Welcome to this special edition of Coffee House Shots for Spectators' Daily podcast.

Parliament recently declared a climate emergency and there are calls to reduce Britain's

greenhouse grass contributions to zero by 2050. That means radical action now, but what are the costs? Is it worth it? And

might there be a better or a smarter way of going about this? I'm Fraser Nelson, and I'm joined by

Laura Sands, a former Tory MP who now sits with Edmille LeBand and Caroline Lucas as a co-chair

of the IPPR's Environment and Justice Commission.

Chris Dark, chief executive of the Climate Change Committee,

whose Net Zero report made quite a splash when it was published recently.

And Joe Coleman, whose energy transitions manager at Shell,

which is kindly sponsoring this podcast.

So, Laura, I'd like to turn to you first.

This is a mixture of environmentalism, of

politics, of economics. Why are we doing this in general? I mean, the course of action being

proposed is pretty expensive, and the risk with any energy tax or any policies is that it

ends up hitting the poorest hardest, so a balance needs to be struck.

So what can you just remind us of why we're having this discussion and whether what Britain does

will make any wider difference? I mean, we have, underpinned by a huge amount of scientists,

knowledge and understanding and modelling, we have a climate crisis looming.

We're already seeing impacts of climate change right across the world.

And I don't think that really there are very, very few people who can really stand up and say

that we don't have a climate change issue that we must address

and must accelerate our action to address. I certainly feel very strongly about the

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