UK's net zero tsar: I understand why people are angry

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29-03-2025

From her home near Stroud in Gloucestershire, Emma Pinchbeck has a clear view out over the countryside to where 10 generations of her mother's family have lived, right up to the hills where a recent addition, a wind turbine, stands.
'As the mother of a five-year-old and a two-year-old,' she says, 'every bit of me wants the valley that I come from to stay exactly the same for them as it was for me'. And that wind turbine is trespassing on that.
Some may see an irony in her regret, as 38-year-old Pinchbeck is the Government's new climate change advisor. As chief executive of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the climate policy watchdog, she is responsible for helping them deliver the goal of reaching net zero by 2050.
It is a high-profile post and a controversial one, especially now that the Labour Government, under its Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, is pushing ahead at speed with the huge changes necessary to achieve net zero. These include the doubling of onshore wind turbines and a tripling of solar panels in the next five years – thus posing a threat to rural valleys such as Pinchbeck's in Laurie Lee's old stomping ground in Gloucestershire. Meanwhile the building of new infrastructure by 2030 to distribute all this green energy around the country will see swathes of pylons erected across the countryside.
It is causing fury in affected areas and loud opposition far beyond. This month saw the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch pledge to 'abandon' the 2050 target, describing it as 'impossible'. It will, she said, cause a serious drop in living standards or even 'bankrupt' the country.
Reform UK, riding high in the polls, is calling for an end to net zero altogether, blaming it for high energy bills and deindustrialisation. According to deputy leader Richard Tice, the current push towards renewable energy is a 'massive con'.
'I understand why people are angry,' says Pinchbeck, who was head of Energy UK, the trade body of the big energy companies, before she joined the CCC last November. 'It never works to force people to change their lives.'
She admits to wondering, 'what I would think if there were more turbines up there on our hill, or new pylons put across the valley'. Given Labour's plan to massively boost the percentage of renewable energy in the system and create a 95 per cent low-carbon electricity grid by 2030, there are many others who face the very real prospect of just such an outcome.
'It is hard work,' Pinchbeck acknowledges, 'to get myself into a place where I can say, 'I know what this new infrastructure is doing here and I am OK with it'.' But with encouragement, public debate and the demystification of climate change adaptation, she believes it can be done.
'My son points at the turbine on the hill above our house and sees it as part of the landscape. I have come to see it as part of his future, not as a threat but as a protection for this beautiful landscape that I love. When you get people [asking] 'Where have the butterflies gone?' they are more accepting of the infrastructure that might protect us from the effects of climate change. You can't just say you are going to bulldoze things through.'
In her short time in post, Pinchbeck has already been targeted on social media by anti-pylon campaigners, and has had to get used to taking a more robust approach to her own personal security, including keeping traceable details about her own family to a minimum. She regrets that the conversation has become so polarised.
'Of course I have sympathy for those who are living where these changes are happening and don't want them, but I can see too a very unstable world ahead for all our children if the worst scenarios in climate change science happen.'
And that means a world where compromises have to be made. 'In the 1960s, the last time we did a big grid upgrade, there were adverts placed in country magazines saying, 'This is about giving people in Wales electricity, where would you put the pylons?', or 'This is about your children having cheap electricity, where would you put the pylons?'' Back then, she suggests, the government worked hard at gaining public support.
As if to emphasise her commitment to a more flexible future, we are meeting at her suggestion not in her sterile Whitehall office but in Walthamstow, north-east London. It is where Pinchbeck and her husband – they met on a train journey and he works in international health – were living when their older child was born.
We sit in a café housed in the local Anglican church. Tall, with almost white, close-cut hair, wearing an elegant floral dress and heels, Pinchbeck is keen to make plain from the outset what the CCC is, and what it isn't.
She is often referred to as the Government's 'net zero tsar' but insists that the 60-strong team she heads has no policy-making role but instead advises politicians on a net-zero target that they themselves voted for back in 2019.
'We are like the Office for Budget Responsibility, but we do climate policy and carbon. We are not a regulator. The Government's job is to set the delivery pathway.'
So, she explains, if a government with a different net zero target were elected, 'we'd give them advice on what that target meant. We are not the campaign organisation for net zero'.
The CCC publishes annual reports to Parliament and the once-every-five-years 'carbon budget', the latest of which came out last month. But questions have been raised about where exactly it gets its data from – one critic described it as 'Britain's ultimate arbiter of climate reality' – and how much it can be trusted.
