YouSaid · the spoken record

Emma Pinchbeck

lines on the record: 58
first: 2025-07-06
most recent: 2025-07-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Possibly, but equally, Alistair, the technologies have continued to improve, right? So we've halved the costs of achieving net zero between the last time we invited government, which was around that time And now, because the technologies have continued to improve, regardless of what's happening in the politics.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a challenging decade for the energy transition because there's more competition and there's global supply chains and there's the kind of conditioning global markets we've all talked about, but ultimately the energy transition is going in one direction. If you care about growth in the future of the economy, you're going to have to adopt electric technologies and get on board with cheap electricity. And the countries that do that early, which China and others certainly have moved to do, will get the most industrial benefits. That's what happens in economic revolutions. We are in one of those moments now. So whether you care about climate change or not, whether you call it industrial policy or social policy or your energy policy, fine, but you are going to end up doing a lot of the things that we're proposing that you do in order to meet the UK's carbon budgets.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It whilst living their lives straightforwardly, and they want clarity from government about what they're being asked to do. So I think there is actually a very simple, if long answer to the thing that I get asked all the time is why should we try? And very lastly, I think I said this when I did question time with Alistair.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether national impact is about 1% of those global emissions. We are all in it together and we all need to do our bit. And that is behind the international framework on climate action. The idea that we all do our part. And industrialized economies that have more resources go first and invest in these technologies early. And I suppose I often think about this again in relation to what it's like to parent a three-year-old, in that you don't, there's a kind of moral thing here in that if you can see the right thing to do, you don't go for the lowest common denominator. I don't say he can like poke his sister in the eye so long as his friends are doing it. I say poking your sister in the eye is just the wrong thing to do so we're not going to do it. And we know that climate change is a problem. The public knows that. In pole after poll after pole after pole, they tell us they want politicians to do more. But they do want it to be fair. They do want it to be straightforward. They want to be able to.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is to show that it is possible inside the existing economic framework to do this, that you can do it and grow GDP, you can do it and have your manufacturing GVA increase. You can do it and keep the way that we live pretty similar. So you'll still have a warm home, you'll still drive a car, but those technologies will change. There is some necessary behavior change in our analysis, but again, it's driven by choice rather than just forcing people to do things. And generally speaking, especially in an age when people are tired, when the economy has been challenging, when you've got some more children, they'll wake you up at night. I think the idea that you can put the emphasis on individual change rather than system change and the energy transition is probably not what I would stake decarbonizing and looking after the planet on. And then lastly, why should we when emissions are small? Something like a quarter of global emissions come from countries.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Few things in that. Firstly, I checked before I came to do this, but our consumption emissions in 2024 are down. And of course, a lot of our consumption emissions from trade come from Europe, which has a carbon price and a net zero target. So in terms of our own imports, they will be decarbonizing over time. China, of course, looks like its emissions will peak and then start declining in the 2030s because of the investments they're making far more than the rest of the world into renewables and into things like electric vehicles and clean technology. So China, no question is a key economy in decarbonizing the globe and has moved ahead and watching it is important. But I would expect to see our consumption emissions come down as those economies change too. There's a thing in this about why don't we talk more about lifestyle change and resource management more generally? And it comes back to the mandate of the climate change committee, which is our job.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Worries, there are also very clear reasons to hope. And I suppose on the day that I decided to have my children, it was the day where I was feeling particularly hopeful.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But for the last five years of my life, I've been working in the private sector with companies who are investing in the alternative. And those companies care about the environment for all the reasons I just mentioned, but they also can see where the economics of energy are going. And I am very confident that we're moving into an age of electricity. And because the economic signals are there, that gives me hope that even when the politics around climate change vary, we will continue to decarbonize. Now, the speed is the thing. And that is what government needs to do is set the framework for this change to continue to happen. But in as much as there are sometimes reasons to be”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That there is a lot to be concerned about with climate change, and I think the public know that. I think it's really important we don't patronise people into the idea that the British public don't understand that climate change is happening or that the global population don't we're all seeing and feeling and experiencing it. And we've just put out our climate adaptation report in the UK, which says something like a quarter of UK households might be affected by flooding in a world where we don't tackle climate change, where we'll have potentially tens of thousands of people dying in extreme heat waves by 2050. There are real impacts to this that we will all experience more human populations moving, less stability in food, less stability in energy systems, just a less stable world. And of course, I thought about that before having the children.