How would reaching net zero change our lives?

The government has announced an ambitious programme to complete the UK's net zero transition to clean energy by 2030. Implementing the "colossal" Clean Power 2030 plan will cost £40 billion a year until the end of this decade, but the government has decided it's "worth the risk", said Sky News.

Although the "rapid roll-out" of clean energy and energy efficiency measures for the transition is "capital-intensive upfront", said the LSE's Grantham Research Institute, it could "serve to make the UK economy resilient, productive and competitive in the long term.

What did the commentators say?

The world our descendants will occupy will be "a very different place", with "wholesale changes" to "homes, modes of transport, and the landscape that surrounds them", said RBC Wealth Management. That means "decarbonised homes", "ubiquitous" electric vehicles and a "reshaped landscape", including cities with "more green spaces to lock up CO2" among a raft of other changes.

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Investment in clean technologies can "induce creativity and innovation across the whole economy", said the Grantham Research Institute. That includes addressing problems that "currently threaten people's wellbeing and limit productivity", such as air pollution, which costs the NHS and businesses "more than £20 billion each year".

By the 2040s, the electricity that solar panels produce "promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today", said The Economist. "Much of the world" will feel "energy-rich". It will be a "new and transformational" era, particularly for Africa, where 600 million people "still cannot light their homes".

But the "most consequential" developments are likely to be "the things that nobody has yet thought of". The "radical abundance" of clean, low-ecost energy will set the "tiny Ferris wheels of the mind" spinning with "new possibilities".

Even if we hit net zero in the next few decades, this "will not bring an immediate end to the global heating problem", said Andrew King and Tilo Ziehn on The Conversation. Earth's average temperature would "continue to rise slowly" under net zero emissions, albeit "at a much slower rate than we see today", while the oceans will keep getting warmer for centuries. But "that's not to say" the world shouldn't "push" to reach net zero as fast as possible, because "the sooner we get there", the "less damaging change" the planet will experience "in the long run".

What next?

Everything involved in Keir Starmer's plan, from "reforming the retail market for energy", to "smart metering", EV charging, connecting heat pumps and new technologies that can "store excess electricity", will "all have to happen in parallel", said Sky News.

And to get all the "clean, locally produced power" to "where it is actually needed" will require an overhaul of the National Grid "not seen since the current system was planned in the 1950s".

So the plan will be "a genuine test" of whether Britain can "get building again" and of Starmer's "political stomach" when it "hits the inevitable bumps along the way".