified for me, and I am 63. My son was 20, nine days ago; I am terrified for him. This is absolutely catastrophic and dangerous. To the messaging point, we have been told for years that you cannot say scary things because people stick their fingers in their ears. That is not my experience in medicine. If you tell people scary things, and then tell them what they can do, then they move to that very quickly. I think there is a separate issue from the individual action, from getting people convinced about the urgency such that they create the permissive environment to let you, the politicians, make the difficult choices. Because you are so constrained, I totally get it. You cannot do things that will get you kicked out because then you cannot do anything that is good for anybody. We have to create an environment where voters across the suite, and business and industry, are saying, “I get it. This is a crisis. We are behind you in getting change. I now know, because Emma has told me, what it is I need to do; now let’s all talk with business and industry about what it is we can do together to make those changes at the speed and scale that we require.” At the moment, most people I talk to really do not see this as an immediate threat to their lives and it is.

Yes, we have one paper this year on the southern gyre, which is one part of the major ocean circulation, suggesting that it is slow to the point that it is probably collapsing now. That does not say the whole thing is collapsing but it suggests that we are getting pretty close. We have had three papers running up to this year, before the next three, saying that we are close. I quote directly: “close to a point of critical transition”. The papers this year are suggesting that this is imminent, without action, and that is the point I suppose we have to make, that there is this urgency to act.

First, I do not think that the consensus would be that we are right at the tipping point for the meridional overturning circulation, so I do not want to go too far. Also, I do think this works both ways. Although we say that every tenth of a degree takes us closer to danger, that also means that every tenth of a degree we do not go takes us closer to safety, so it is not that suddenly at some point it is all completely useless and we should not try any more because we have already passed the point of no return. Every tenth of a degree will save us something. Emma has already explained how the market can provide solutions that people can afford and actually benefit from and then we can have the co-benefits as well. Forgive me for being a bit naive but I do think there is some role for the altruistic statement that what I said about the world and the UK applies to individuals: that until individuals reach a point where they are not net-emitting greenhouse gases because they know that the small amount they are emitting is—maybe they are still flying on holiday or something, which we are probably never going to stop being greenhouse gases, but somebody else is offsetting it somehow. The individual should also think about that, that until they are not doing, until they are not net-emitting greenhouse gases, they are contributing to making the climate worse for themselves as individuals, effectively. I think that is something that can be made out. I did raise the question earlier about the appetite for climate risk. If your appetite for climate risk is high, you maybe do not care if we get to two degrees or three degrees, but to be honest the demographic in this room is not the one that is going to suffer from us getting to two or three degrees. We are not the ones who are living in housing where there is air pollution. We are not the ones living in countries that are not able to survive an extra degree or two or that are getting bigger typhoons or whatever it is. I know I am being a bit naive in pushing out that people might care a little bit about people in other countries who are suffering from climate change and might not want to contribute to that. In the end they have to decide whether they are buying a heat pump, but I think that it is useful for them to have in their minds an underlying principle that they would really like to if they could.

Apart from the 2,000 people a year who are estimated to die from excess heat in the UK. This goes to Emma’s point that it is here now. You presumably accept that.

Yes, that is the problem, that we cannot identify who they are. The whole problem is like being a lobster in a pot; you do not realise it is happening until it has happened.

Is it not asking the consumer ultimately too much, saying that they are responsible for it? It is for the Government and industry, for example, to pick up, then government incentives or government policy certainly, all these sorts of things, where ultimately the responsibility and the burden is not on the consumer and therefore it is something that the Government can very heavily steer into the right direction.

I would say that the Government have the role of making it easy for them. The consumer still has to make the individual decision about whether they are going to allow somebody to come and disrupt their house with a heat pump.

If something is cheap, easy and affordable, which consumer would not make that decision?

I do not think we are in disagreement.

We have had the privilege of sitting with the public and having deliberative conversations, as part of which we do spell out the climate science and people think that is important. Most people do come in thinking that climate change is important. It is underlying what is causing it, how serious is it, what it means for them, the detail that they are less clear about. That is important but even then, when we are talking about policy trade-offs, people are extremely clear that they wanted more from the Government, more communication and more in terms of telling them which technologies were important, why they were important and making them as cheap as possible. People were clear that they needed support with the up-front costs of heating technology in particular because it is an essential service and because it would take time for the cost of heat pumps to fall. They also wanted that communication and that help to be in the right window of opportunity. When you are doing disruptive upgrades or when you are doing work to your home or, indeed, when you need to replace your heating system and not before—which has been a previous recommendation of the Climate Change Committee and it still stands—they were keen to make sure the transition was fair as much as possible, so with support for vulnerable, low-income households, those in fuel poverty and so on. People also differentiated between areas of decarbonisation action. This inquiry is focused on energy, but in areas such as flying or food, people often had different views that were reflected to us on something like energy, which is essential to the economy and to households. For example, the public reflected back to us that they thought that flying was more of a luxury choice and that the Government should consider how aviation could be decarbonised fairly. That was quite different from their views about energy and food. On food, affordability came very high up the list of things that the Government need to be clear about, which is why our recommendations to policymakers in the seventh carbon budget were that you have to make the alternatives cheaper, tastier and more available. That is what you need to do. To come back to something I said earlier, first in deliberative conversation you have to be clear about the solutions, you have to talk to people about them, but communication is not enough on its own. You need to make these choices cheaper, tastier and more available for people whether you are talking about energy technology or food.