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About our advice, and so it's I completely agree with you that it's about how people feel underneath a lot of the technocratic arguments we're making is this kind of consciousness about what we think would work, bearing in mind we are asking people to adopt new technologies in their homes and in transport systems now. So yeah, and I really love that citizens panel research. You should definitely look at that if you haven't managed to see it already in the advice.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The big takeaways from that exercise were that people were actually very up for ambition on climate change. They really wanted government to do more rather than less. But to speak to the technocratic thing, they also wanted more information. They wanted conversations like this one. They wanted more detail and they enjoyed understanding what they were being asked to do. And lastly, they were often not clear on what they were being asked to do, sometimes because the political rhetoric had changed on technologies like heat pumps, they were hearing various different stories about whether they were effective or not or whether they were supposed to get one or not. And they wanted clear messaging from government. They wanted clarity about what they were being asked to do and they wanted it to be a fair transition. So they wanted to make sure that people weren't going to be left behind in the transition that there would be support, particularly for low-income households. And this was a broad demographic that we talked to. And that fed into how we thought.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to pay for this somewhere in the economy, but the household bill in the UK, the energy bill in the UK is such a big thing for a lot of households, particularly low-income households, that it would make a significant difference to people to feel that change. And of course, for all households, they did benefit and you would get this market signal that would help people adopt cheap technologies. And that is a much better approach than pushing people into having technologies if you can make them cheaper, more convenient, and a better product. So that speaks the feeling bit. The other thing I wanted to say is we ran a citizens panel for this advice. And I think, Rory, you've taken part in citizens' assemblies before. And we've got experts on the Climate Change Committee who are experts in behavior change.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I talk about cheap electricity all the time, not from a climate change point of view or as a kind of industrialist, but because I sat with people who had to run call centers at the peak of an energy crisis. There is a record level of debt held by the energy suppliers in this country because people cannot pay their energy bills. It is a critical input into our economy that people should be able to have access to cheap electricity. And the decision or non-decision to leave policy costs and electricity bills at a time when we could be giving people immediate bill relief is for me a huge issue when we're trying to persuade people that the energy transition will be good for them in the long run. And also just because we could do with taking some money off people's bills right now. And I accept, Rory, that”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually completely agree with that and just said if you think the first thing I should say I'm definitely not telling the NFU off. We've had a great working relationship with them. And I think the point is, and again, in my last job, I had to brief the energy sector and the transport sector and the farming sector about the carbon budget. And it's a change I've had to make in my own head since coming over to doing this work. how it's delivered will feel differently different to this kind of big exercise in looking across the economy, which is the CCC's job. And that's okay. Like they can go faster, they can do slightly different things to us. They can disagree with our”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Age that feels fractured and where it's hard to keep focus, can we just kind of crack on with that sort of detailed quite boring delivery stuff? So there's a sort of political bit there. The other thing is materiality. Towards the end of my last job, I got completely obsessed with global supply chains. And we have this rising protectionism and a change in geopolitics and a change in trade policy. And if you're thinking about building infrastructure and you're a business, how do you make sure that you've got all the stuff that you need? And we're in a much more competitive environment for a lot of this as well. The skilled workers, the components, the commodities. And that would be my main concern if I were sitting trying to think about delivery either in government or in industry. And I suppose that comes back to the need for industrial policy alongside energy policy alongside your decarbonisation strategy.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where are the barriers to this infrastructure rollout? Because a big part of delivering emissions reduction is still energy system change. It is still building clean energy infrastructure and utilizing it. It is political will, I think, you know, the kind of focus to do some quite complex things. I did try and talk to you about energy market design in this podcast and it is complex stuff. It's always more nuanced than it appears on the surface. And Rory, I appreciate the similar conversation on offshoring. I realize most of the answers I give are like impossibly technical and nuanced, but that's because it is. It's a really complex area of work, this, and you need people who are going to be able to sit with it and wrestle with it and focus on it and get some stuff done. So there is like, can we in a...”