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Hello and welcome to a special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. Right now, the news

is filled with speculation over the roadmap, how the government plans to get the country through

the pandemic, but there are also domestic issues creeping up the agenda. One of the biggest

challenge Boris Johnson faces outside of COVID is the net zero target, a 30-year plan to decarbonise the economy.

With the G7 meeting on Friday and COP 26 coming up the agenda fast, how exactly does he plan

to do this? James, in your Times column, you write about a plan being mooted that the UK wants to get

other countries involved in. Can you talk us through it?

Yes. Essentially, I think it would be very difficult to maintain domestic support for hitting a net zero target in any big,

advanced economy. If there's a sense that you are just exporting your emissions and your jobs,

if essentially other countries are freeiding on the progress you're making

towards net zero, they're not charging a price for carbon domestically, giving them a competitive

advantage and enabling them to essentially post jobs. So I think the question is, how do you get

countries to come together and to come up with a multilateral solution rather than

coming up with their own unilateral solutions? The EU is already talking about a carbon border

tax. The US is interested in the idea. I mean, the danger is if countries all go their own

ways and act unilaterally, this could very quickly turn into kind of green protectionism and further

end up undermining the international trading system.

And so I think the challenge for the UK, which has obviously got the presidency of both the G7

and a COP UN climate change summit this year, is to try and kind of craft a kind of multilateral

...