Kale flourishing in the heart of Hull? So could we see a bountiful harvest from the urban jungle garden cities? Could we be seeing much more food grown in the spare patches of land amongst our buildings? Also on the show, has the idea of hydrogen for heating now had its day? We hear about the growing opposition from some residents to a public trial in Redcar and put them to the Energy Minister. We hear about another grim temperature milestone, but how hopes are rising for the energy transition to send global emissions into decline as soon as next year? And could plants actually be better at saving us from the worst of climate change than we thought? But first, the argument over whether hydrogen has any role in heating our homes is hotting up again as the Government prepares to announce a decision on whether or not to approve a trial in the Yorkshire coastal town of Redcar. It would mean disconnecting residents from the gas grid and hooking them up to hydrogen. Those that refuse can't keep their gas boilers, but can have an electric alternative instead. A similar trial in Cheshire was canceled due to local opposition, and some people in Redcar are now expressing similar concerns.

The company that wants to run the trial is Northern Gas Networks. They already own the pipes that deliver gas to millions of homes across northern England. Tim Harwood is their hydrogen program director. We feel we can't just electrify the whole UK, we have to give people choice. And so we're doing this project to demonstrate we can convert the gas network over to hydrogen. We can do it safely, that we can provide resilience to customers so that the hydrogen is always there when they need it and that customers actually like it and that their lifestyle doesn't change that much and that they feel like it's fairly similar to using natural gas. So where does the Government stand on this? I'm joined by Energy Minister Lord Calluman Martin. Callan. Well, thanks for joining us. You said we'd see a decision about this trial in Red car for hydrogen and home heating by the end of the year. What have you decided?

We will get a decision before the end of the year, but genuinely, we have not yet made a final decision on the matter. We're still looking at the submission from Northern Gas Networks, we're still looking at the costs, the feasibility, the practicality, et cetera, of the trial, though we genuinely have not made a decision yet.

A big thing that the government said would influence that decision is local consent. And, I mean, I've got a few films of people here talking about it.

We are being told we will have electric or hydrogen with no choices in properties over 100 years old in a conservation area. I don't think so. I don't think it's safe, I don't think it's been tested enough, and I don't think I'm being allowed to have a voice and a say, I have.

To question were our politicians were educated, because I cannot understand how they can be so gullible as to believe the greenwash that's coming from Northern Gas in Red Core.

Well, I've been up to the area I come from near them myself. I've visited the trial, I've spoken to people up there, I've been to the shop on the high street and like any matter, some people are in favor of it, I've met them. But equally, there are also some strong objectives and I've received many letters and emails from them as well. But as I said, in the terms of the decision, then community consent will be very important for us. And there are different ways of measuring this, or the local MP, the local council, et cetera, are supportive of the trial. But equally, I know that there are a number of people who are strongly against it as well.

I mean, it's not just about local opinion, is it? I mean, scientific opinion is pretty united in thinking that hydrogen for home heating isn't a great idea. Your own National Infrastructure Commission said there is no public policy case for hydrogen. I mean, people who know about this don't think it's a great idea for homes.

Again, there are split opinions on it and there are some people that are in favor as well.

You can't just present it as an.

Equal spectrum, but these are all factors that we will take into consideration. But the purpose of doing the trial, if we do the trial, no decisions have been made yet will be to work out the costs, the practicality, the feasibility of it in a real world environment.

I think you yourself have said that the chances of seeing hydrogen in our homes is very small, if at all, that it will go ahead. So why don't you just clarify this and say, look, we're not going to go, it's not appropriate for home heating.

It's clear that the vast majority of decarbonisation of home heating in the UK will be electrification. It is possible in some areas, if we have hydrogen production locally, that it might play a relatively small role in some localized areas, but we won't know whether that's possible unless we do the trial.

But a relatively small role in some localized areas. You just said, I mean, if you're a gas operator, that's kind of saying, this is going to be marginal at best for you, isn't it?

Hydrogen, it will not play a major role in home heating. There's no way that that could be practically achieved. And electrification, we know, works. Heat pumps are a practical option, we have heat networks. Rural areas will perhaps use biogas or renewable liquid heating fuels, et cetera. So they will be the principal means of decarbonisation.

You seem to be saying that the door is nearly closed for hydrogen, but leaving it open just a little bit just puts in confusion and boiler companies are still advertising products as hydrogen ready and it just confuses the market.

