I tried listening to the BBC Moral Maze ‘debate’ on Net Zero, but I only got half way through as I was in a public place and screaming at the clouds with the ferocity I felt could have got me carted away to an institution. Why debate something if the panel debating it hasn’t the foggiest what it is? Everybody, including the chap from Net Zero Watch (do his funders know about this?), said climate change was a real, man-made and serious issue, but…

And it’s that ‘but’ that bothered me. Net Zero by 2050 isn’t an arbitrary figure plucked out of the air by some eco-warrior, rather it’s the target scientists have estimated we will have to hit in order to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Of course, it’s a wee bit more complicated than that as the area under the curve matters, but for the sake of this debate, it is a policy based on science, not dogma. And if that had been established up front, it would have settled much of the debate.

I listened to the NZW guy get grilled by the pro-science panelists, but they completely framed their questions in terms of ‘sacrifice’. In order words, as we have done much of the polluting, shouldn’t we shoulder more of the pain of change? No one said who cares if your car or heating is electric, as long as it does the job? People like cycling, given half a chance, otherwise it wouldn’t be a massive pastime and a major international sport (the Tour de France has the biggest live audience of any annual sporting event in the world). And would you rather travel for a romantic weekend in Paris by train or plane? It was all sackcloth and ashes, which allowed Mr NZW to claim poor people would suffer. No-one mentioned any opportunity or upside.

It got worse when the anti-net zero pair opened up on Dr Alice Ewart of Oxford University. She was told billions would die of starvation as we couldn’t produce fertiliser under Net Zero. What utter bollocks! The pro-DDT campaigners predicted a similar apocalypse, but DDT was banned and nothing bad happened, unless you count stopping poisoning ourselves and our food chain (try finding food in an pollinator-free world…) as a bad thing. One of the questioners asked about a deprived family who wanted to take two flights to Spain every year, clearly unaware that the average person in the UK takes one flight a year, so two would put them well up the income scale. Another question was whether an anti-Net Zero party won the UK election, would Dr Ewart ‘respect the democratic choice’. That’s not how democracy works, that’s autocracy – if only there was a clear and present example of that happening in front of our very eyes… Dr Ewart was much more polite than I would have been under this onslaught of poppycock.

I gave up then as it was starting to affect my blood pressure. I don’t expect everybody to have a comprehensive understanding of Net Zero and what a low carbon economy might look like, but to reduce such an existential issue to a fact-free parlour game nearly drove me bananas. If there’s any lesson to learnt from the exchanges is that we have to be much better at communicating what Net Zero means, along with its implications, welcome or otherwise.