Thom Yorke on BBC

Thom Yorke sits on the BBC Breakfast sofa with Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, on the day the charity launches its campaign for a law cutting Britain's carbon emissions by 3% a year. The science is no longer in dispute, Yorke says, and “I find it too terrifying not to get involved”; the campaign gives him somewhere to direct the fear. Juniper explains why it has to be law: the government's targets are being missed, and a law is one that all governments have to follow.

When the presenter asks how anyone can recycle without the infrastructure, Yorke turns it round. What people do at home matters, he says, but less than the old coal-fired power stations that should have been decommissioned ten years ago, “a series of very very large villains” the government knows about. Without a law, he argues, the result is a witch-hunt of people who are not doing enough; with one, the panic and the sense of powerlessness go away.