I think there is an issue about that, and I know the CMA are looking at some of the claims markets authority by the boiler manufacturers, and it's very clear that they need to present accurate information to the public. And I think there is some confusion that they have allowed to creep into the debate because, of course, it is possible to mix hydrogen into the current gas supply up to concentrations of about 20%. And that will work perfectly well with existing appliances, existing boilers, existing cookers, et cetera. But there is a point of confusion of the public and potentially misleading them. But I'll let the CMA take action on that.

Okay, just briefly on that 20%, is that still a goal, to mix in 20% of hydrogen in the gas mixture?

That's one of the other issues that we're looking at at the moment, and you will see decisions on that fairly shortly as well.

Okay, bated breath. Well, thank you very much, lord Callanan. Well, as mentioned in the top of the program, I've been in Hull looking at the right to grow. The idea of developing unused patches of land for fruit and veg. Is this an idea that could take root elsewhere? Well, here we've got this borridge. This is very good. The bees love the borridge, so it creates like a really light honey. Martin's Borridge is growing on an industrial estate in Hull, hardly an Eden. But before this community garden arrived, this space was a wasteland. We're on the site of an old dock which was filled.

Yeah.

So we had to put these nets up because we start getting rabbits coming on the site on a night. It's a bit of a wildlife haven. Places like this often are once the rabbits have been enjoying the leaks, have they? Yes, they've been nibbling some of the tops of the leaks. They left a good bit behind them. They have indeed. That will go in the soup soon. Many of Hull's disused nooks and crannies could be filled with borridge and kale. It's become the first city in the UK to offer people the right to grow on unused council land. Jill is the councilor here in Hull who proposed the right to grow motion. It was passed unanimously.

I just don't want people not to have food. I want people to have decent food, but I also want them to feel good about themselves.

And what does it actually commit the council to doing?

There needs to be a map to show people just where they are able to start developing these growing areas. And there also needs to be some way of harvesting water, getting people so that water can be either harvested here or brought here.

They can also supply insurance, cover something that can make or break new projects. But what can you grow in these small, sometimes scrubby spaces? So what do you got in mind for me today as your undergardener? That's right. You're my assistant and we're going to be putting in some multi CERN spring onions. Okay. In here, the appropriately named John Pickles works for a local charity growing and sharing veg around Hull. He'll be mapping Hull's future food sources. Roughly how many spaces do you think might be appropriate for this? In Hull, there could be 30 or 40 little pockets. We're talking about pockets of land. I can see them popping up in all sorts of little nooks and crannies and pockets of grass. Just a strip of four or five apple trees where they'll fit in, or some raised beds here. You can do it on a small scale, but you can replicate it. The idea we sort of have a blueprint of the elements that you need for a successful growing space. You've got some small polytunnels and those spaces don't even have to be at ground level. You've got rooftops here. You've got the large shopping center which has got a massive roof area.

You've got, meanwhile, spaces which is very similar to the garden we've got here, which is a derelict piece of land. Mikey Tompkins spends his time mapping out the potential for urban agriculture across many cities and thinks it's huge. How significant could the actual quantity of food be grown in these spaces between, say, 15 and 20%? We're not talking about urban food growing being all our food that we need to consume, but 15 or 20% of the food consumed in that city. The benefit of urban food growing is that you can use small space quite intensely as opposed to extensive growing, which requires fields just sitting empty for maybe three or four months of the year. Is this something that you think has real potential or is it just a kind of rather quaint, nice food programy kind of thing? Historically, this is how we always grew food. I mean, the city provided quite a lot of our food and going back to things like dig for victory. When we got ourselves together in the Second World War, the research coming out there was saying, this is more productive than farmland. We're speaking to Mikey in another garden with industrial roots.

It all started in Skips and we'll soon be moving on as the neighboring British Library reclaims this space. In the meantime, they're busy growing for local food banks.

I'm just trying to work out if I can do this without actually holding it. Oh, good grief. Should be a building expert, Pam Warhurst.

Emphasizes how good growing places are for people, not just plants, when she bends the ear of politicians around the country.

Since Hull adopted our motion of a right to grow, I've been all over the know. I was in Wales yesterday and I was down in Birmingham the other day, so there's lots of interest in it now from councils and communities. And I'm prepared to go anywhere that anybody wants to talk to me about right to grow because it's the right time to do it.

