We’ve had a week of depressing headlines here in the UK: the horrific murder of the most innocent kids doing the most innocent of things – a Taylor Swift-themed dance class – followed by a flurry of false rumours about the identity of the suspect, and then riots across the country as people express their ‘patriotism’ by throwing bricks at the Police, setting fire to a Citizens Advice Bureau and looting bath bombs from Lush. “We want our country back!” is the cry.

Nostalgia is an extremely powerful emotion that often overrides any rationale. Personally, I have a tendency to look back fondly on the 1990s – my partner and I were DINKies (dual income, no kids) who could pretty much do what we want, when we wanted, with plenty of spending money to do it, against the backdrop of Britpop-fuelled optimism. I have to keep reminding myself that those rose-tinted spectacles keep filtering out the horrors of war in the Balkans and the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi. Closer to home, the headlines were full of the crimes of Fred and Rose West, Harold Shipman and the murderers of James Bulger, to name but three. But those don’t come to mind as readily as the days of fun, sipping beers in the sun watching Pulp on a distant stage. Ah, the good ol’ days.

Going back to child safety. The current homocide rate in the UK is statistically identical to when I was a child in the 1970s/80s. [Early this morning, I saw a graph on Twitter showing that for children it is much safer today but I’ve been unable to track it down to verify it.] As always, road deaths run at about twice the murder rate, so if our rioters really wanted to protect children, they should really be campaigning for speed bumps and low traffic neighbourhoods.

The point I’m trying to make here is that people act on emotion rather than statistics – we all do it, even you and me. And we have to be very aware that many of the same people currently pretending not to fan the flames of the riots are also trying to weaponise Net Zero as some kind of threat to the ordinary man and woman in the street. This is not a battle of facts, but a battle of emotion, of gut feeling and confirmation bias. We need to use Green Jujitsu and reframe Net Zero for each audience, whether that’s for energy security, for warmer homes, for cleaner air and, yes, for child safety (road safety, asthma etc) – whatever button works – because if we don’t make a compelling case for, some silver-tongued amoral rogue will make the case against.