Last year, the Royal Society published a report by the Oxford theoretical physicist Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith suggesting that official forecasts are underestimating the amount of power storage needed to make net zero possible and challenging the costs of switching to renewable energy.
'There is a lot of debate about the exact technical mix [that will provide our power to reach the point of decarbonisation],' says Pinchbeck. 'There are folk who think we may need to have decarbonised gas plants and some who think we can do it with batteries and whizzy technology in people's homes. Or nuclear.'
The CCC models the technical mix to illustrate the many ways in which the 2050 target is feasible, says Pinchbeck. 'It isn't the committee's job to decide which one will be adopted. If the Government chooses for example to do more nuclear because of geo-political reasons or industrial policy, we then run the numbers on the carbon [reduction consequence] of doing that.'
Pinchbeck points out that there is a full methodological report published every time it provides an annual update. 'Our data has to come from peer-reviewed academic papers from leading universities and other institutions, or industry data, up-to-date research from think tanks and consultancies, or government statistics.'
'Our chief analyst James Richardson came from the Treasury. If anything is not in the numbers, we are not saying it. We are here to provide independent advice on how we meet the target.'
What that means, according to their latest report, is an annual average net-cost of reaching net zero by 2050 of 0.2 per cent of GDP – or £4 billion a year. That figure is reached by setting projected investment required (£26 billion a year) against projected operating cost savings (£22 billion a year), and is 73 per cent lower than the number given in the previous carbon budget in 2020.
These are still huge figures at a time when, as this week's spring statement demonstrated, the public finances are stretched to breaking point. 'The way we do our carbon budgets allows for innovation and competition and so a lot of the money for this transition is going to come from the private sector.'
In her brief time at the CCC, Pinchbeck has already dealt with two secretaries of state for energy security and net zero – the Conservatives' Claire Coutinho during the appointment process, and since the general election, Ed Miliband. The former Labour leader was the architect of the 2008 Climate Change Act which set up the CCC. Upon taking his new role, he appointed Pinchbeck's predecessor to be his lead adviser on the clean energy switch-over, a move that confirmed the suspicion of critics who believe the CCC is partisan.
How does Pinchbeck feel that Miliband is doing? Rumours are circulating in Westminster that he has lost the confidence of the Prime Minister, while beleaguered Chancellor Rachel Reeves sees his green policy agenda as damaging her priority of economic growth.
'Without wanting to sound difficult, the CCC sits outside politics,' she replies, carefully sidestepping the question.
Pinchbeck grew up with her younger brother in Gloucestershire, though her father's job with the RAF meant that some of her early years were spent overseas when he was posted in Germany. Her stay-at-home mother qualified as a cabinet maker when her children flew the nest. 'She has this joke that I came out of the womb sounding like a character in an Enid Blyton children's story.'
Her Gloucester grandmother's accent was, by contrast, 'broad'. She was a key figure in Pinchbeck's formative years. 'She was a farmer and so were her brothers. She taught me the names of the wildflowers. Inheritance in my family was knowledge of nature.'
Pinchbeck thrived at Stroud High School and went on to read Classics and English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, the first in her family to go to university. Her first job was in finance in London.
'I graduated after the 2008 financial crash so that opportunity to work in finance was good and interesting. There were some renewable projects but my heart wasn't in it. Then David Attenborough's Frozen Planet came out [in 2011]. The last episode touched on climate change and I remember feeling very moved. I wanted to spend my time and resources doing something about it.'
She worked initially for the World Wide Fund for Nature, rising to be its head of climate change before moving as deputy chief executive to the energy trade body Renewables UK, and then from 2020, to the bigger, broader, green and non-green Energy UK.
'I had been working in renewables, and I thought Energy UK was old-fashioned, but I don't think you will find anything on the record that I said while at Energy UK that would be out of line with what the chief executive of the CCC would say. It is the same evidence base that has always informed the things I am saying.'
The public image of the big energy companies is often that they are more comfortable sticking with gas and oil than switching to renewables, but that wasn't what she found in her time there. 'Businesses want long-term thinking. So far as the energy industry is concerned there is this enormous energy transition happening, the economics of energy are changing.'
But what about the politics of energy with the re-election of Donald Trump, whose climate change scepticism is on the record? 'The key global swing factor,' she says 'is how fast China can build factories to make solar PV panels so it can turn off its coal-powered stations.'
