YouSaid · the spoken record

Claire Coutinho

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54

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2025-10-17

most recent

2025-10-17

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1

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1. “You'd been his advisor, hadn't you? And so we'd been worried for a long time about the cost to consumers. And you can argue that we didn't go far enough. And I, like I said, approached it with an open mind and I thought the overall project had some worth. But it was controversial. We faced massive opposition. I remember the front pages after we did that reset. And it was almost universal that people said we were denying climate change. At one point I think Ed called me a flat earther and there was hysteria about there was hysteria about simply pushing back some of these targets which were going to add huge costs to people's lives.”

   2025-10-17 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Net Zero has become a religion: Claire Coutinho on climate, identity and cooking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “I mean, those are the first few weeks in the role, and we've just done this big reset. And you can argue, we just pushed back these bands that were coming down the track. So there was bands on boilers and cars. And we said, look, it's not the right time to do this. We in this case you.”

   2025-10-17 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Net Zero has become a religion: Claire Coutinho on climate, identity and cooking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “The cost of energy. So, my entire priority, whether I was in the job or now in opposition, has been how do we make energy cheaper. The biggest problem that we have is our electricity is the most expensive in the world. It's also some of the cleanest, but our biggest problem is that it's the most expensive. And when I started looking at those numbers and got into the detail of that, it dawned on me that actually we are making our electricity unnecessarily expensive. And that's a problem. It's a problem for industry, and we see that. We see that businesses are moving abroad. It's a problem for households. And it's a problem, by the way, for your emissions, because what you're doing is making your electricity really expensive over here. And on the other hand, you've got all these bands and targets and quotas for people to buy electric cars and to buy electric home heating, and it's not working because guess what? They don't want to pay more for those things”

   2025-10-17 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Net Zero has become a religion: Claire Coutinho on climate, identity and cooking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Look, I was the first person who came in to do that job who was questioning things. So at the very beginning, if you remember, we did a net zero reset. We talked about cost to consumers. And we talked about cost to businesses. But you're right. It has been a journey. I thought this was a good thing and we need to be careful about how we were doing it. But the more I got onto the bonnet, the more I realized actually what we're doing is counterproductive. We are making emissions worse. We're making the country poorer and we're losing jobs to other parts of the world.”

   2025-10-17 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · Net Zero has become a religion: Claire Coutinho on climate, identity and cooking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source