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Good evening. The consequences may have been unintended, but they were eminently predictable.

In the avowed interests of future generations, we've left our coal in the ground, we import around half our current needs,

we've not developed offshore and onshore gas deposit, ditto, and have failed to replace our ageing nuclear power stations.

Now we have an energy crisis and the cost of living is rocketing.

We already pay nearly twice as much for electricity as Americans and prices are about to rise 50%.

Is this part of the compact as civilised society makes with its successes,

like the government's levelling up project, something that will cost us a lot now but create

a fairer country with more equal opportunities for our grandchildren? The most extreme critics

of both leveling up and the carbon zero target say these grandiose ambitions actually make the poor

suffer now so the well-off can have a nicer lives in the future. How do we balance the needs

and desires of the present with our obligations to the generations yet to come? That's our moral

maze tonight. Our panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator at the Times,

Ash Sarkar, the Marxist libertarian and editor at the Navarra Media Group, and McElvoy, senior editor at the

economist and the priest and polemicist, Giles Fraser. Asch, you are by some distance, the youngest

amongst us. How's your gas bill? And what's your take on this?

My gas bill makes me want to throw up, Michael. And I've got to say, you'll be pleased to know that I

reject this whole framing because we're pitching this as the needs of the present way against the future.

But the fact is, if you're not on the money escalator of asset ownership, you don't have much

of a stake in either the present

or the future. So the people with a nice present who tend to be property owning older people,

they're not looking down the barrel of a long precarious climate apocalyptic future like

...