I cannot overstate the horrors that global warming has in store for us and our children should we fail to take immediate remedial action. Yet, my timeline is still full of dinosaurs of the Right and tech utopian fantasists of the Left. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/31/climate-crisis-exerting-increasing-impact-on-uk-says-met-office?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Tweet

This is what rapid action on decarbonisation looks like, but... https://twitter.com/jonburkeUK/status/1285914427074772992

...that's the easy part. The fact is, demand-side measures that reduce superfluous consumption present the single most effective mechanism for reducing emissions. We - the industrialised world - are objective consuming more than the finite limits of the planet can withstand.

Politicians don't want to level with you about this. They think you love 4x4s and foreign holidays more than your own kids. Maybe 40 years of 'me, me, me' means they're right? Well, I love my children enough to risk unpopularity by telling people things they don't want to hear.

There's no escaping that we need a price on carbon covering most goods (with zero rated items to reduce hardship). But a lack of international action should not deter the U.K from implementing its own system, which will be necessary to reach real net zero emissions in any case.

The beauty of carbon-pricing is that it doesn't prohibit anything; it merely ensures that the price of commodities reflects their full environmental costs. One of the most significant environmental problems is that we consumers to externalise the costs of their choices to others.

There are, of course, lots of high-impact decarbonisation measures - such as the transformation of the energy system - that can have a huge positive impact with minimal disruption, but there's no getting away from the fact that consumption has to fall if we're to save ourselves.