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I was going to say to help Rory out is to take off my CCC hat on and put on my, you know, decade or so of working in the energy sector. And what I would have said, Anna probably said on the record in that last job in terms of”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Approach is that is for government in policy and for industries to do in delivery. And what I've learned in 10 years in the energy sector is we will be completely surprised about what the delivery pathway actually is, mostly. It will be the offshore wind story for a lot of the economy where technology will come through and do something we didn't expect it to.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're not the project delivery people. And just to give you an example of that, just drawing outside the energy sector for a moment, we make advice on agriculture and tree planting. And that bit of the economy in the seventh carbon budget. And we did a lot of work with the National Farmers Union in thinking about that advice. And what we've done is model agriculture in the UK economy and things like meat production and crop production and land use. And then we've looked at things like tree planting and hedges and peatland restoration, which are all uses of land and considered how farms might change over time. And what the National Farmers Union were trying to get at was, well, what does this mean for each individual farm? Can you make recommendations like what it's five cows from this farm as opposed to stopping or like turning over part of the country to do arable crop? And the thing is about that local farm by farm detailed.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I was going to say is that it's not the core of my job, actually. So I was about to say I'm a new public servant, so I'm being very well behaved at making sure that I stay within the mandate of the CCC. And the mandate of the CCC is to demonstrate a particular number in 12 years' time is feasible. And we do that by modelling pathways and scenarios that can get you to a number. And so, and we look at global examples of what's possible and we try and benchmark our advice in science and evidence.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To scale up that kind of technology. And just very lastly, there's a kind of skepticism sometimes I hear about the speed of technology change and what's possible. Just to give you two examples, we're all walking around with phones in our pocket that did not exist back when I started university and they've kind of fundamentally changed how we live our lives and that happened very slowly and then all at once. And then the other is that we changed the entire gas network at least once in the lifetimes of people who will be listening to this, you know, in the 60s and 70s moving over from coal gas to now methane and did the whole gas network. We built like 40 power stations in 10 years when we were dashing for gas in 2012. These things are not without precedent.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we've done that with every technology that we need in order to decarbonize the energy system. And that's absolutely possible. It has been just extraordinary in the energy sector over the past 10 years. We've smashed through every sort of target I've ever seen for particularly solar. There is a more challenging geopolitics supply chains are harder. Inflation has been the way it is. But even so, we were at record levels of clean energy investment last year globally. I would expect to see renewables continuing to grow internationally. And that sort of scale doesn't feel outlandish. So long as you get the investment environment right, and that's part of you've got to have cheap electricity. People have to benefit from these technologies. We have to want to use the energy from them. You also have to have a planning regime that allows you to build infrastructure with speed and you have to have the grid able to take off the power from the new power plant. There is still a challenge in delivery, but it is complete.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The scale of growth for renewables is realistic. Now, when we're setting out our advice, we're required to make sure it's feasible. And most of those technology rollout rates are consistent with either what we've seen in other countries or what we've done in the UK previously. And they're based on modelling pretty sophisticated technology S-curves. This is this idea that technologies often go slowly into the market while they're developing and they're expensive and they speed up when they're cheaper and then you get sort of the hard bit at the very end”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in terms of the scale of renewables growth, now the government's clean energy mission is not the same thing as the UK's carbon budgets, right? There's a slight difference in what they're trying to spend.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A workforce that you can employ in those factories. And that's why it's not just about the energy price. These companies are also making decisions on whether they think you've got incredible industrial policy. And very lastly, something those companies absolutely liked when I worked with them was that the UK had carbon budgets because they saw those as like long-term industrial policy. Their problem was the sort of short-term energy price and the grid connection and the fact that government wasn't moving to make electricity as cheap as it could be given the renewables that we have on the system.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With industries in my entire career, and particularly through the energy crisis, is investment in energy efficiency, is investment in renewables, in making the cheap renewables that we can build manifest to the users of energy. And this is about making sure that electricity is actually cheap. And possibly, though this is outside the Climate Change Committee's remit, a more activist industrial strategy, if the government thinks having steelmaking in the UK is important, it's going to have to do what other countries have done and offer bigger exemptions or have a better industrial policy or plan in advance for these industries and accept that there's a cost to that, but it's strategic. So that's not to do really with energy policy per se. That's a different portfolio of things. Lastly, I'd also say that from the experience of trying to get factories to come to the UK in my last job, grid collections were also really important. So are you doing your infrastructure upgrades? Have you got roads to get components to people? Have you got skilled labour?”