Climate change: Big lifestyle changes 'needed to cut emissions'People must use less transport, eat less red meat and buy fewer clothes if the UK is to virtually halt greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the government's chief environment scientist has warned.
Prof Sir Ian Boyd said
the public had little idea of the scale of the challenge from the so-called Net Zero emissions target.Sir Ian said polluting activities should incur more tax. He believes the Treasury should reform taxation policy to reward people with low-carbon lifestyles and nudge heavy consumers into more frugal patterns of behaviour.
He also believes Net Zero won't happen unless the
government creates a Net Zero ministry to vet the policies of all government departments in the way the Brexit ministry vets Brexit-related decisions.
He confessed that he was not optimistic about the future of the planet because
so many systems of government needed to change in a short time."We certainly won't be able to travel so much as we have in the past, so we have to get used to using modern communications methods.
"We've got to reduce demand to a much greater extent than we have in the past, and if we don't reduce demand we're not going to reduce emissions.
"Emissions are a symptom of consumption and unless we reduce consumption we'll not reduce emissions.
"It will very rarely come down to a direct message like 'sorry, you can't buy that but you can buy this'. But there will be stronger messages within the (tax) system that make one thing more attractive than the other."
He said UK government strategies were in place on air, environment, resources, waste, marine, and food. "[Ministers] need to be persuasive."
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49499521The net zero ministry is just Orwellian technocrat speak for the ministry of severe austerity. The technocrats will have you all eating bugs and living in collective eco-barracks by the end of the century.