So how? Just on energy efficiency measures for now, because we could go on to talk about a lot of other things, the up-front cost is a very significant challenge, isn’t it? Even if you explain to people that this is a great thing to do, when they get hit with the cost it is a real barrier. Don’t worry, Emma, you do not have to repeat the point about getting electricity prices and operating costs down—

I am going to get T-shirts made.

Well, that is a way to go. But EVs, salary sacrifice is the biggest single way in which we have got electric vehicles on the roads. What is the answer for solar, battery, heat pump or insulation?

To a certain extent these are choices for the Government. We are not a policymaking institution—which I know you knew that I would say, but it is right that I do say it. We are looking for action in the Warm Homes Plan. In June, we said in the progress report to Government that that is the area of significant interest because of the heavy lifting that electrification is doing for decarbonisation between now and 2040. What happens in homes and in transport systems is important and clearly we do not yet have the Government strategy for homes.

The Warm Homes Plan is going to be targeted at people in fuel poverty, broadly.

We cannot speculate on it before we have seen it, but we will score it for you and give you our view in the progress report. What we would be looking for in that plan—

My question is: what do you do for those people who do not qualify for the Warm Homes Plan?

We have said that you need up-front support for heat decarbonisation across the piece. How to target that is a choice for the Government and different Governments want to do it differently. Sorry, Bill, but that is a policymaker’s decision. Underneath that, we have said all households would benefit if the gas to electricity price ratio was closer because we have seen that be effective in every country that has had a successful heat pump roll-out, a ratio of around three to one. On initial review, the measures announced in the Budget do not quite close that ratio, so we will be looking for further rebalancing in the Warm Homes Plan if that is the metric that we are looking for. I think that the Government have said that they might do more in that regard. We will look at it. The other thing that came back from the citizens’ panels is this concern across the piece about fairness for the vulnerable and that is as much as we can say to policymakers about what they might want to do.

Hugh and Eric, do you have anything to say about up-front costs and what might be good recommendations for the Government?

Not particularly, but speaking from a personal point of view and not really from a Royal Society point of view, what would encourage me to get a heat pump was hearing lots of stories of people having a good experience of fitting one as opposed to what you read on the internet of not-so-good experiences. We need to get those people who have had a good experience out and start talking about it.

I have a very good experience of fitting one.

I would put my comments to you on that issue but also to pick up on your point as well. I think it is unfair to ask politicians to drive things through against public will. They usually get one chance at doing that and then they are in trouble and that is just the reality. We need a consensus here, don’t we? We have heard both Emma and Eric say exactly what I said. This is not a difficult story; it is not contentious. We need the public to understand the real threat and what they can do. We need the body politic to understand that it is a real threat across the entire political suite. Then we need a consensus for action. That public narrative or public voice will then allow politicians to act. Then by all means politicians can argue or agree about the actions that need taking but let’s just move the ground to that and stop contesting whether we are going to take action at all. There is no time for that level at all. I would seek a consensus across parties and across the public and then we can start discussing what action looks like because your point is right that some of these things are going to be difficult. We see that rolling out now, whether it is the price or, “I don’t want to see pylons going across my field”, or, “I don’t want to see solar panels here and there”. These are difficult issues for people but until we all buy into the fact that we must do something, we will always have these arguments.

It comes back to the question of how you get that consensus; we have lost it in politicians.

We have but I think that can be achieved, partly from the trusted vectors we have spoken about—the asymmetric voices, defence and intelligence, health, academics—but across political suites. There are people from the far right to the far left who would agree on this. So let’s start trying to pull that consensus together. We tried the national emergency briefing last week as a first start. It is not hard to get people to come in and brief. Just depoliticise it because until now this has been viewed through a political lens, very much so, particularly on the other side of the pond, that action on climate is somehow akin to communism and the destruction of capitalism, the end of human civilisation, and that just has to stop. We need to move this into a scientific basis and then start saying by all means.

That was an allegation levied this morning by one of the panels actually.

I thought I would usefully add—because I know it is frustrating when I say I cannot give you too many diktats about policy—what we did do in the seventh carbon budget is model a mix of policy solutions for the different household types by income and different buildings. The seventh carbon budget advice, which we have published, shows what different policy options look like for different households. We did that with a view to support policymakers to make those choices and trade-offs. In almost every household type, by 2050 people benefited from the net zero energy system against an energy system of carry on as usual. Another thing that was quite clear in our economic analysis for the economy as a whole is that the vast majority of the capital investment to deliver decarbonisation in the seventh carbon budget is about decarbonising electricity generation but also about decarbonising the building stock and in particular investing in heat pumps. You can see all that in our economic analysis. The savings from making that investment are also very clear and outpace the costs from about 2040. That is the same at household level where people save money on their bills because, as you know, Bill, if you have a heat pump and it is working well they are more efficient.

Thank you.

Some of the questions I was going to ask have already been quite well covered because you have made it very clear, Emma, that it is very important that people see the impact of the energy transition on their energy bills in a positive way. To the panel more broadly, do you think the measures in last week’s Budget will have aided at all in building support for the energy transition or are there other steps you would have liked to have seen?

