Have you noticed the UK’s falling emissions?

In my box of climate communication tools for workshops and talks, I have an activity where I get people to guess the trajectory of Britain’s carbon emissions. I have a series of columns of different sizes that represent Britain’s emissions, and I invite people to put them in order. I used it at a conference for science teachers a couple of weeks ago.

Most of the time, people make an ascending staircase. Sometimes they add a small dip at the end, but they almost always underestimate just how ...