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How much it's about energy price or policy and just a structural change in the UK economy towards services or to higher value, more efficient manufacturing. So some industries like steel or refineries are using older, more less efficient kit. They're older plants. They're from an older industry. And we have grown high-value manufacturing in the UK at the same time as those industries have had a harder time. And again, the energy prices those companies pay are also different because the exemptions apply differently to different kinds of manufacturing. So it's not as simple as manufacturing as a whole. In terms of what governments could do, it is absolutely true that energy prices are fundamental to people wanting to locate manufacturing or energy-intensive businesses here. There's no question about that. And our prices are higher than in Europe and the US. The only solution to that in the UK so far as I could tell from working with”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yes and no. I'll come on to what they could do in a moment. But it's important to say that industrial GVA grew in the UK whilst we were delivering emissions reductions, along with GDP. And again, it's quite hard to tell”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there are two different kinds of charge. One is we've got things like a carbon price in the UK, though carbon prices also exist in other markets. So the EU, which is when I'm a big competitor for manufacturing, the EU has the emissions trading scheme and a carbon price there, for example. And then there's the other kind of policy costs, which most countries have. And this is the thing where we finance our infrastructure through often levies on bills or the users of energy. And that includes network connections and upgrades, but also the infrastructure to provide the power to people. Now, different countries do that differently. They spread the costs of that differently. And a lot of Europe, for example, domestic householders pay more of those costs to give industry more of a break or different countries offer bigger exemptions. So it's not that these charges don't exist. They look at different levels in different countries. It's that other countries have had a more activist industrial policy that has said we're going to exempt our heavy industry.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About again getting gas out of our economy and using cheap renewables effectively and getting that electricity price down, that would be really helpful So, the wholesale price is a big part of it. There are also policy costs on the price that industrial users pay. There's a portfolio of exemptions that the UK government gives different kinds of manufacturers like steel or, I don't know, a chemicals plant or a pharmaceuticals company. But they're not the same for different kinds of plant. And crucially, they are less generous than our European equivalent. So often that difference is that it is to do with the exemptions in policy. And that comes back to what you could call a more activist industrial strategy in other countries than we've had here”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is one of those ones where we're not really sure why industrial energy prices in the UK are higher than in Europe, though I can talk you through a few key factors. One is what we've been talking about, which is we do have a higher electricity price here. And that is partly due to the fact that gas sets our electricity price even more often than it does in other European markets where gas might be the price setter. had a dash for gas in the UK in 2012. We use a lot of gas in our energy system. We're very exposed to the gas price. And on top of that, gas sets the electricity price about 98% of the time in the UK. So it's pushing electricity prices up. So that's one of the reasons. Generally, when you look across Europe, economies that have a more diverse mix of nuclear and renewables are not using gas as a price setter and they have lower prices. So I think there's some...”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As quickly as possible. And so it's, I don't know, frustrated industrialists' view as much as it is a climate change view, that one. But I would love to see progress on electricity. So you're hearing 10 years of frustration. The UK government has been a trailblazer in working out how to get emissions down in a major economy and grow the economy and keep manufacturing GVA. I think there are great things that we've done, this particular piece about cheap electricity and helping people get the benefits of it. I just think we really need to get right.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that based on 10 years of working in the energy sector, I'm pretty confident that we're in the middle of the kind of energy transition that we last experienced at the turn of the industrial revolution, like I cannot tell you how exciting, terrifying, fast the change in technologies were happening away from fossil fuels towards electrification. And this isn't a climate change committee view that we've got cheap electricity in our modelling. It's an energy sector view. I cannot understand why any economy looking to grow where energy is such a key input to everything else that you're trying to do, particularly after an energy crisis caused by volatile gas, would not be trying to make electricity as cheap as possible and taking advantage of the fact that we can have renewables and then we can give them to people to use in their homes and electrified technologies.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the UK, our electricity price, and in most markets, we use a market design where the overall price in the market is dictated by the last possible plant on the system. And all you need to know in the UK is that's gas. Gas is more expensive than renewables. And it means that the electricity price that would be cheaper is driven up by the cost of gas. And so our electricity price tracks the gas price. And we're very dependent on gas in the UK and we use a lot of it and we've got a lot of gas and electricity mix. So that's why our electricity prices are higher.