Many regular readers will be aware that I have another hat – I’ve been a City Councillor here in Newcastle for 20 of the last 21 years (I had a year in the wilderness). In 2004, the year I was first elected, my party took control of the Council for the first time ever. We inherited a recycling rate of  just 8%, terrible even back then, and pushed it up to 39%. When we were looking for ways to push it higher, officers suggested that alternative weekly collections would nudge householders to recycle more as they would only get their residual waste bin collected every two weeks.

Unfortunately our public consultation on this change coincided with a wave of populist press ‘outrage’ against changing bin collections– one paper featured a man apparently using a blowtorch to remove maggots from his tarmac drive (I have it from a good source that the maggots were bought in a bait shop). With local elections looming, our main political opponents in my ward jumped on the bandwagon and put out leaflets listing all the diseases that this policy would apparently expose the public to, illustrated with pictures of rats and creepy-crawlies. We backed off to wait for the furore to die down.

Unfortunately we lost control of the Council in the meantime and the incoming regime promptly u-turned and implemented alternative weekly collections to barely a squeak of complaint from the public. I did get some childish enjoyment from reciting their list of terrible diseases back at them in the Council Chamber (I can be remarkably petty), but the world moved on. You couldn’t imagine a political party getting much traction for a return to weekly residual waste collections today (some have tried in the interim, none have succeeded).

I think about this example as the political right in the UK aligns itself against Net Zero and Donald Trump took the extraordinary step of halting an almost completed offshore wind farm on obscure ‘national security’ grounds. There’s a prevalent media narrative about a backlash against Net Zero, ESG and everything vaguely green. Social media abounds with AI pictures of broken solar panels lying in fields and ‘reply guys’ fire a steady stream of easily debunked myths on sensible LinkedIn posts (I’ve had some corkers over the weekend)

There are three ways of responding to this: firstly despair and anger at the sheer levels of misinformation and mendacity, secondly to see it as the inevitable pushback from vested interests as real change starts to bite (aka predatory delay), and, thirdly, trying to separate the signal from the noise to see what is really happening in the world. I tend to subscribe to all three simultaneously.

Globally, investment in clean energy hit new records in the first 6 months of 2025 (of which Trump has been president for 5), up 10% on the previous year. The cost of solar energy in particular continues to plummet and countries around the world are investing heavily. Electric vehicles are the only type of automobile whose market is actually expanding. I could list many more examples of things going in the right direction.

We’re in what rugby players call the ‘hard yards’ – brutal battles for just a couple of steps towards the goal line. The closer we get to the line, the more harder the pushback, and sometimes the ball has to go backwards to go forwards. But the goal line is just there ahead of us – and when we get a score, we’ll have to go back behind the halfway line and start working on the next one. No-one ever said it was going to be easy – but we can’t afford not to win.