I am not going to dig into the detail of the economic policy, but I think the messaging is not there. We go back to this beginning. I do not think people understand that there is a real grave urgency for action and that there are benefits to the UK economy and health and our future health by taking action. I think that until people get that they can look at any budget and struggle. The last Government and this Government do face real economic challenges. It has been very difficult to do anything in the last 10 years with the current economic climate, but until we get people to buy into the fact that this is an important thing and people can then go on the front foot about policies and say, “Yes, we are doing it for these reasons and it is a vote winner”, it is never going to come to the front, is it? It is always going to push to the margin.

There were clearly some positives in the Budget to do with energy prices and so on. There were also some negatives around it to do with oil production. If you are going to contribute to emitting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and still keep to targets, you need to explain what you are going to do to counter them, how you are going to remove that carbon from the atmosphere or what you are going to move faster on. Obviously, it is not enough. What do you expect us to say? It is good but it is not enough to solve the problem by itself. I do not think science has anything to say about the Budget, only that it is never going to be enough.

I am feeling that you have all got reasons not to; it is not your remit.

On the point about the changes in the Budget on bills, there will be a saving on energy bills, which I think is just helpful across the piece when you think about the scale of the energy transition and what people are experiencing and that idea that the energy transition should benefit people. It might give some space in that regard but that is speculative. What is interesting to us at the Climate Change Committee is whether or not that reduction, if it comes off electricity, is enough to close the gap between electricity and gas prices. That is the important metric for being able to get electric technologies away because you are making a decision about whether the efficiency of the electric technology starts to outpace the fossil fuel counterfactual and you get rewarded for it. Of that £134, we think £96 of it comes off electricity policy costs and £38 from gas policy costs. This is new analysis from my team. We do not think that does enough to close that spark gap and get it to the one to three ratio that we need to get the benefit of the more efficient electric technologies. We do not think that that on its own will be enough to drive those savings to consumers and that may mean that you need to do more in terms of support for households to encourage them to get, or choose, the electric technology when they are making that replacement choice. On electric vehicles also, there were measures on pay per mile and there are some post-Budget estimates from Government that suggest that that will reduce electric vehicle sales before 2030 but somewhat offset by then the increase in the grants. I think it is a net reduction of about 100,000 electric vehicle sales before 2030, which clearly is not good news when you are thinking about the roll-out of EVs but I think it is around 1% percent or less and I am very happy to follow up with those figures. We will, of course, do this in full detail when we do the progress report in June. Again, we are looking to the Warm Homes Plan. That is where we will expect to see a more rounded package of measures for buildings. I think it is unfair to make a judgment this early about the whole suite of things in terms of decarbonisation. We will do a full review of all this in June and by then be able to see the market data as well.

I come back to the issue of public communication. While we live in the world of renewal obligations and contracts for difference and all that stuff, the general public does not. I would say universally that everyone I would speak to, everybody, says, “The problem with my bills is green taxes. That is why my bill is so high.” They also say, “All this renewable stuff going on, why is my bill going up, not coming down?” because they do not understand marginal difference in price. Until we actually get this sorted out, the public is not going to be voting for it and you cannot sell it as a politician. That is the problem. We must get that narrative changed.

Briefly before we finish, I think you alluded to this already, but the opposition to energy infrastructure that you often see, do you think that would be reduced if it is more closely linked to reduced energy bills, if people could see the link between providing that infrastructure and—

That is probably a question better for Emma but I think yes. The people with whom I talk who are not in this world just do not see it. They see renewables rolled out and they say, “I have a 100% renewable tariff, I moved to”—name your favourite renewable supply here—“and my bills have not gone down and yet it is meant to be solar and it is meant to be so much cheaper,” or, “It’s meant to be wind,” because they cannot see that direct coupling and that really blocks the narrative, in my view.

Speaking personally, it is fairly obvious to me that people would be happier about energy infrastructure in their area if they were benefiting from it with reduced bills, but that is a personal opinion rather than the Royal Society opinion. Overall, we can still make the case that there is a net gain from having the infrastructure and some of it really is not quite as bad as it is somehow made out to be. I go walking a lot. I see a lot of pylons already around. I do not really notice them any more. They have been there. I realise that is hard to persuade people of so I think the incentives you are talking about can work.

Also, we know that the green economy, the renewable economy, the energy transition economy was growing three times faster than other sectors. It is a major contributor to UK plc. Yet we are told that the only way to grow the UK economy is to fund more fossil fuel extraction. There is also another narrative—talking about misinformation and disinformation—that green taxes are the only reason that works and we should therefore go to fossil fuels, which are massively subsidised, not only in the extraction but in the failure to take into account externalities. We need to get some better understanding across to the public because you will not sell these policies otherwise.

Emma, do you want to come in?