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The long term consequences they are harming the ability of the market to take more of this transition on. And it means people aren't experiencing the benefits of cheap electricity. So that has been confusing to me for some time, I mean, years now, that this isn't happening, but it's the single most important thing they could do. If you've got still got brain space, there are more complex things that we can do in energy markets to realize the fact that we've just put brand new cheap renewables onto systems designed for fossil fuels.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should be cheaper, the efficiencies of them, and can't use low cost electricity. What it also does politically is make people think that electricity must be more expensive than it is. So when they hear people like me telling them that renewables are cheap or these technologies are cheap and they see their bill, they think it must be, that we must be making it up. And so I think there are very good political reasons to try and give people the benefit of cheap electricity as soon as possible. Now, the government has resisted moving those policy costs into taxation fairly obviously because there's a cost to it.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That either sits on the bill or it sits in taxation, sometimes pass through the private sector, but ultimately that's what happens. And in the UK, our policy costs sit on the electricity part of our bill, bearing in mind that most people in the UK have a dual-fill bill. They're using gas for their heating and they're using electricity otherwise. And the decision to put those costs on electricity is in one way logical because some of it is financing new electricity infrastructure. But what we have accidentally done is make the fuel of the future where we're going to be asking people to use more of it in their households, where it's going to be driving our industries, where it is the absolute heart of the current energy transition. We've made that more expensive with a policy choice. And so then you end up having to effectively additionally subsidize the technologies because the market can't finance the operational savings that you make, the fact that these technologies”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get excited while I talk you through electricity prices in the UK wholesale market. I'm sure that's what everyone tuned in for. So when you think of the thing that we want the government to do, and in my last job, I was asking for this because we went through the energy crisis in the UK, people couldn't afford to pay their bills and we were looking for ways to get bills down. In most countries around the world, the investment in energy infrastructure in networks and in new infrastructure and then policy costs.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do that, can you get people to adopt them? And also, they should be cheaper to run. So we reckon that a household in the UK that had a heat pump rather than a gas boiler saves about £700 per year by net zero than one where they stay dependent on fossil fuels. But to realize that benefit, we have to change how we're putting policy costs on electricity. We have to make electricity as cheap as possible. And there's been a reluctance to do that.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple of hours a day, they keep your house at a particular temperature over time. Now, this is a very common, any Europeans listen to this will be like, yes, obviously that's how heating systems work. But in the UK, they're just very novel, and they're seen as this brand new technology. And we don't have a heating market or an installer base or a heating industry that is designed to fit them. There used to be also concerns with our housing stock because the UK having not had the same experience of the European world wars still has a lot of old housing stock. And because heat pumps are a very efficient technology, they work best in buildings that are well insulated. But as the technology has improved, we can now put them in more buildings. So we're relatively confident most households in the UK could have them. In terms of cost, because there are novel technology in the UK and the installer base and so on, they're more expensive than a boiler. So the big policy challenge is can you get the cost of them down? Can you scale them in the market?”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in terms of do they matter? Yes, they are a keystone technology for decarbonisation in the UK for the 2030s and 40s. And that's because we've squeezed emissions out of the power sector pretty credibly. We think transport will be driven pun intended by electric vehicles through the market, but in the UK we do have this problem of replacing gas boilers with heat pumps. And they're just a different technology. They're very common in Europe. They're very common in parts of Asia. And I'm going to get into trouble with a load of engineers for describing them this way, but that's been the story of my life. They are like, think about an air conditioning unit that does heat. So they take heat from either the ground or from the air and they pass it over a heat exchanger in a box that sits outside your house and they kind of bump up that heat to make it warm enough to then warm your radiators up. And unlike a boiler, they don't produce really, really hot radiators and hot heat.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big underlying driver always for us is can you make the alternative cheaper for people and more attractive so that the market can just do it? And the biggest barrier to the uptake of electric vehicles and heat pumps in the UK is that our electricity price is high and some of that is down to government policy choices. And so there's this kind of series of policy decisions that government aren't making. I have to say, having come off the back of an energy crisis, I cannot understand why they're not doing what everyone has been recommending in terms of removing some of the policy costs of electricity bills in the UK to make electricity cheaper, but that I'm sure we can get into.