One of the most pernicious arguments against the UK’s Net Zero ambitions is that the country “is only responsible for 1% of emissions.” This is only true if you don’t count imports or air travel, but it is also morally bankrupt. The UK has 0.8% of the world’s population, so, per capita we are 25% above average, an average which is already too high. New UK Climate Change Committee boss Emma Pinchbeck has pointed out that we can’t meet the Paris ambitions if all the 1% and below countries give themselves a pass. And imagine what would happen if I told HMRC that I wasn’t paying my taxes as they are a tiny fraction of 1% of the total tax take…

But on Monday, at a workshop I was running with a client’s board, one director raised the spectre of another problem – ‘tech debt’. He explained that this is the phenomenon in software systems where penny-pinching in the present stores up a big and expensive-to-fix problem in the future. One version of tech debt is sticking with ageing technology rather than biting the bullet and upgrading now, maximising the life expectancy of the system as a whole.

It struck me that this was another weakness of the ‘1%’ argument – its proponents are assuming that high carbon technologies, spares, fuels and services will still be readily available and affordable in a low carbon world. Where do you source spares for ICE vehicles if the major motor manufacturers have switched to EVs? Who is going to be refining and distributing road fuel at a scale to keep costs down? And if carbon border adjustment mechanisms start to bite, will our industry still be competitive globally?

I can’t think of another major technological shift where people are actively campaigning for our country to be laggards rather than leaders. We talk about ‘stranded assets’ – high carbon assets losing their value in a low carbon economy. We could end up as a stranded country if we listened to the purveyors of the 1% fallacy.