Create ‘positive tipping points’ with climate mandates, governments urged

Among the mandates suggested was requiring a rising proportion of car sales to be zero-emission vehicles, reaching 100% by 2035. Photograph: John Walton/PA

In the terminology of the climate and ecological crises the phrase “tipping point” is loaded with dreadful implications.

It evokes a climate breakdown supercharged by the mass escape of methane locked in Siberian permafrost, or the great currents of the oceans smothered by freshwater melting from the Greenland ice sheet, or the Amazon turning from great rainforest to parched savannah after the felling of one too many trees.