The nub of last week’s podcast discussion with Andrew Sissons was: UK electricity is currently expensive because our legacy system is dependent on expensive gas and we are trying to build a whole new system to replace it. Even if the new system will be cheaper when it is fully up and running, the cost of rewiring the country is far from insignificant. The more I mull on this, the more I see parallels with the transition in the motor industry: car sales globally are falling so there isn’t much money around to invest and we are trying to build a whole new ecosystem – electric drive chain/battery suppliers, manufacturing lines, post-sales support, charging etc.

In both cases, it is the overlap of the old and the new during the transition that creates the problem, rather than the end point we are trying to get to. This is complicated further through non-linearities – there is a minimum viable service required to sustain either the old or new systems from sudden collapse, and during the transition we may have to prop up both.

I suppose it is like fitness training. I’m pretty fit through cycling and circuit training, but I have a love/hate relationship with running. I like running and I like the idea of being able to run, but damage to one of my knees from dabbling in taekwondo in my 20s means I have to be careful and I stop whenever it flares up – running down a steep hill often triggers it and I live in a steep-sided valley. But the main reason why I don’t run at the minute is I know from experience the first few runs will leave me feeling truly horrible before my muscles and joints get used to it again. Eventually I’ll feel great, but that transition will hurt bad. So I put off starting.

In the same way that the transition period between being unfit and fit is painful, the period between high carbon and low carbon is where we feel the economic and social pain. From a social/political point of view, pain is much more powerful than gain; psychologists can demonstrate that we resent losing £10 much more than we appreciate gaining £10. This is why, as we start to hit the steeper gradients of the low carbon S-curves, we get a chorus of “why on earth are we doing this?”, or more insidiously, “yes, we have to do something about climate change, but not [anything which will actually make a difference].” In the perception of outsiders, brown jobs lost will never be recompensed by green jobs gained (and they could well be in a different place), investment for modernising the grid is slated while the cost of road widening is welcomed, and labour issues in the solar panel supply chain are decried using electronic devices with the exact same provenance.

Going back to my fitness analogy, the old training clichés include “no pain, no gain”, “if it’s not raining, it’s not training” and “feel the burn”. All of these actively welcome discomfort as a positive, not a negative. Likewise, we should look at the flood of anti-Net Zero bullshit in the press and social media and see it as a sign of success, not failure.