77: 2023 so far - a stock take on the UK’s climate ambitions

How is it August already?! As the summer holidays come to an end, Matt, Becky and Fraser are joined by Local Zero icon Dr Jeff Hardy to discuss both their personal and broader highlights and lowlights of the year so far.

Episode Transcript:

Matt:  Hello and welcome to Local Zero. Somehow, we are already eight months into 2023 and it has been one crazy year so far.  

Fraser:  It certainly has. At the time of recording, the school holidays are just about to end and the summer is winding down, so we thought we’d take the chance to look back on key issues in energy and climate of the year so far, our highlights from the pod and look forward to where we think the big challenges and opportunities are for the rest of the year and beyond. 

Rebecca:  Joining us today is a long-time friend of Local Zero, Dr Jeffrey James Edwin Hardy, Director of Sustainable Energy Futures Limited. Jeff has very kindly taken time out of his busy holiday schedule to join us for a chat about all things local and net zero. 

[Music flourish] 

Matt:  So if you haven’t already, please do subscribe to Local Zero wherever you listen to your podcasts. Find us on Twitter @LocalZeroPod or on Mastodon at #LocalZeroPod and check out our website, LocalZeroPod.com. If that doesn’t satisfy you, you can always email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com. So, Jeff, welcome. You’re dialling in from holiday. That is a commitment for sure. I hope you’re having a nice and restful time. 

Jeff:  I am and, of course, anyone would interrupt their holiday for this show [laughter]. 

Rebecca:  Setting the standard there [laughter]. 

Jeff:  I’m coming to you from Whitehaven in Cumbria. 

Matt:  And you’re a Cumbrian lad, right? So you’re back home. 

Jeff:  Yeah, I’m a Seascalean. I’m from Seascale over on the coast. 

Matt:  Seascalean [laughter]. 

Jeff:  The most beautiful and abandoned beach in Cumbria because it’s right next door to Sellafield. 

Matt:  Yeah, Seascalean and Sellafield all sound a little bit sci-fi actually but listen, I’m really happy to have you in because we’ve got a lot to cover here. 2023, what a year! Normally, we do a stock take at the end of the year but I think, by popular demand, we’ve probably got enough content from the first eight months to do a stock take for the year. Is that a fair assessment? 

Jeff:  Yeah [laughter]. 

Rebecca:  Dear me, you know, Matt, I was thinking about this when we decided to do the stock take and thinking just about what we’ve done on the pod, let alone all of the wider goings on in our research lives, in the policy world and so on. I was just thinking about the pod and I actually forgot about three months worth of the episodes that we did and just assumed that they’d happened last year. Yeah, so much to think about and to get through. 

Matt:  Yeah, exactly and I guess this begs the question as to what some of our favourite episodes have been from the past year. Jeff is going to select all the ones that he was a guest on, I suspect. 

Jeff:  Yeah, possibly [laughter] and a co-host, of course. Becky and I co-hosted an episode, yeah. 

Matt:  Not just a guest, Jeff. 

Rebecca:  Where were you two lazy boys, Matt and Fraser? [Laughter] 

Matt:  We’ve got to point our listeners towards some of our favourite pods over the year. It’s been quite difficult for me to whittle this down but, Becky, I think you were quick off the mark when we put this around last night. 

Rebecca:  [Laughter] Well, I’ll tell you two of my favourite episodes but actually, it was so hard to just choose two because I put out loads more than that and I’m sure we’ll talk about them. Two I really, really enjoyed were the last episode, the one just before this – Episode 76 – all about water and the water industry. I just thought that the interview that we did with Hugo was absolutely fascinating. What I really loved about it was how tangible it was. I think sometimes, when we’re talking about energy, we can just kind of get lost in the invisibility of energy. If you’re not looking at that wind farm or if you don’t live next to energy from a waste plant or solar panels on your roof, you can sometimes just get lost in the invisibility. Especially for me, I live right by the sea and it’s part of my day-to-day life. It wasn’t just that the issues were critical and that there was a pathway to action that we could take but actually, it felt like something I could really grasp hold of and have real conversations with anyone about. 

Matt:  Yeah. Jeff, that’s where you hail from and that’s where you are now. It’s water. This is not a pun, by the way, but is it something on the lips of folk around about where you are now? Do you see this as a real dividing line at the moment? 

Jeff:  It’s so in the news, right? Feargal Sharkey, for example, has been brilliant in leading the campaign. I saw there was a first law case going in to claim compensation for sewage inaction in the news today. Yeah, I grew up in Seascale and we grew up right at the front as well, so looking out on the sea. When I left Seascale and went to York University, I couldn’t sleep for about three months because I couldn’t hear the sea. It was really odd. You can see sea out in the sea [laughter] with all the energy stuff going on as well. If I go on Seascale Beach and look right, I can see Sellafield and if I look left down to Barrow, I can see four enormous, offshore wind farms. If I look straight ahead, that’s where that coal mine is going to be. It goes under the sea this crazy coal mine in Cumbria. It’s all there right in front of you. 

