There’s a story in the Independent this week that upgrades to the UK’s electricity grid will cost £32bn, part of an estimated £200bn that will be required to hit the country’s climate change targets for 2020. The £32bn will add £6 per year to the average electricity bill, yet it is being portrayed as an obstacle or some great painful sacrifice.
Just £6 a head a year to make such a huge leap forwards in tackling climate change? Is that all? Given the risks of doing nothing, I’d say that was a bargain.
And just think, that’s a £32-200bn clean tech market to deliver the transformation. Just when we need to build a greener, more robust economy to get us out of the current economic pickle.
What’s not to like?
On the wider scale, this shows once again we have got to flip our attitudes from seeing the problems to seeing the opportunity. Optimism is a rare commodity in the environmental movement, but whether we are looking at one country’s infrastructure or one company’s environmental strategy, we have got to get much better at, as sausage manufacturers would say, “selling the sizzle.”