I should answer the question. The Climate Change Committee does not have a specific view on how you discuss, for example, network build-up because a lot of those matters are local level impacts. What we have said in the seventh carbon budget overall is that quite clearly we need to build energy infrastructure and network infrastructure for electrification and we do need to speed up that infrastructure delivery, which includes things like planning reform, better conversations with local communities, and so on. I was also going to say something I said earlier, which is that I would heavily recommend talking to some of the companies, community groups, communicators who are on the ground having these conversations. The network companies were asked to do Great Grid Upgrade communications initiative just as I was leaving my last job, which as you know was in the energy sector. I would be talking to some of those experts. I would be calling my successor at Energy UK and asking that question. I can point to something new in public research, the research that the energy regulator did on bills. That certainly chimes with my experience. They did a broad analysis of public opinion on energy bills and what the public said was that they do not understand them, they feel frustrated by them, they particularly think that standing charges are unfair, but there is no consensus about what to do about them. The public does want pricing to be simpler and easier to navigate. They want to see where things on bills come from. Control over how they pay is important but not necessarily the main thing. The main thing is about simplicity and ease a lot of the time, which I think chimes with a lot of what we said today. We just have to make this more straightforward for people and cost-effective. A reminder: affordability was the No. 1 issue for participants, quite clearly. They expressed concerns spontaneously about the impact on vulnerable consumers and wanted action taken to protect vulnerable groups, which is not dissimilar to the findings we have had through our citizens’ panels on measures for decarbonisation. Quite clearly, the energy regulator research is broader; it is about the energy transition more broadly than just looking at it from an emissions reduction point of view. Again, there is a whole set of communicators in that space who you would benefit from hearing from, I think, who specialise in how you communicate energy issues to the public, which is distinct from how you communicate climate, though there is obviously a Venn diagram in the middle of those two things.

I wanted to put to you something that was put to me at the weekend. I am not saying it is right, but it is an interesting take on the Budget. For someone sceptical of the energy transition, of course, there is a big view that policy costs—green taxes you just called it—are the reason why bills are high. The Government gave £150 pounds off everyone’s bill by cutting green taxes. Have the Government just proved those people right? The single big measure the Government put in the Budget was to cut green taxes and everyone has got £150 off their bill.

They are more in control than with the gas price.

That was put to me this weekend. You can understand where that narrative comes from. We are looking at building the support for the energy transition but it is very easy for people to take things from what is happening. How do we counter that narrative?

In the current bill, 38% at the moment is wholesale costs so that is highly sensitive to the gas price. Some of the most powerful analysis we put out in the seventh carbon budget is around that volatility. We estimate that in 2050 a household with electric technologies—an electric heating system and an electric vehicle—is 15 times less exposed than a household still dependent on fossil fuels, should there be another gas price spike. You can look at global geopolitics and uncertainty and make your best guess there, but I think avoidance of that risk is really important. For the costs on bills, at the moment, just looking at the latest Ofgem analysis, 23% is network costs, 13% is policy costs and the rest is things like operating costs, as you know, earnings, headroom capacity, market costs and VAT, all of which sit in different places on the bill. Clearly, we need to communicate what is on the bill to people better. Again I would go and ask some people in my old world rather than us about how you might do that. I would certainly talk to some of the energy suppliers who have to do this day in, day out, talking to their customers, and to some of the consumer groups and charities about their views on it. In the policy options that we modelled for our distribution impact analysis and more generally we modelled moving some of these policy costs off electricity. We did that in various ways, including on to gas, on to tax and various options so that you could see the distributive impact of different choices. I think that what is important here is making electricity cheap because the thing that we need to convince people of is the thing that we say, which is the underlying energy system, the efficiencies of these technologies, the fact that they are modern. An electrically driven energy system with electrical products on the end is more efficient and cheap for you and if you get that right, then I think people will start to believe the conversation about the cost perspective.

I take all of that. This was a Martin Lewis website clip, “The Government’s going to knock 150 quid off your bill because they are ending ROs and ECO.” It could not be more clear to those people who do not believe in what you have just set out that by cutting policy costs, we get our energy bills down. Have the Government sent the right message through the Budget?

Personally, I think no. I completely agree with you. It sounded like, “Yes, you were right all along. Your bills are high because of this green crap that is been attached to your bill”. That is what it came across as and it is fighting the wrong argument. Going back to creating some conditions to say, “No, they are there for a reason and the reason is this, and we think that is a very important thing to be doing”. It is a small portion. It is 12% to 13% of your bill. It is pretty small but it is there for a very good reason. If you do want to reduce it, then say that we have to raise that money in some other way to support the green transition but be on the front foot on this. You are right; it played out to everyone I know as, “You were wrong, Hugh, all along. That is why the bills were high” and it plays badly.

There is now a letter going to every household confirming from the Government that people will be getting £150 pounds off their bills.

Which convinces them that less action on climate will be a really good thing and that is an error.

Thank you.

We have covered some of this already so my first bit, hopefully, will be brief in reply. A lot of the discussion today and more widely in this space has been around greener choices and individual behaviour. I would perhaps say that there has been too much emphasis on that in the environmental movement. It is quite interesting. Just picking up a point that a fellow member made about making rational choices, we are dealing a lot of the time with people who are most exposed, people who have many more decisions to make every day about how they are going to feed the kids and pay the bills, and there is quite good evidence that the more choices you have to make, the less rational the choices you make are. Emma has already told us that we have priority in the public mind in terms of action on climate change, but the change comes through practical measures. Does the panel have anything further to say on what interventions make the most difference? What is the evidence base on that in terms of support for the energy transition? I know that we have covered this already a fair bit, Chair, but I want to know if there are any further comments on that before I move to my next question.