Matt:  Jeff, you’ve done a lot of work on electricity networks. I know, in the past, as you say yourself, you’re a recovering regulator having worked for Ofgem. So one of the big things about water I think that came up in our pod with Hugo Tagholm was privatisation of this sector. Now I’m not wanting to get into a big debate around that but this does seem to be a sector where privatisation hasn’t worked. With your hand in the electricity networks and all the rest, I was wondering whether there are any lessons that we might be able to share because it feels like the water industry is in dire need of some pointers. 

Jeff:  Yeah, it’s a fair point. There are several trends that are probably true in monopoly networks that have been privatised. One is that over the course of that privatisation, the regulators and the industry have learned a lot about which incentives work, how to get the right sort of behaviours, how to get the right level of customer service and all of that kind of thing but we’ve also learned that probably the interests between the public and the investors or shareholders are not terribly aligned. Obviously, on one side, you’ve got a desire for shareholder benefit maximisation and on the other side, you’ve got a bunch of essential services, be it transport, water, electricity or gas and all of these energy vectors, etcetera. I think we are going to hit a crunch point on this, particularly given where we’re at on cost of living and on... let’s call it public attitude towards excessive profits and poor service. We’re going to hit something quite serious soon I think. 

Matt:  On the water quality one, Becky, which struck me, it’s a really interesting one. I’ve probably sent a grumbly tweet this morning around this. The water quality one is something that’s cut through in ways that we haven’t seen other issues cut through such as air pollution, for instance, and ULEZ (Ultra Low Emission Zones). Maybe you can dig more deeply into climate. Certain sections of political parties and certain sections of the media have been very hard on certain subject matter such as ULEZ. They’ve not really dug into water quality in the same way. It seems to be something that’s got cut through. When people are calling for cleaner rivers, oceans and lakes, that seems to be generally accepted as something that is okay to call for. 

Rebecca:  I think people calling for cleaner air is also accepted. The flip side of that and looking at the Ultra Low Emission Zones, you have challenges around what that means for people’s day-to-day lives and perceptions of injustice. Whereas, I don’t think those potential negatives come through as much with the water debate. The real impact seems to be on those who are currently polluting. It feels like there’s not that kind of wider space around it. For me, I think that’s one of the reasons that I really enjoyed the other episode that was top on my list which was the one we did with Kate Bradbury looking at our gardens. It felt to me as well that the conversation there was all very positive in the sense that this is something that people can take real agency and ownership over, whether you have a massive field out the back of your house or even if you’ve just got a window and a window box. Everything felt very practical. Here’s some advice and here’s what you can do. It didn’t feel like there was a lot of conflict, tension or negatives in and around all of that as well. So I really enjoyed that episode too. 

Matt:  Yeah, there’s something I want to pick out there from what you’ve both said. Where we’re at with the water debate is there’s a problem and there seems to be a groundswell of appetite for a solution. The finger is kind of pointing at industry and government. If you look at ULEZ, we’re at the point where I think it’s fair to say there has been a round table between industry and government and there’s been a settling on there needing to be some kind of solution. The Low Emission Zone in London and other cities are not new things. ULEZ is an expansion of this. The finger is then pointing back and saying to the consumer or the citizen, ‘You now need to change or this will happen.’ If I can link this into gardens, actually, there’s an opportunity and instead of somebody telling you that you have to do this in your garden, you can choose to do it. There’s where the responsibility lies and whether it is demanded of you or quietly and politely requested of you. I feel like those are big dividing lines at the moment too. 

Fraser:  I think that’s a really important point. I think it’s important to caveat that with as well that actually, we know that there’s a general widespread public understanding of the need for changes to happen around energy. It’s not just that we’re asking people to do something or change the way they do things. It’s not that people automatically say, ‘Oh my god, no. That’s terrible. You can’t make me do that.’ It just makes it a much more likely wedge issue for people on either side of that debate to then raise conflict around that which is exactly what we saw with ULEZ. There was very little reporting on the ground within Uxbridge saying, ‘What are the actual real issues here that you have with ULEZ or is there something else about this election?’ The amount of coverage on that was minimal versus jumping the shark completely into a rejection of green policies. I think where you’re involving people, who are overwhelmingly supportive of green policies generally, you involve people in a way that they might have to make a change and that makes it easier to drive wedges into. That’s not to say that there isn’t some potential pushback or concern about making those changes and not to say that there’s not a need to make justice and fairness central to that but it becomes much more politicised when it becomes about people making changes versus the water industry – not to simplify it too much – which is quite an obvious goody/baddy common thing that we all want to see and we don’t have to do much in the middle. It makes it much easier to take more decisive action on that, I suppose. 