So you think this could make a real difference to people on lower incomes?

I think it would make a huge difference to people on lower incomes because this isn't about being stigmatized and going to a food bank. And how lacking in hope at times must that feel like when you have to do that. If you knew there was land that you could gather with your friends and produce your own food, then it could make a very significant difference.

Horticulture in the heart of the city could change not just urban landscapes, but also the lives of some of the people who live there. Nourishing both minds and bodies. We are now less than a week away from the big climate summit cop 28 in Dubai, which will try to keep global temperatures to the Paris target, which was well below two degrees above the preindustrial average. It comes as the world passes a grim milestone, with the average global temperature going temporarily above the two degree mark for the first time. Climate scientists say that while this is only a temporary breach of the limit, it should be a call for action. As time is running out, it tells.

Us that we are warming up the planet and we need to do something about it. So I'm actually optimistic that these breaches of these targets that we've set ourselves are going to help politicians understand how critical it is to shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy as quick as possible.

And that transition is picking up pace, according to a new report from the Science and Policy Institute Climate Analytics calculating that if the boom in solar, wind and EVs continues at its current speed, global emissions could now be about to peak and begin falling as soon as next year.

The market is there, the economics are there. We have growing manufacturing capacity for solar in particular. It's still a choice that governments have to make. We also know that they have enormous production pipelines for fossil fuels looking out into the future that would blow our chances of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees. So it's absolutely crucial that we get governments altogether collectively committing to stop backing the fossil fuel economy and really accelerate the transition towards renewables.

And governments will be getting together next week for the annual UN Climate Summit cop 28, this time in Dubai, where I'll be there with Tom Clark. Tom, there's a lot at stake this time, isn't there?

Yeah, it's kind of heating up, isn't it? Metaphorically and literally. We have got this cop happening in what is almost certainly going to be the hottest year on record, but also at a time when we've wondering whether we can still keep that idea of keeping temperatures below one and a half degrees alive. They keep talking about that this cop presidency is still maintaining and that's a position that it can take. What we're going to find out of this cop, I think one of the most important things is this stock take. How are all the world's nations doing in terms of their pledges? And what that is definitely clearly abundantly going to show is we are a very, very, very long way from the cuts in carbon dioxide. We need to get anywhere close to 1.5 this thing stands.

And one of the things I'll be really interested to see how it shakes down is that we all know fossil fuels the problem. This is an economy country based on fossil fuels. The guy who's running the conference runs the big fossil fuel company.

That's absolutely right. Fortunately, we've got an opportunity to sit down with ADNOC, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, and talk to them about this and how they feel. Oil companies can even have a seat at the table, let alone play a role in net zero. But that's the argument they're going to be making. It makes this cop really interesting. In a way. Those oil companies have actually been excluded from previous climate summits. But the reality, and they'll point this out to you, still, 80% of the world's energy demand is met by fossil fuels. You got to get off that onto something else. Do you need them around the table? A lot of people argue, actually that is the sensible way to go about it.

It is a good question. If they are the villain of the piece, do you bring them in to solve the problem?

Others would say absolutely not. And there's all sorts of analogies out there, but some people say it's like having a tobacco company run your lung cancer conference or whatever. I think it's a little bit unfair on old companies, given all they do is provide energy. But we certainly know have a proven track record of talking down climate ambition. There was a long lobbying campaign against it. Can we trust big businesses to make progress? It will be really interesting to see.

Well, between now and then, you've got a great story out this weekend. Tell me about that. That's right.

So rather on this top level thing we were looking at, how is this going down with real people and here in the UK, I mean, I think it's been quite apparent this year. We are seeing what what can only be described as a bit of divide emerging. People on one side feeling we cannot move fast enough to hurtle towards net zero, get the sort of policies in place to decarbonise. A lot of other people kicking back against that. And we've seen some tensions flare around things like ULEZ, the Mayor of London's emission cutting scheme. You remember the blade runners, these masked vigilantes going down, cutting down cameras. We chatted to one of those. But also those roadblocking protests just stop oil in state Britain. Really interesting coming together. We managed to engineer between a woman incensed, outraged about having her journey to school with her son blocked, try to shunt some protesters out of the way with her car. We managed to get driver and protester to come together.

