Is ‘net zero’ a moral pursuit?
Moral Maze
BBC
4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 11 September 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The party conference season kicked off with claims and counter claims about the viability of Nigel Farage’s proposals for government. One issue that unites Reform and Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives is scrapping the 2050 net zero target, echoing US President Donald Trump's pledge to "drill, baby, drill" and embark on new oil and gas exploration.
This is a turbulent time in international politics. The prospect of achieving a global consensus on climate action seems a forlorn hope. What’s more, critics of the UK net zero target argue that the costs will cause a decline in living standards for little overall benefit.
Forget economic arguments: what is the moral thing to do in the face of a warming planet, rising sea levels, more extreme weather, food and water insecurity, and human displacement?
Readers of Immanuel Kant might be tempted to invoke his ‘categorical imperative’, a moral rule that says you should act in a way that you would want to apply to everyone, regardless of your personal desires or the potential outcomes of your actions. In climate terms, it means pursuing net zero as a moral good in itself. Utilitarian ethics, however, says that the right action is the one producing the most happiness and the least unhappiness for the greatest number of people. Therefore, it could be argued that the detrimental consequences of pursuing net zero in the UK, combined with its questionable global benefit, make it immoral.
Is ‘net zero’ a moral pursuit?
Chair: Michael Buerk Panellists: Matthew Taylor, Ella Whelan, Giles Fraser and Anne McElvoy. Witnesses: Maurice Cousins, Alice Evatt, Tony Milligan and Sorin Baiasu. Producer: Dan Tierney
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're dead to me. |
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| 0:40.0 | Good evening. The consensus on curbing global warming, if it ever existed, seems to be breaking down. |
| 0:46.8 | Here, both reform and the Conservatives want to scrap the central target, net zero carbon emissions by 2050. |
| 0:53.8 | The UK, in fact, leads the world in cutting emissions, |
| 0:57.0 | but critics say only by importing fuel and exporting industries and jobs, leaving us with the highest |
| 1:03.4 | energy costs in the Western world. It may seem noble, the Spectator magazine said this week, |
| 1:09.6 | but it's organised hypocrisy that's crippling the |
| 1:12.2 | economy. The government would dispute this, of course, and the argument over the costs and benefits |
| 1:17.8 | of decarbonisation is hotly, no pun intended, contested. But there are still many who see this |
| 1:23.8 | as more important than economics, what the great 18th century philosopher Emmanuel Kant called a categorical imperative, |
| 1:31.2 | an objective so existential, so morally desirable, as to override any negative consequences |
| 1:37.0 | of trying to achieve it. |
| 1:38.7 | So is net zero a moral imperative? |
| 1:42.2 | That's our moral maze tonight. |
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