Do you mean practically or in terms of communication?

Both, I think, because what do we communicate that makes people think that it is a good idea and what practical measures make people think it is a good idea?

Again, I am going to get T-shirts made. What the public has told us is that there needs to be sufficient up-front support available for the installation of a heat pump but also that you need the cheap electricity environment to make the fundamentally more efficient technology stack up. Then it just becomes an economic decision. The electric vehicle is going to be cheaper than the internal combustion engine vehicle, we think, before 2030. Frankly, that is not a climate choice. That is the choice of someone who has to drive a lot and who is looking for a more economic solution. You have to get electricity cheap to help those people. That is why we focus so much on the wider environment. On top of that, we do talk about smoothing the barriers to deployment, and if you are talking about large-scale infrastructure that is things like the planning reform that you will have heard a lot about. At household level, it is making sure there is good communication, good information and you are thinking about intervention points, things like when people move house, thinking about solutions for the private rental sector as well as homeowners as well as social housing providers. Incidentally, our buildings model has 10,000 different types of buildings in it. We have tried to test solutions across all the different household archetypes. On top of that, when you do the distributive impact assessment, there are obviously different impacts and different benefits for different households. If you are a policymaker, thinking about where you target your support is important. That is why we have laid out some of those choices. On communication, what the citizens’ panels have said to us is that they want clear choices. Choice is important, but not when you have 99 decisions to make in any given week, as you have said. Saying to the public that we think that the technology in most cases is a heat pump or we think that the technology is an electric vehicle and here is what you need to know about them and clear information about solutions is important, at the right time, again, and from trusted actors and voices preferably. The public has given us quite clear steers about what they think good intentions look like.

I will move on, then, to the trusted voices and the less trusted voices. How do we ensure that politicians and scientists, who are by definition nerds—don’t laugh; you all are—focus on that and that very clear messaging and policy? Is there the infrastructure for science and thinking about science communications in particular but not exclusively that is not for nerds? Is there evidence on what types of communication work? Does telling people facts work? Does telling people individual stories work? What is the evidence base for what will actually functionally change people’s minds in the environment if you set up the environment correctly?

Yes, there is lot of work on this. If you are wishing to get the real experts, I would strongly commend George Marshall. You already had some others who are real experts on your Committee talking about this. Facts tend not to convince people, as it turns out. You are right, scientists and health people are nerds; we listen to data and then we act on it and most people don’t do that. They act on emotion far more. The second bit is that we know from most behaviour change that you cannot expect people to worry about something that they are not already worried about, so you have to try to meet them somewhere where they really are, whether it is that they are worried about the bill or they are worried about their mum getting breast cancer. You have to meet them somewhere where they already have a concern. The third thing is that you have to make it real and immediate. We have learned from a long history of health education that if you try to get people to worry about something where there is an indeterminate risk in the medium term and something that is pleasurable now, they are not very good at it, which is why we do not bother with public health messaging about alcohol, cigarettes, unprotected sex, drugs and so forth, because for a lot of people that is great fun now and there is some risk that comes down the line and they are not good at wiring together what they do now, or giving up something they are enjoying now, for that. The final bit, and this is not just because I am working in health, is that we do know internationally that the health message is probably the strongest message. It is the one that people hear. They trust healthcare professionals. They trust nurses in particular, actually. Nurses are way out there. They will hear the message and they are worried about the human impact on them and their own children, so it is a way to reach people. I also agree that bills matter.

You have already heard very powerfully from Emma that cost is probably going to be the primary motivator for people—I would accept that—and from Hugh that the co-benefits such as health, air pollution, hopefully improving biodiversity will also be there, but I do not think that negates the need to do the underlying explanation of why we need to get there and what the direction of travel is, which is what scientists can do. I am afraid we will do it in a nerdy way, most of us. There will be some lessons.

Is there any way of making science exciting?

There will be people who translate what I would say in a more nerdy way. There will be people who will translate that into the climate equivalent of an Attenborough programme and then further down to the climate equivalent of one headline in the Daily Mail, or whatever it is, that is actually positive for once. I think the answer to your question is that we need to do all the things we have discussed. The fact that just giving people facts is not the answer does not negate the need to give them the fact.

The experience we have had has been deliberative settings where you have time with people.

Which we do not have.

Were the Government to set up those structures, and certainly when we have run communication through those structures, nerds are fine. The public is more than able to understand the facts here and make trade-offs, and quite complex trade-offs, between policy choices. I do not think that you need to think about what the simplest message or the most trusted voices is or even assume that the public does not have an appetite and does not want to understand the science in some of the complex trade-offs we are offering. We have certainly found the experts go down well with the public when we have spoken to people, but you have to have the space to query, question and debate. Delivering just one-directional facts I think is not something that we have seen to be powerful.

Is there space for that deliberative approach? We have, what, 72 million people in this country? People around this table knock on doors every weekend, we do a lot of listening, have a lot of conversations, and we know how much time that takes to have even 10 conversations on a Saturday afternoon. Given that I do not think we can put in place deliberative strategies for everyone, are there any other techniques we can use? Also, linking to that, what is the evidence about how you meet the needs of different groups in our population? Because we are not a terribly diverse set of people, just based on appearance alone. How do we address that as well?