Oh, that's very to talk it through.

So just let me let me show you a little clip of that here.

I mean, you actually see someone with a car pushing shunting a human being.

Absolutely. I was nervous about this, but how must have felt interestingly. What set us off on quite a good start to our journey? There was a bit of coming together about this. The driver obviously recognized she did wrong. The protester admitted I wasn't targeting you personally. Our fight's not with you.

And you managed to bring these two people together. That's right.

I just felt like, who are you to stop me and my child going about a day? Not like, no disrespect, but that's how I felt at the time. We have to wake people up. It's like, Wake up, everybody, look what's happening. I have no rights here to block you personally what you're doing. I absolutely agree with that, but I.

Do believe that do you feel, because of the actions of people like Lou, that you are less likely to care about climate environment issues if someone came to you and said, Vote for this?

Less likely, yeah, absolutely. I'm thinking for so many people in the country that messaged me after that happened, saying the same thing, they wouldn't want to get behind it because it's pretty frustrating.

Well, that's really interesting. They were quite civil together, but the driver suggested that the protesters actions weren't necessarily helping her own cause.

Absolutely. And I don't think either has changed their position very much, at least on their views on what we need to be doing about climate change, the amount of energy we need to devote to it. They're still very entrenched in their views.

And I think you had another one about onshore Wind, which is obviously a contentious issue for some as well.

This is a really interesting one, because if you poll people across the UK, onshore Wind is actually very popular. Most people do not oppose it. Scotland have always had a policy to favor it. Here in England, of course, but successive governments have flip flopped on it for years, gone round around on the issue. We haven't really got anywhere, but we now know the Westminster government does want to favor onshore Wind. So we went up to Scotland to see, well, what does that mean? What does it actually mean? When we start to if we were to seriously expand the amount of capacity, what you find is, yes, it's popular with people in towns and cities that benefit from that electricity, but much less so amongst people who live near these things.

Which would you rather have? A forest of steel and things with flailing arms, or would you rather have green trees and unspoilt landscapes. They don't ask the people who live next to the turbines what their views are. They ask people who live in London, people in urban areas, but it's the people living in the countryside who are actually basically we're not NIMBY's, we are providing the electricity for people living in cities. That's the reality of it. We get the adverse effects, we don't get any compensation in any form.

Well, thanks very much to our science editor Tom Clark, who I will next see in the Gulf. Sticking with science, there was a really interesting report out this week that suggested that plants might be able to absorb more carbon dioxide than we thought. And I spoke to the report's author, Jurgen Knauer from Sydney, and asked him what his paper clearly showed.

So we were looking at terrestrial biosphere model and how plants in that model take up atmospheric CO2 under future climate warming. And we found that the more complex the model is, or the more realistic photosynthesis was represented in that model, the higher was the CO2 uptake. So that was our key finding.

So is it because there's more CO2 in the atmosphere that we're putting out there that they're collecting more or actually because of some of the way that the climate is changing, they're taking more or both?

It's both. So plants definitely benefit from higher CO2 concentrations, but they also benefit from at least, like globally, from the combination of higher CO2 concentrations and higher temperatures.

Why do you think this matters? When we look forward, one thing that strikes me is we are actually planning to do a lot of tree planting to help take up CO2. Is it relevant to that story?

Definitely. And that's what we said could be is really some sort of policy implication from our findings that we need to protect vegetation, but we also should restore vegetation as much as we can.

In farming, people are increasingly saying we need to keep the soil covered. Bare earth is a sort of crime against nature. It doesn't happen naturally. And I just wonder what you thought about that. We need to keep things growing, don't we?

Absolutely. I agree. I mean, the more plants grow or the more of the soil is covered by plants, the more of the CO2 is taking up in the first place. Right. So that's a good thing. I should mention that that doesn't mean or generally also in our study, we didn't look at how long that CO2 stays in the biosphere or in plants, but generally you could say, as a rule of thumb, the more CO2 that is taking up by plants, the more is generally stored in the ecosystem or on land.

Thanks very much indeed, Yogan. Well, that's it for the show this week. Remember, you can catch up on all your climate and environment news on the Sky News website and app or by scanning the QR code that's on your screen right now. Next week we will be in Dubai for Cop 28, the big climate summit. We'll see you there.