In the final days of Theresa May’s premiership, the UK’s net-zero target, like the landmark 2008 Climate Change Act before it, entered the statute book with hardly any resistance.
Well-founded complaints were made that it did not match the pace and scale required to address climate breakdown, but, as in 2008, across parliament there appeared to be an underlying consensus that “something had to be done”. Outright climate-change denial was kept to a faint background hum.