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That has caused the UK to reduce its emissions by over half against 1990 levels. That's a really good news story in the UK, particularly for the home of the Industrial Revolution. But now the story is how can you use that clean electricity in other bits of the economy? And in particular in heat and in transport. Now, with transport, actually that's less of a policy job than getting the market framework right for cheaper electric vehicles to come through and people to buy them when they come to replace their cars. But for heat in the UK, it's much more challenging and is likely to need some leadership from government. And that's because 80% plus of UK households have individual gas boilers. We're not like Europeans or some other countries where we have shared heating systems or electric. We use individual gas boilers. And for at least as long as I've been working in the energy sector, successive governments haven't really come up with a decent framework for dealing with that.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is right in terms of current government progress, as well as advising the head of time. The homework marking bits that every year we publish an annual report and every two years on the climate risk piece about government progress. And we give that to parliaments so they can hold government to account critically in the UK. The biggest gaps in terms of policy delivery in the UK are around the next bits of the economy that we need to decarbonise. So the UK's decarbonisation date has largely come from the power sector. It's come from replacing large power plants, gas power plants mainly and coal with renewables and flexible technologies.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2030s and 40s, or something like 12 times more exposed to another gas price crisis of the kind we've just seen and reflect Below the noise, is this significant of a change in policy direction that we have to think about? But we are supposed to be taking a medium long-term view. And so I get asked this question a lot about net zero. And I say to people all the time it was genuinely more immediate in the last job when I was dealing with the private sector. I just wanted to say to Rory's, while the other thing is we are the body that advises government on climate risk. So if we, of course, think that there's more chance of climate impacts materializing because governments aren't acting, then our adaptation committee, which is the other big body at the Climate Change Committee confusingly singular title to committees, that group of experts will be thinking about what does this mean for UK flooding for extreme heat, for rising sea levels under an outcome where we might not stay beneath 1.5 degrees. So we are doing the risk management, I guess, for a lack of...”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's definitely a practical thing about. Is the political noise meaningful in terms of the feasibility of delivering against our targets? Because under the climate change that we are required to advise government on feasible delivery pathways and a feasible target. And I think things like the change in the global economy, the idea of more protectionism maybe concerns around supply chains, these things manifest themselves in our advice. And so in the seventh carbon budget, the one that we've just published, in our advice for the UK government in late 2030s and 2040s, we are talking about particular industries needing to have industrial strategy, needing to think about energy prices, needing to be aware that energy security is really important. We say that a UK household with a gas boiler and a gas-based energy system in the”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's where the committee's heads are. They're thinking ahead of time. That's the work that we're doing analytically is focused on the late part of the 2030s.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are two answers. One is practical, which is the noise around net zero and climate change in politics at the moment was a much bigger problem for me in my last job, whereas chief executive of the energy trade body because investors are relatively short-termist or they're making decisions now about what they think the politics will be. They read headlines. They're not necessarily reading sort of sophisticated economic analysis. The last time there was noise around net zero targets in the UK and I was in my last job, we were losing millions of pounds worth of investment from the UK because the energy sector reads net zero as a infrastructure project as a sort of long-term strategic industrial strategy. They want to invest against it. And so that political uncertainty is a problem. The point of the Climate Change Committee is with the medium long-term people. So I guess thinking about what the world looks like in 2030.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At 2030 or 2035, we set an envelope of emissions, so we set an outcome in the economy that we're looking for over a five-year period. So the other thing we do is we set those carbon budgets about over a decade ahead. And that gives investors and governments long-term certainty about where we might be heading, because we've legislated a target for 12 years time, but there's enough flexibility in the model that we can be surprised about how it's delivered.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's an international agreement done through the UN climate change negotiations that we should stay at about 1.5 degrees of warming. There was a deal reached in Paris in 2015. And what every country then has to do is go away and work out it's got a nationally determined contribution, but its own individual contribution to that global effort. And it has to be done territorially, as within country borders, because you can't tell another country with sovereignty that they should do something in their manufacturing sector. So every country is supposed to go away and prepare its plans. And what the UK did in the 2008 Climate Change Act, and then in response to Paris is work out what our plans would have to be to be considered a fair contribution to that global effort. And then what we did, unlike other countries, is not set hard specific decade-old targets for a certain percentage by 2020.”
2025-07-06 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 142. The Truth About Net Zero's Credibility (Emma Pinchbeck) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source