I think you are right in part. While I am in massive support of the citizens’ assemblies—and I am not saying we should not have them; we should ramp up what Emma was talking about—we need a parallel track, too. The people who are really good at this, of course, are advertisers. They are very good at getting us to do things that we did not realise we wanted to do. There are some very good progressive people in the advertising industry, creatives and others, who are on side for this and they are beginning to coalesce. I think they would help with the messaging because they are very good at understanding how to get messages across. Also, that business of market segmentation that you are talking about, about if you are talking to a poor person from an ethnic minority group in Birmingham, the messaging has to be different and conveyed in a different way and potentially a totally different message than talking to a white 80-year-old in Highgate. So, my answer to that would be advertisers.

I suppose that is a partial answer in that the purpose of institutions like the Climate Change Committee doing some of that research and giving you that evidence is for you then to be able to use it as policymakers and parliamentarians without having to do it yourselves. I cannot comment on what the Government might choose to do with their own communication but we have said that more public engagement is important. I would also say that we are probably not the experts on communication. The CCC is an analytical body and we are scientists or, as you said, nerds. I think as policymakers you are talking to the public every day, but on top of that there are expert organisations that have thought about this question deeply. Lastly, I wanted to put on the record that the social research we did and the citizens’ panels were geographically diverse and deliberately so. Again, the public going through that deliberative process was more than able to think through problems in different ways and understand the science and the information they were given.

One final quick observation is that the bad actors, generically, have been very good at this. They have put a huge amount of money into working out what message plays best to get people to do the counterfactual and we need to get on the front foot in the opposite direction.

Thank you. Now, we may have folks coming fairly soon, I am guessing, so Polly Billington has the final set of questions.

The question I have in front of me is one that I think you have already tried to answer in a number of different ways. I am going to try to dig deeper into it. What are your top three recommendations for Government with regard to building support for energy in the net zero transition? I suggest, Emma, that yours is probably likely to be change how we price energy. Can I follow up, therefore? I have been listening with a lot of interest to a lot of the things you say. I was interested that you said that doing net zero properly would mean that everybody would be better off if we were to make electricity cheaper. I am genuinely concerned about the risks for the fuel-poor of shifting the carbon policy and other decarbonisation costs on to gas. Can you tell me a little bit more about your analysis, which suggests that people will be better off with that shift, because that is my primary concern when we are talking about reform of the electricity market?

I would point you to the distribution research that modelled two different policy packages, including moving some of the policy costs on to gas and some of the policy costs into taxation in different proportions. Broadly, in the vast majority of households that we looked at, people still benefited because they were taking on electric technologies. There were some exceptions. For example, one property type was people living in high-rise buildings with electric resistive heating. There were some very specific cases where the benefits were not as clear as in the others. If you look at that analysis, you can see it broken down between different housing types. The message, though, was because you are making electricity cheap and electricity becomes the fuel powering most households, most households see a benefit from that switch to an electric vehicle and the heat pump.

You do understand that that transition will be extremely hard. We have a significant number of people in fuel poverty who rely on gas to heat their homes. Gas is expensive now, so we need to acknowledge that, and is volatile, but it is still cheaper, significantly cheaper, than electricity. You create a profound disincentive for anybody to shift over, especially if they are short of cash.

You can see the various impacts of moving, for example, on to gas or into taxation in that analysis and we were quite careful because of the nature of that choice and the fact that it goes well beyond decarbonisation policy not to recommend one or the other; they are illustrative packages only. However, if you look at that analysis you can see the distribution impact, so it will answer your question on what it means for low-income homes and households in a particular housing type. I would point you to that analysis and be very happy to answer any further questions you have on it. I should have said that as well as making electricity cheaper, we did have other recommendations for policymakers, particularly around communication, and highlight that the reason that electricity was such a primary recommendation for the Committee at the moment is that the households question, electrifying the demand side of energy in particular, is really important. In general, we have heard a lot more from Government about electricity generation than we have about households. We are waiting on the Warm Homes Plan to be able to really score Government progress on homes. To reflect the earlier question about the impact of the Budget on bills, one reason that I think we simply cannot fully answer that question is we do not know what the whole package of measures looks like, including what will be in the Warm Homes Plan, for example, to in some way mitigate the change with eco policy. That again will speak to some of your questions about impacts on particular kinds of homes. In the progress report this summer, we will look at measures in the round and make recommendations to you on whether we think that they are sufficient for decarbonisation and say something about different households and any change to our analysis.

Okay. I think it is interesting that when we have been talking about deliberative structures and so forth, we have been talking about the fact that they are properly demographically diverse and so forth, but fundamentally when we have the more general conversation, it feels like what the conversation is dominated by is the discourse around owner-occupiers. They do not make up even half of the households in this country. They are certainly not the ones who are most likely to be impacted by adverse issues around policy costs. I would be interested to understand how you could help us rebalance that national conversation into something that is much more focused on those people who do not own their own home and may still—despite our wonderful Renters’ Rights Act—not be in full control of their home, if they are paying rent to a private landlord. What is the role of social housing, which is in the control of a large number of people who are democratically accountable to the electorate to be able to get this stuff done, and when can we shift some of those big movers and levers to be able to get something more profound done on that?