Jeff:  Just a quickie on top of that as well. Between the air quality and, say, the water pollution, I think one of the key things is that it’s really obvious when sewage is being spilt into water. It’s visible. It’s visual. Whereas, the implications of air quality are really obvious but you can’t always see it. If you’re standing back from London, you see the haze over the city. The other thing is, and it’s something we might delve into later, ULEZ is not a bad policy. It’s aimed in the right direction. People are supportive of air quality but the implementation and the way in which people were aware of the implications and the help that was offered was really poor. You’ve seen the extension of the car scrappage scheme after the event. That’s not how you do stuff. The reason why I think we might come back to that later is that there’s a really live debate now about hosting energy infrastructure and transmission lines in Scotland, Norfolk or wherever it might be. They’re going to hit the same issues unless we really think about how we want people who are hosting that infrastructure to perhaps benefit from hosting that infrastructure. 

Rebecca:  More widely, I just wanted to do a shoutout at this point to the phenomenal live episode that Fraser and I co-hosted earlier in the year that was all about energy-smart places but actually, how we can make sure that these really support that broader just transition outcome and making sure that things work with people and communities and not just being done to them. Whether you’re talking about infrastructure or whether you’re talking about other policies, I think that is the approach that we need to be taking. 

Matt:  All of this points to the need for timely, in-depth, deliberative participation and co-development with communities. There are colleagues I’ve heard from over the past year during 2023, like Jen Roberts, Caitlin Hafferty at Oxford and Tavis Potts at Aberdeen, all talking about different methodologies for engaging with communities and hearing from them about when you’re developing these policies. Jeff, like ULEZ... clearly, with ULEZ, I completely agree that if you wanted to cut air pollution deaths, this is a really, really important policy. But to extend that car scrappage scheme on the basis of what we heard after it was implemented or was about to be implemented, I should say, it seems like they hadn’t done the engagement because they heard and they acted. Now whether they were hearing from the community who were asking for the scrappage schemes or commentators representing communities, rightly or wrongly, I don’t know but they felt it enough to change the policy. We need to get really good at engaging with the right communities at the right time when we’re developing these policies; otherwise, we see backfire. A vacuum is created and then you can see a rolling back. 

Fraser:  I think that’s crucial, Matt. I think if it’s not fair, it won’t fly. I think that’s fundamental to everything that we’re trying to do publically just now. We hear pushback relatively often from well-meaning people working in the net-zero space and the energy sector saying, ‘If we try and do everything fairly and we try and engage extensively, it’s going to take ages. We don’t have lots of time.’ But actually, ULEZ is a good example and it’s not the only example... we’ve seen it with, for instance, the Hydrogen Village Trial – rest in peace – in Whitby where if you’re not willing to take that time and work with people really, really closely, you then face the very high likelihood of having to redress the mistakes you’ve made from not doing that in the first place later down the line and also, in turn, seeing resentment and resistance to these ideas more broadly. For optics, it’s not great but I guess most fundamentally, if you want to do it fairly and in a way that benefits people and gets you over the line sustainably and effectively, it has to bring people in at the earlier stage. It has to be meaningful and it has to be fair and be seen to be fair. 

Matt:  Yeah, I just wanted to add a tagline, rightly or wrongly, to what Jeff said. It’s not what you’re doing, it’s how you’re doing it. There’s that notion that it’s the leadup process to the policy and then also the policy itself but the objectives of the policy like cleaner air. I haven’t yet met anybody who doesn’t like cleaner air. How you do that is the question. It feels like that was lost in the ULEZ debate. Fraser, some of the things that you were pointing to there is that we cannot lose sight of why we’re doing this; to cut carbon emissions and also to cut air pollution so we’re saving people’s lives who are living on these arterial roads. Rant over [laughter]. 

Jeff:  For now. 

Rebecca:  A very valid rant. Absolutely amazing rant. I think it was good but it’s just one section of everything we did. Are there any other key things that we’ve focused on this year that we think were particularly important or great? Matt, what were some of your favourite things looking back? 

