What if the UK took radical action on emissions? by Christian Tate

It’s very easy to become overwhelmed by the climate emergency, the numbers quoted in news reports are so immense and the steps needed to genuinely tackle it seem so overwhelming.

We wanted to put the impact of radical actions into an understandable human context, so we took the UK’s per capita emissions and worked out how much they’d fall in certain radical scenarios: the removal of all petrol cars from the roads; the cancelling of all flights into and out of the country; the closing all fossil fuel plants; everyone going vegan overnight; the planting of a forest the size of Scotland.

For each we showed some of the larger downsides (total destruction of the livestock industry etc.) and evaluated the UK’s progress to date. We wanted readers of our book, An Answer For Everything, to be able to grasp the key points straight away but also to enjoy digging into the detail. We took advice from climate scientists, spent days (and days) trawling through academic papers and went through at least three iterations of how to present the emissions savings and we were pleased with the result. Although it does show the UK has a long way still to go if we want to reach net zero.

(PDF has full infographic piece, PNG is just the first page)