I will pick up some of it. I cannot tell you the policy answer because that is not my area, but you are right in my view. The community I serve in north London is a poor community and I am not an owner-occupier either. They are certainly not and they do not have control. My worry would be, with that shift, they suddenly get hit with the bill they cannot meet. Some of it may be—Emma would know the data and I do not—about changing the housing stock at the same time. If you are able to upgrade the insulation and ventilation in those homes, that will mean that the bills and the energy requirements will drop enormously, and there are other benefits, too. Gas cookers produce an awful lot of water and in a poorly ventilated space that drips off the walls, you get mould, and then we get people coming in with their asthma and arguing with the council to get moved. There may be something to be done to say to those in that space that while we are moving to electricity, we can help you reduce your bills in this way and it will improve your health at the same time.

That is helpful. The big six came in a few weeks ago and said that even if the gas price went down very low, electricity prices would still go up, which puzzles us since we understand that electricity is continuously linked to the gas price. I would like your view on how we need to reform the electricity market to make electricity cheaper, and to understand what you think they mean by that and why they are insistent that it is basically policy costs that are keeping prices high.

It is certainly true that we are expecting to see network costs and policy costs come through on bills and, as we have talked about, they sit on electricity bills, not gas bills. There was also a small rise in electricity wholesale costs, I think, under the last price cap rise. The wholesale cost, because the gas prices settled, has come down. However, over the last 10 years the biggest component of the bill has been the gas price and wholesale costs are still at the moment 38% of the domestic bill. I think they are right, though, that without measures to reform the way we put charges on electricity and gas, you will not get that clear signal that electricity and the underlying economics and efficiencies of electricity should be cheaper for people. Regardless of what happens in the wholesale markets, Government will have to take action to try to get that spark gap down. That is true.

Can I follow up on a couple of things that you said, Emma? One is the 10,000 different housing archetypes, which I was delighted to hear because it is very rare that I find somebody who spends more time talking about the different typologies of housing.

I think I have said this at a previous Committee, but all our models are obviously transparent and you can find them online if you would like to go through them.

I am absolutely delighted. However, I would quite like you to cross-reference that on a tab, thanks, with all the different tenures of homes and incomes because that is important.

Yes, I think we have some of that in the model.

Otherwise, what we do again, I am afraid, is start talking about somebody with an off-road electricity charger, somebody who has huge amounts of attic space in order to be able to insulate it, somebody who has enough space for a heat pump outside and so on, when I am talking about my single parents in small houses and small rented accommodation where they have no control.

We have done that. We have the buildings model where we look at different solutions in 10,000 or so different building types. We then did distributional impact analysis across, I think—I always get this the wrong way around—12 different household types and 15 different kinds of farm, interestingly, on our land advice. Those archetypes included socioeconomic factors but also things like tenure and the type of household. We then applied the different policy options, including moving some of the levies around and other policy choices, so that you can see what that looks like across different households. When I say that we model different kinds of household, that is what I mean. It included tenure.

Okay. Finally, although you have been adamant that you do not have a preference on policy, it is quite interesting that when we have been talking about electrifying heat you have referred almost consistently to heat pumps when obviously there are other ways of decarbonising heat.

The way to think about the advice in the seventh carbon budget is that where there is a clear technology winner, when the analysis clearly supports an option, we have been clear to say it. We have said that it is an electric vehicle, not another decarbonised vehicle for road transport. For homes, we have said that in most cases it is the heat pump. We do have heat networks in our assessment and we have some electric resistive heating, notably, for example, in Scotland, where you have lots of tenement buildings. We have other heating technologies alongside the heat pump, but the primary message is that in most cases it is an electric technology, and within heat, in most cases, it is a heat pump. Again, we have modelled that across different household archetypes to a pretty significant degree, and again you can find all that modelling and analysis online in detail.

Apart from making electricity cheaper, what else would you do?

We have made various recommendations to Government. We try not to get to the point where we are prescribing policy choices, which on the building side of things does become about targeting particular homes and is therefore for Government rather than us. Broadbrush, what we have said is that you have to get the market incentive right, which means cheap electricity and up-front grants. How you target that is a decision for Government but there is quite a clear need for it. You can see in our economic assessment of the whole economy that that is where the investment comes from, and there is an investment need. We also say that we need to clearly communicate that it is heat pumps and electric vehicles for most households, and give those choices to people. As to how you communicate that—again, we have talked about it—there are other experts out there, but certainly we have pointed in previous evidence from the Climate Change Committee to the need to do that at the right time and through trusted actors, which can include—

Sorry to interrupt. Again, what I am finding is that we are having a conversation about owner-occupiers, people who are moving home and who will then make a choice between whether they have a heat pump or a kitchen. We have large levers with social housing where you can tackle fuel poverty as well as decarbonising heat and so forth. I can totally understand why you are saying, “Well, those are policy choices”, but if your job is to make recommendations about how you knock megatons of CO2 out of the economy without it falling over, it strikes me that it would be a good option to make sure that we are continually focused on the big levers that the state has.