Matt:  I had a few. I will flag one but then speak about another. I really enjoyed pulling together the Carbon Offsetting for Communities work. I worked a lot with our producer, Patrick, on doing that. We ran a summit in March to understand how nature-based carbon offsetting is really starting to change the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Not just Scotland but Wales as well. Jeff, you’re going to talk a little bit about Wales hopefully later and increasingly in England too with new woodlands and peatland restoration. We’ve seen this with energy caught in the crosshairs and rather a bit of an afterthought I would say in terms of where investors are. Increasingly, for all the reasons we’ve just outlined, it’s very much on the tip of people’s tongues. I will just flag that. There’s a  four-part series. Listeners, if you haven’t dug in, do so. The one I wasn’t expecting to really change my way of thinking was the decarbonisation of live music. We heard from Music Declare’s Lewis Jamieson but also colleagues at Tyndall Manchester like Carly McLachlan and Chris Jones. It just felt like it was a whole sector I hadn’t really thought much about but the carbon footprint of music is real and it’s big. It’s not just the carbon footprint but it’s the ecological footprint. The abiding takeaway I got from that was there is a lot that can be done outside of the regulator and the government. There was a lot of emphasis there on the acts and the fans. There’s a lot of shared ground around wanting to live in a greener, healthier future and music, as we know, has been the driver of major cultural change over the decades. I think it has a massive role to play in climate but it needs to lead by example. I thought Lewis and Carly pointed out some really exciting examples of that. When I go to a gig now, I think very differently... as and when I get the time which is rare [laughter]. 

Jeff:  I was going to say [laughter]. 

Matt:  When I do, I’m there thinking mostly about climate change which probably isn’t the most relaxing thing [laughter]. 

Fraser:  The live episode at EnergyREV was a lot of fun. It was a great panel. It was a great audience and there were lots of great questions as part of that. It was just a nice couple of days at that conference. I really enjoyed, a few weeks ago, the episode we did on Rights Community Action with Naomi about very much grassroots standing up to coal mine developments, fossil fuel developments or standing up for net-zero developments or developments that people see as providing big opportunities in their community like actively helping community organisations and people participating in hyperlocal democracy around these very much global issues I thought was really fascinating. Again, like you mentioned Becky, it was one of these episodes that was extremely tangible... you can go out and do this kind of stuff now if you want to. I thought it was a really, really good episode and a really empowering type of episode for us as well as listeners. 

Rebecca:  It was also our 75th episode. Whoo! It’s always nice to mark those things out. I agree and I thought that was a really great episode. I was so inspired hearing Naomi’s story of how she had got involved and was then really driving work in this space and working with different communities, bringing new skill sets and reflecting on a lot of these challenges around some of the legal aspects and things that perhaps people in communities may not even have the skill sets or the abilities to deal with. I really loved the way she brought her passion but also her expertise to support very exciting work going on. 

Matt:  Taking that and reflecting on 2023, we make a point that if you dwell on the bad news, you can quickly become disillusioned and lose that fire in your belly to make a change. What I’ve liked about some of the pods that we’ve covered this year is that there are a lot of good news stories out there. There are a lot of really bright, really committed and really experienced people who are making a change. Take Lewis and the music episode who has decades of experience working in the music industry and managing really high-profile bands and here he is pushing for a change to decarbonise the music industry. Brilliant. We want more of that like Kate Bradbury teaching every person about how to fundamentally improve the ecological footprint in their garden in really basic, basic terms that anybody can pick up. This is good stuff and if we don’t have this, I think we are in the wilderness and, again, no pun intended [laughter]. 

Rebecca:  Jeff, you have a slightly more impartial or unbiased perspective. Looking back, was there anything that particularly stood out for you in the year so far? 

Jeff:  You say unbiased but probably the two that stand out for me were the two that I was involved in. The first one that we did together on the Distribution Network Operators, Becky, was really interesting. It was a bit techy in places but there were some really important questions about the role of your local electricity networks and networks generally. I thought that was really good and probably a lot of the things that we learned in that are carrying through into a lot of the discussions that are going on politically and with the regulator. I did enjoy the EnergyREV live one back in March, wasn’t it? End of EnergyREV – sob. It was just lovely being around all of our colleagues for that last time and having everyone together but it was also just a really positive end to it. It was almost like a call to action. Look, we’ve learned an awful lot over the last four years about how you might develop these Local Energy Systems that are more in tune with local values and deliver benefits locally. Now how are we going to crack on and do it? I really liked that. I think I did slip in a question from the audience. I’m never knowingly not involved when I’ve got a chance [laughter]. One of the things that came out of that whole event... I said on a panel at the time that as a relatively grumpy person about energy policy, I decided, at that point, to form a self-help club [laughter] and that’s just kicked off. We have a collection of grumpy, frustrated energy policy people who get together – a little bit like Alcoholics Anonymous – where we just sit there and say, ‘My name is Jeff. This week, I’m grumpy about... X.’ Of course, it’s an anonymous group, so I couldn’t say whether or not anyone on this particular podcast is involved in it or not [laughter]. 

Matt:  No, you couldn’t [laughter]. I love this idea of having some energy grumps or grumpy wonks who have seen too much and they’re now at the point where they really need to self-soothe. Now, Jeff, we’re going to give you a platform to be grumpy but also to be very optimistic maybe too. Maybe you could reflect on 2023 so far. It feels like 2023 has been as busy for energy and climate as 2022 was for politics generally. I don’t know whether that’s fair. You’ve got plenty to pick from [laughter]. Any highlights or lowlights and thoughts about what this means in the bigger picture? 

