Net zero, green recovery and green industrial revolution plans – what's in a number?

In the UK and the EU, grand Ten Point and Green Recovery Plans are all the rage. In the UK, everything adds up to 10; in the EU it was 20, with its "20/20/20 Climate and Energy Package". They tend to be popular, especially if every technology and lobby gets a prize. There are some advances: this time in the UK, “nature” makes an entry at no. 9 in the latest equivalent of the pop charts. The interesting bits are about what is left out. In the Ten Point Plan, networks are ignored and carbon taxes are notable by their absence. It's all about production, and the aim is to present “good news”. The politically inconvenient facts that, by not paying for the pollution we are causing, we're all living beyond our environmental means, and that it is ultimately us, as consumers, for whom all this carbon is produced, are ignored. The Plan is all about what happens here. The global problem of the global increase in carbon concentration in the atmosphere – which keeps going up even during the pandemic –and the import of all that stuff made, for example, in China does not figure in the great Plan. Cracking climate change is all about the much more painful politics of making polluters pay; funding and financing the core infrastructures; and pushing hard on R&D.