China is the biggest carbon-polluter in the world, but the United States is the second (the UK ranks 17th in the same charts).
'Last time Trump was in office the fastest-growing profession in America was wind-turbine engineer. Business and politics are not the same thing. Politicians can set out a framework for businesses to operate in, they can attract businesses to a particular part of the world, and they can set up business and industrial policy to drive the market in a certain way.'
But in such partnerships, she says, 'ultimately the economics are king. And the economics of the energy transition are that it is going at a pace thanks to new technologies. So, I think we will still see growth of renewables in the US, and we will still see battery storage growing.'
Pinchbeck refuses to be deterred by the scale of the challenge of climate change. And, in that context, Britain, as we have regularly been told by our politicians, is leading the world in climate change adaptation.
'We are the oldest climate change committee in the world [there are now 26, covering countries that account for 90 per cent of carbon emissions globally] and our UK climate governance is so respected around the world because our climate outcomes have been real: the first G7 economy to half its emissions; the first to prove you could do it while also growing economically; the second-biggest off-shore wind market in the world. But now there are others ahead of us.'
Some of that dropping down the running order has resulted from rising costs, for example of harnessing wind-power, another area where CCC reports have come in for criticism. Unfairly, says Pinchbeck. 'If you want to build anything – train lines, hospitals - costs are now going up. Gas has become so expensive so manufacturing anything is more expensive. Supply-chain inflation is rising.'
That applies equally to the technology required to harness and distribute wind-power. 'And with wind in particular,' Pinchbeck adds, 'there is more competition because other countries are now going faster than us and providers can go elsewhere [and get paid more]'.
But she insists – 'ask anybody in the energy sector' – new-build renewables remain 'the cheapest source of power. At the moment, she explains, electricity prices track the gas prices and gas is more expensive. '98 per cent of the time gas is setting the electricity price rather than renewables or the price of a wind turbine.'
Part of her determined optimism that a climate change disaster can be avoided comes from the data that is the CCC's stock-in-trade. Part, too, is clearly her character. But even she confesses that she has found the adaptations that will be required of all of us challenging, as when she bought her first electric car.
She forgot to charge it because she was so used to relying on the petrol station round the corner. 'Now I love my electric vehicle, like a third child, but it is different.'
She quotes her mother-in-law who has had a heat pump installed. 'She'll murder me if I say she is elderly but she is in her seventies. At first she found it hard but now she is pleased with it.'
The question, though, surely isn't one of can we adapt, it's whether people want to and she sees too many people caught in the middle.
'I have no time for doom-er-ism, that everything will be radically different because there is no hope. Or this idea that everything has to be made radically different to preserve the environment.I am in the business of doing what we can to put our arms round what we have left.'
In 2024, the 1.5C limit agreed by the Paris Climate Change Agreement a decade earlier for temperature rises above pre-industrial levels was breached globally. Is that a bad sign for what will be left in years to come?
'We haven't breached 1.5 in so far as how the international negotiations and targets understand it because they are looking for multi-year, multi-decade consistency. However, it is a reminder that things are going quicker than we thought in terms of climate impacts.'
On the other hand, though, she continues, there are counterbalancing signs that we are making progress. 'Regardless of what you feel about the politics of net zero or about climate change action, the economics of the energy transition are astounding. The International Energy Agency is saying global emissions may well peak by 2030. And then start declining, which is in line with where it needs to be to meet the Paris Agreement.'
Pinchbeck's husband is also from Gloucestershire and the couple have moved back there from Walthamstow to raise their children. What does she think 2050 is going to look like for them, by then grown-up, if politicians choose to stick to the net zero targets governments have set? 'I am not trying to sugar coat things,' she explains, but says that the sceptics who argue that we can do nothing and nothing will change are naïve. 'There is change coming.'
But we also have an opportunity to mitigate it by getting an electric car, a heat pump, eating less meat and cutting down on our air miles. 'The trend lines already show, for example, people are eating less meat [and that applies to her, too]. One study talks about us eating six kebabs rather than eight, but we also need to make the alternatives cheaper, tastier and more available. That is enough to drive change and farmers have always responded to change.'
And if we do? 'Your home will still be warm. You will still drive a car. You will still eat meat. You will still go on holiday.' But there will also be pylons and wind turbines and solar panels where once there were fields and open spaces.
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