Jeff:  Oh my god! [Laughter] What have we got? We’ve got, once again, undeniable impacts of climate change live on everyone’s TV every day of all sorts, whether it’s ice melting faster or Greece burning. There’s everything... storms. It’s all there laid out before everyone’s eyes, so it’s right up there in the public consciousness. We’ve had high-energy prices pervading through the first half of the year now starting to come down a little bit but still approximately twice as high as they were before the crisis kicked in which means we still have a significant poverty crisis ongoing with high inflation alongside all of that and with high interest rates. There are a lot of pressures. You’ve got pressures all over the place and in the context of that, it feels like we’re at the tricky bit of net zero, particularly from an energy perspective, which is that we’re continuing to make a lot of progress on electricity. Although, with inflation, I saw that one of the offshore wind farms has been put on hold, for example, because they cannot deliver it for the incentive, Contracts for Difference, that they’ve agreed. It’s not cancelled but it’s on hold. These things feed through to each other. What we call the easiest bit of the energy transition, the decarbonisation of electricity, is suddenly becoming a bit trickier. We’ll get on to all of those new transmission lines and the impact with the public later but then at the same time, you’re starting to see this impact in public of things that need to happen as well. We’ve talked briefly already about the Hydrogen Trial and the absolutely wrong way to go about public engagement that that one went through and, therefore, got massive pushback. We’ve had the Ultra Low Emission Zone becoming a political issue but really, at heart, it’s a badly communicated and delivered but acceptable policy. We’re having wider issues around the ability to put infrastructure in place like charging infrastructure or connecting anything to the grid at the moment. So much of the grid is full right now and partly, that’s an issue with connection queues but partly, it’s an issue that the grid is full. We have to wait for it to be upgraded. That’s slowing down everything from new housing developments, to electric vehicle chargers, to new local renewables... to whatever’s going to be connected to the grid. There’s a lot of stuff going on. The final thing is we’re in the middle of what feels like the busiest energy policy schedule I’ve seen for yonks. You’ve got the entire review of electricity market arrangements cracking on which deals with the supply side of the energy system like the generation and how that is passed through to customers, ultimately market structures. You’ve got, finally, something starting to move on retail market reform but more of a call for evidence than a call to action. You’ve got the local governance work that Ofgem is working through at the moment which is thinking about putting in place some sort of regional coordination body to help meet where local energy plans meet national energy planning and smoothing that through. You’ve got thoughts about how you increase the transparency and availability of different flexibility markets. You’ve got the potential of a flexibility exchange coming in place. That’s all at the same time all without any form of master plan about where it is we’re actually trying to get to. Alright, we’re going to get to net zero. That’s the key thing but we don’t actually know how we want to get to net zero. All of these things are pretty much operating in silos as well. 

Rebecca:  Can I get up on this soapbox with you? I am so grumpy about some of this stuff and I’ve been wanting to vent for months now [laughter] and I have been holding it in. 

Jeff:  Oh, you should join a club [laughter]. 

Rebecca:  I agree. Look, I mean there’s this lack of direction. It just feels like we’re floundering. We’re talking, and talking, and talking but we’re not seeing action because we’ve got nowhere for that action to go and we’re just going to miss the boat on net zero if we don’t move fast enough. The one thing that I’ve got such a gripe about is around heating and buildings. When I saw the Energy Security Strategy come out earlier in the year, I really wanted to write a blog about my reaction to it but I think, even now, I’m still so emotional and so angry about that that I’m finding it difficult to get my words down in a cohesive way. I just feel like we know what we need to do and we’ve got the vision and we’ve got the direction from the Climate Change Committee. We know what needs to happen with clean heating. We know we need retrofit and we know the speed and scale we need it. We are lagging. We are the worst in Europe and it is shocking how badly we’re doing in this space. We don’t have the finance and the business models. Just to see that the only policy support there is an extension of the Boiler Upgrade Scheme which, by the way, I did and I consider myself to be a relatively decent earner. We’re in a good financial position but I had to borrow money just to be able to get into that scheme and am now in debt. So how most people are going to even be able to contemplate that, I don’t know. With retrofit, there was just a focus on support for some number of thousands of households. I can’t remember the exact number but we’ve got something like seven million in the UK that need addressing. It’s just so shockingly poor in terms of policy support despite the fact that for that one, we know what we need to do. We don’t have the skills and supply chain to deliver it and I’ve seen my husband try and get into the industry and just how difficult it is, how undiverse it is and how unsupportive it is of people coming in from different backgrounds. Ultimately, we look at all of this and where we need to go and then we look at what can be delivered on the ground practically. I’m with Octopus Energy and I’ve talked countless times on the show about how brilliant they are, how much I’ve enjoyed being with them and how great they are but two things have been going on now for eight months. One is that they still can’t connect my smart meter properly. I’ve got a SMETS 2 smart meter and I should be able to get readings but it’s not connected and I have to do manual readings as if I had an old dumb meter. How then I can participate in any of these amazing new flexibility schemes, I don’t know. Secondly, I did the right thing and moved away from gas. I am still paying gas standing charges because despite having asked on multiple occasions for my gas meter to be removed, it has not been. Surely, those are such basic things that even when we have the direction, the vision and we know what to do, we cannot go in on the ground with some of the most innovative players in the industry. Rant over.  

