The 7th Carbon Budget: love your neighbour?

The Seventh Carbon Budget is out now. It won’t make it to our news feeds, but it’s an important document.

Published by the UK government’s Climate Change Committee (CCC), it’s a well-articulated pathway to (trigger alert) net zero. It’s their best effort at how we in the UK can live more or less as we do now, but without ruining the world around us. For us evangelicals though, there’s something about it that really stands out. Something quite amazing. Though lacking the poetry of Isaiah 65, its themes of prospering humanity, long life, well-being, justice, peace and a flourishing earth could come right out of the prophets.

The pathway to the CCC’s world of mutual flourishing is fairly straightforward. Switch everything to electric (home heating, cars, industrial processes), make all our electricity from low carbon sources (wind, solar, nuclear), plant new woodlands, restore peatlands, fly less; eat less beef, lamb and dairy; walk, cycle and take public transport more. That’s pretty much it. If you’d like to go to the horse’s mouth, you can find it at www.theccc.org.uk.