On BBC Radio 4's Any Questions? panel show last week, a Conservative MP's standard lines on net zero were met with audience disbelief, as the reality of a rapidly changing climate made the party's position sound increasingly surreal, according to Guardian columnist Zoe Williams.
Williams, who appeared on the panel, said the audience's questions focused overwhelmingly on the climate crisis, with the news that El Niño would bring an unprecedentedly wet autumn doing little to soothe the parched earth of a record-breakingly hot, dry summer. 'Crops are failing, the land is on fire and nobody has not noticed,' she wrote.
Audience questions focus on climate
The question that best captured the mood was: 'Have we left it too late to avert the crisis?' Williams said there was no such thing as too late, channelling economist Ann Pettifor, one of the architects of the original Green New Deal, who argued that we had to proceed as though there was still hope, because the alternative – grim nihilism – was no basis for a cooperative, generative body politic.
Isabel Hardman from the Spectator said it was already too late for some things and not for others, noting that things weren't looking good for birch trees in the south and east of England.
Conservative MP's response
Conservative MP Nigel Huddleston then responded, but Williams argued that Conservatives are tribally required to say that transforming to a carbon-neutral future is too expensive at this time, even while they can see the impact of fossil fuels all around them.
Williams said the purge of net zero believers from the Conservative party has a brute logic, with Kemi Badenoch choosing this as a red line. But when that position is performed in front of normal people who wake up every day to a rapidly changing climate, it sounds unhinged, she wrote.
Audience reaction
All the standard lines about the UK accounting for only 1% of emissions globally and leaving transformation to China dissolved on contact with reality, Williams said. One audience member gave the only sensible response, making a gesture with his hand and his head, which Williams described as 'legible' but which got him told off by a member of the production team.
Williams concluded: 'For the climate, it may be too late and not too late; but we definitely don't have time to carry on indulging this surrealism.'