Jeff:  That was brilliant [laughter]. 

Matt:  I think both of you were fantastic there because I think you outlined so many of the key issues. I’m going to add in another uncertainty because I think this could potentially be good or bad news and I’m not quite sure which. Jeff has outlined this avalanche of policy consultations and these expectations that we’re going to have to make some interventions over the coming months certainly right across the energy supply chain from licensing... whether it’s oil and gas or providing licences to offshore wind all the way through to, Becky, what you were saying about how we actually bill for and charge for power in people’s homes. We have a General Election and the expectation is May 2024 at the moment but that may change. There could even be one as early as this autumn. We don’t know at this stage but we do know that they’ve got to run one by January 2025 I think and it’s likely to be earlier than that. Now what industry and investors loathe is uncertainty and if you have certainty about high carbon or certainty about low carbon, that can tend to grease the cogs of investment. At the moment, we have uncertainty over everything and that’s compounded by political uncertainty. We have economic uncertainty, we have political uncertainty and on another level, we have socio-cultural uncertainty. I think there are quite a lot of values that people are maybe revisiting and are being challenged by others, friends and family. We’re in a period of massive flux and it feels like until we iron some of this out, Jeff and Becky, we can’t deliver these massive, massive infrastructural changes like retrofitting almost every home that’s currently standing, building out a transmission distribution network across areas we don’t have it and doubling or tripling our offshore wind capacity. How do we do that in this atmosphere of uncertainty? Does a General Election help or hinder that over the coming years? It’s difficult to say but there we go. 

Jeff:  There are two things. There are a lot of things but I’m going to start with two things. One is Professor Catherine Mitchell was right and I’ll explain that in a second. 

Rebecca:  Is that the title of the episode? [Laughter] 

Jeff:  Yeah, I think so. 

Matt:  You’ll have to explain to some of our listeners. 

Jeff:  I will. I promise. The other thing is this lack of vision. It’s absolutely linked to Professor Catherine Mitchell. Professor Catherine Mitchell at Exeter University, Falmouth campus, led a project called iGov which was thinking about governance of the GB energy system. A few years ago, I had the privilege of being on the advisory board when I was at Ofgem. One of the issues that Catherine and her very brilliant team of researchers and collaborators around her put their finger on was countries that have a really stable political consensus on energy and climate change tend to have quite progressive, long-term policies and a positive vision that is generally acceptable to the population. Denmark is an example of this but there are others as well. Take aside all of this culture war nonsense because it is just going to be a flash in the pan purely with the election in mind just trying to put a small wedge between various parts of society. It is a distraction. We have a very strong public acceptance of the need to do the right thing on climate change and that has been solid and, for the most part, growing over time. What we need to be able to do is to enshrine that into an apolitical vision of where we need to be as a country or a positive vision of where the UK wants to be once it becomes a zero-carbon economy. What you’re really doing there is bringing together all of that useful information we already have from the public, industry and everything about what’s required and what people expect of that future system and what they’re prepared to do in order to achieve it. What Catherine said, which I think is really important, is then you need to give that delivery to an apolitical body in order to get on and do it. Get the politics out of the way and basically get on and do it and only come back to the politics if something tricky occurs. In the iGov work, it was something called an Energy Transition Commission. This is a body that would take a lot of information in from, say, the Climate Change Committee, from National Grid and also from the politics to say, ‘This is how we want you to deliver on this,’ and then set out deliverable plans – proper plans – that set targets not just for, say, offshore wind but for everything that we need to do and mechanisms to get it done and to be able to then assign out responsibility for those to the bodies that can deliver, whoever it might be like National Grid, suppliers or generators. It’s about getting that consensus on politics because there isn’t, bar the very fringe elements. There isn’t a lack of consensus on climate change. 

Matt:  Jeff, let me just add a bit of flesh to that because you’re correct and YouGov takes constant polling on this. Just to add a few numbers to that... 

Jeff:  I love that you’ve always got numbers [laughter]. 