The last recommendation that we made is specifically that you need policies for private rental and for social housing. In general, to get the S curve, to get the roll-out rate we need in heat pumps and electric vehicles for the seventh carbon budget, a lot of it is about things like making sure that the boiler upgrade scheme is in place and that there is help with the up-front capital cost of installation at owner-occupied level. That is not to say that you do not also need different and specialist interventions in other areas of the housing market. How you do that is obviously for Government, but we have called that out in the advice on the seventh and I am sorry I did not bring it out earlier in the evidence.

No, it is okay. What is interesting is that it may well be something to do with the criteria and the terms of reference of the CCC. We have such a settled view that the market is going to solve everything that the instinct and necessity of the way that you come up with things is, “Well, we will deal with them and the other things are a matter for Government”. We have to decarbonise homes.

I do not think that is a fair reflection of the advice. Among other things, we have pointed to, for example, regulations in new build. We have pointed to examples of where Government policy exists and is necessary in social housing and in the rental sector. That is all there in the advice and it is certainly there in the progress reports. However, we are also trying to emphasise that this is not just about Government. Nor is it about individual choice. We also need to get market incentives right, not least because we estimate that 65% to 90% of the capital investment is going to come from the private sector. Also, you are asking people to take on low-carbon technologies because we know that they are cheaper and because we know that electricity is going to be the fuel of the future in most economies. It is a very powerful and clear economic message to say that making your future fuel more expensive is a bad idea, and I do not think that is even a comment about decarbonisation; I think that is a comment about energy strategy more broadly. We are keen to emphasise it because it matters across the economy, it matters in our analysis, and it drives so much of the decarbonisation going forward. It is not the only measure by a long way and you can find others in the advice on the seventh.

Thank you.

Thanks very much.

Sorry, Hugh, did you want to say something?

By all means.

Very briefly because I know that you are trying to draw things to a close, outside housing stock it is food. It is one of those bits where we can get carbon sequestration, adaptation, prevent flooding, prevention of eutrophication, food security, and a massive impact on the health of the nation. Globally, 38% of carbon emissions come from food supply chains. We know how to fix that bit, and we can improve the health and wellbeing of our nation and save a tank load of money across our healthcare as well. Remember that when you reduce those healthcare costs, you also reduce their emissions. An MRI scan is around 20 kg of CO2. We did 4.4 million of them last year. We did 8 million CTs at 10 kg. That is just the scans, and a lot of that is being driven by non-communicable diseases. Again, it is difficult for politicians to enact policy without being accused of nanny-statism. We need to start framing it differently, saying that this is good for our health service, it is good for us, and it also happens to be good for climate change.

Am I allowed to add a clarifying point as well?

Yes.

There is always a danger when we give evidence on the pathway analysis that we end up in a situation where there is a single version of truth. The balanced pathway analysis we did for the seventh carbon budget exists to give you confidence that the number that we are recommending for the UK economy as an overall target for the years 2038 to 2042, including international aviation and shipping, is an 87% reduction on emissions against 1990. That is our mandate. We run all our additional analysis to give you confidence in that number. Quite clearly, as Government, you are allowed to make your own choices and the choices are for you, including what you do for different kinds of housing stock. I note that the Scottish Government have recently accepted our advice on the target but have said explicitly that they are going to do something different in policy with regards to heating and tree planting. That is as it should be. That is the way that the relationship works. We make recommendations in the report. They are our best advice but they are not prescriptive choices, and nor is the pathway the only version of the truth of how you can get to the target.

As the thing that we have heard the most today has been that we should reduce the cost of electricity, I am going to ask another question about it.

Hang on, can I just finish one thing?

Yes, go on.

We were talking about three recommendations for Government and what I now have is to keep making electricity cheaper and tackling food. I am also interested in the stuff to do with nature, on the basis that of the things that people in this country love most, after the NHS it is our countryside. What do you think we could do on our nature management in terms of climate that would reassure people that we care enough about nature and see it as a crucial part of the climate transition?

It is very simple: plant trees. In order to hit the tree-planting rates we need to deliver on net zero, we need to be planting trees today. Trees take 25 years to grow and mature in order to remove carbon from the atmosphere at the rates that we need, so we need to be planting them now for 2050. On top of that, we would say the right tree in the right place, so broadleaf native species.

And accessibility because that helps the health, mental and physical, of people.

On this question about electricity prices, would we have been better off spending the ECO money, given some of the problems with the schemes, on reducing electricity prices, and is there something in making that comment about what we do with the Warm Homes Plan money?

I think the first part, Chair, is too specific for our mandate because it speaks to the nature of different choices in Government. The other thing I would say is that until the Warm Homes Plan comes out I do not think we can see what Government policymaking on the built environment looks like in the round. We will again come back in the progress report and say it. The third thing to say is that we do not think the measures in the Budget close the spark gap and that is our primary interest from a decarbonisation point of view. There are other extremely good reasons to take action on energy bills at the moment, which you have heard from folks in the energy sector and from the regulator, regarding affordability, but in terms of our advice and our assumptions about electrification and people getting the benefits of these technologies, we need to get electricity costs down still.

You are just not in a position to say how.

Certainly not yet. Not until we see the Warm Homes Plan.

Emma Pinchbeck, Hugh Montgomery and Eric Wolff, thank you very much for giving us your time and your evidence in this marathon session. It was longer than the world record for the marathon so it truly was a marathon session. I appreciate it.