The fundamental problem is that we are led by a political class which moves from, you know, university course on the environment or that sort of obsesses about net zero, straight into power, and there's no real connection with, you know, industry agriculture or the communities where they are conducted.

There is a very big pushback, I think, in the making against net zero and I think any government that thinks it can steamroll this issue

over the population is going to find itself in a very uncomfortable place.

Hello, welcome back to the Brendan O'Neill show with me Brendan O'Neill and my special

guest this week, Ross Clark.

Ross, welcome to the show.

Good afternoon, Ben.

It's great to have you back on. The last time we had you on the pod we were

talking about your brilliant book Not Zero, which is about Net Zero and the craziness of Net Zero,

how expensive it will be, how it probably won't even help the planet

very much, but it might destroy lots of jobs. It was a really good sucker punch against

the ideology of net zero and the idea that we need to rush to net zero by 2030 or 2050 or whatever else people are saying.

And I think I wanted to start off today by asking you where you think the discussion about net zero is at right now

because it seems to me there are some positive signs I think there's a recognition

among lots of people right now that we will need fossil fuels for some time to come and we

need to be energy dependent etc. So there's positive signs but there's also of

course negative signs not least with the continuing climate change alarmism coming from groups like

extinction rebellion very aptly aided by the BBC and sections of the Labour Party

which tell us if we don't achieve net zero we're all going to go up in a pile of flames.

So what's your reading about where the public discussion is at right now in relation to the

net zero idea?

I think what's happened in the year since we last map is that as soon as the sort of net

...