Matt:  Well, I think on this point, it’s important. Roughly, a third of the population or the sample of the population identifies environment and climate change as one of the three top priorities for politicians to tackle. That’s above issues such as housing, Brexit, crime and education. If we look at it in terms of the level of belief around climate change actually being an issue that we’re driving, 70% believe in climate change which is human-driven, 17% believe it’s happening but they’re not quite sure what’s driving it or they don’t believe it’s human and there’s about 13% who either disagree or are just unsure. You’ve got 70% who believe that humans are driving this and a third of folk are identifying this as one of the top three priorities. This has been incredibly consistent over the last few years. That’s the backdrop to what you’re saying in terms of that mandate if you will. 52% of people voted for Brexit. We’re seeing polls, time and time again, pointing to people having an appetite to tackle this. Having an apolitical body to get on and do this seems like a very sensible suggestion in my mind. 

Jeff:  Yeah, but, of course, politicians don’t like to let go of energy. It’s an essential service. It is political. There are security concerns. There’s all that kind of thing, so it’s difficult to get to this point but fortunately, there is experience from other countries, all be it relatively small populations, that it is doable. I’d love to know from experts in political economy about the right way in which you could make that palatable across the parties because that just feels like one of the most important things to get rid of so many uncertainties. That’s exactly your point, Matt. Uncertainty drives either business as usual because you stick with what you’ve got or it makes you really nervous and, therefore, money becomes very expensive for other things. Uncertainty always drives up the cost of capital. There’s a strong link between how much something costs and how certain you are about it being delivered as well. It’s just so important to reduce that. We’re not uncertain about cracking on and doing stuff. We’re not uncertain as a population that we need to do something. What we’re uncertain about is whether or not you can trust a political direction. 

Rebecca:  [Laughter] I feel like this is clearly something we might want to focus on. Perhaps there is a future episode coming up all about this. I feel like we’ve talked quite a lot about where we’ve enjoyed stuff that we’ve done so far and where we see some of the big challenges. Maybe finer reflections from each of us on what we think we absolutely need to focus on for the rest of 2023, whether that’s in our own lives, the policy space or even future Local Zero episodes. Jeff, do you agree about priorities and what we’ve been talking about? Are there any other areas you think we should a hundred per cent be focusing on? 

Jeff:  I’m happy to talk about priorities and I’m going to be shameless in talking about the thing that I’m most excited about at the moment. On Tuesday I think, the Welsh Government or rather Tad Cymru and Welsh Labour, through a collaboration agreement announced a new energy company called Ynni Cymru (Energy Wales) to be established in order to essentially help drive Smart Local Energy Systems in Wales for the benefit of local Welsh people and Wales more generally. I have the privilege of being an advisor to that project for the next year or so working with local partnerships to get that company scoped out and then get it delivered. It’s super exciting. There are lots of things we think it will do and we’re working through what that looks like. Really, it’s helping maximise the productivity and efficiency of existing assets in Wales like community energy assets of one form or another like a wind farm, a solar farm, a battery and electric vehicle charging but then learning as much as we can across the whole of Wales about how those assets currently operate and then seeing what options we can start to bring forward to maybe get them working together in integrated energy systems to drive more value back to those communities and also improve the productivity of the whole Welsh energy system so you can get more low-carbon stuff connected faster and hopefully, drive down bills for Welsh bill payers as well ultimately. It’s just brilliant, coming out of EnergyREV and looking at all of these projects trying to do stuff, that the Welsh Government or rather Plaid Cymru and Welsh Labour have put this as a priority. It’s proper exciting. Yeah, stay tuned. It was all over the BBC and Sky News from the Welsh Government themselves yesterday. 

Matt:  Very exciting, Jeff. I look forward to hearing more about that. 

Rebecca:  Fraser, your priorities for the rest of 2023? Any key things you think we really need to focus on in our work and on the pod? 

Fraser:  I don’t think it’s going to be any massive surprise for listeners and for you guys to hear me bang my drum in the corner here but I think what we’ve seen over the last, let’s say, month or maybe two months in particular are two things happening in tandem. The first is that there is a clear and present understanding of the urgency of the climate crisis and its direct impacts. They’re feeling much, much closer to home. We’re appreciating that. They’ve been very, very severe for a long time around the world but they’re feeling very close to home and people understand it. We know, Matt, from your lovely figures that people agree with the need for widespread climate action. What we see on the other side and the second thing that’s happening is that the rubber is meeting the road in terms of what we’re asking people to do in terms of more direct impacts in people’s lives of the net-zero transition. But the backlash from that has been, in many ways, manufactured but the backlash from that doesn’t feel as sharp as maybe we’d been worrying about it being previously, again, because people understand the need to address these issues. What we’re seeing from the collision of these two things is the public consensus that Matt and Jeff have both talked about but a real clear understanding that to get this over the line, it has to be done in a way that’s fair and it has to be done in a way that brings people along for the ride. Of course, that’s a challenge and it’s not going to be easy or happen overnight but the advantage of that is that when you’re thinking about how we do net zero in a fair way, in a way that’s sustainable and with people, you then open up a massive plethora of other good things that you can do. You can start to bring down bills. You can start to think about improving homes, improving health outcomes and improving social outcomes. That, for me, while it feels a bit chaotic and maybe a little bit jarring just now with some of the conflict and narrative around it, is incredibly exciting. It’s not so much a manifesto. I think you guys set out material things that are really exciting and really positive that we can all be focused on but for me, it’s about keeping sight of that bigger picture or vision that we have now and that big opportunity that we have in front of us and advocating for that anywhere possible. I think it’s what is going to get us over the line and I think it’s what is going to get us to a point where not just the net-zero thing which we have to do crucially but we can do so much other good in the process as well. That’s my pitch. 

