UK Citizen's Assembly

If, like me, you're frustrated at the lack of progress on tackling climate change, you're probably wondering why the politicians aren't getting on with it.

There could be any number of reasons for their inaction including: lack of understanding of the urgency of the problem; they're in league with the fossil fuel industry; they're too busy running the country to give it enough time; and they're afraid of the political consequences of actually treating it seriously.

My belief is that it's a mix of the above, with their relative importance varying from country to country. Ultimately though, I'm convinced that when governments actually get down to working out what policies would be needed to achieve their stated goals (e.g. Net zero by 2050), they fear how their voting public will react. And the more the politicians procrastinate, the more 'extreme' will be the measures they will have to take and, in theory, the more extreme the push-back the voters could give them.

This dilemma is further increased by the fact that there are any number of ways of achieving net-zero but some policies may be less likely to annoy the voters than others.

But which ones? Politicians have shown themselves to be remarkably out of touch with the people they supposedly represent. They are also very risk averse.

So it's very interesting that the UK now has a 'Citizen's Assembly' to sort out what Britain should be doing to reach it's carbon emission targets.

The Citizen's Assembly has been commissioned by no less than six parliamentary committees (Committees set up by the government to study and give advice on particular areas of interest). In this case, they have borrowed an idea suggested by Extinction Rebellion.

The Citizen's Assembly consists of 110 ordinary citizens carefully selected (using questionnaires) to be representative of the mix of views on climate change held by the UK's population (From "There is no crisis" to "There definitely is a crisis"). The idea is that, over a number of weekends, the Assembly will see a number of guest speakers, have the science explained to them by experts, be presented with the full range of potential ways of reaching Net Zero by 2050 (The UK's current target that's been written into law), and vote on which ways they would like to be put in place by the government.

The idea is that, given the assembly is representative of the population as a whole, any decision arrived at by them can be confidently taken up by government as a roadmap, with a greatly reduced risk of political fall-out.

If the assembly is truly representative (i.e. Not statistically biased in some way), and if they receive the best possible advice, and if the recommendations look workable, and if the government takes the recommendations, then we could be looking at history here.

The Citizen's Assembly has only met once at the time of writing, so there are a few weekends to go, but I look forward the final recommendations.

More here.