Matt:  Okay, deep breath from me. What do we do? I’ve got a few pointers. I think we need to really shift away from what we’re going to do and where we’re going, which seems to be a lot of the discussion at the moment, to how we’re going to get there and how we’re going to get it done. This is a lot of what Jeff said about delivery. The time for deliberating in terms of percentage cuts, years and targets... we’ve done that. Okay, so let’s get it done now. The second is how we can galvanise support to tackle climate change into climate action at all levels. I’ve just made the point a moment ago about the iGov and there’s various other polling including the government’s own through DESNZ (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero) or what was originally the BEIS’ Attitudes Tracker. It’s there. So how do we translate that? That’s all about what Jeff said and I think what Labour is starting to point towards there is in terms of a vision of a greener, brighter, fairer world. I was very happy to see Keir Starmer come out on Sunday in response to some of the issues we’ve talked about and actually lay that out. I didn’t agree with everything in there but, for me, it was a big step forward, particularly it being in The Times too. Thirdly, listen to citizens and communities, engage with them and co-develop but cut out the noise. There’s a whole lot of noise. Again, let’s go back to the ULEZ. There seemed to be a huge amount of pull from certain quarters after the Uxbridge and Ruislip by-election. There were kernels and nuggets of value there that were coming from communities but we need a standardised, best-practice platform to hear from communities and citizens and take that as gospel and not just one narrator’s interpretation of another interpretation because this gets very lost very quickly. The final point is to call out the negative but spotlight the positive. We see mounting protests, the likes of Just Stop Oil or XR. I won’t go into where I particularly stand on that on a personal level but I think it’s important to call out the negative where it is but that must be coupled with spotlighting the positive. That’s what we’re trying to do on the pod a bit more which is spotlight positive. If you can go hand-in-hand with that and call out the negative and spotlight the positive, you offer people a way forward. There we go. That’s my manifesto. Thank you. 

Rebecca:  Yeah, hear, hear. I think for me it’s really about thinking things through from the perspective of those people who are at the sharp end of making change. Actually, if we take two major issues that I think we probably have not addressed enough and that we need to address, one being heating and what clean heating and better buildings look like and the other being our food, what we’re eating and the links between food and climate change, both of those things are where we need those right policies and enabling environments but actually, to create change, what we’re doing is we’re asking some number of millions of people across the country to all be making change there. I think, in both those instances, there are huge challenges partly around awareness, knowledge, understanding and misinformation. When you start to look at things practically on the ground, how do you take someone who is perhaps not acutely embedded in these debates on a journey from living in a home that’s probably leaky and that probably is quite high-carbon intensity in terms of the heating or in terms of people that might be eating in a way that is not perhaps the most environmentally friendly? How do you take people on a journey but recognise where they are, what they care about and where they have agency to change through to something that is in line with the vision of what we have for a net-zero future? I definitely think we need to pay more attention to that piece and how to support people where they are the agents of change. 

Matt:  Make that change easy and fair. Yeah, really important. 

[Music flourish] 

Right, there you go. I hope that was cathartic. I hope we’ve got it all off our chests. I feel a little bit better as well. You have all been listening to Local Zero. Please, if you know anybody who might enjoy it, word of mouth is a very powerful tool so why don’t you suggest our podcast to them? You can listen to the likes of us blethering on and our very special guest, co-host and friend of the pod, Jeff Hardy. 

Rebecca:  Absolutely and do remember to subscribe to us on your favourite podcast platform. You can find more on our website, LocalZeroPod.com and if you haven’t already, do follow us on Twitter. There’s lots of great chat there @LocalZeroPod. You can email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com if you want to share any longer thoughts. We have Mastodon at #LocalZeroPod. There are numerous ways to get in touch with us and please do respond to us and let us know what you think about our priorities for 2023 and if you have other things that you’d like us to focus on as well. But for now, thank you and goodbye. 

Matt:  Goodbye, Jeff. Enjoy the rest of your holiday. Thanks. 

Jeff:  I will. 

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