Steve Backshall: Naturalist brings Ocean tour to Sheffield, Bradford and Hull as he hits out at latest Net Zero stance

“I'm kind of incredibly jaded,” Steve tells The Yorkshire Post. He feels “properly betrayed” because he was part of announcing the Environment Bill and Act, he says, and was “working quite closely with the Government on what appeared to be big, ambitious goals for the environment that would set us ahead of many of our rivals around the world in terms of the environment.

“And now, it seems, when it is politically expedient, Rishi Sunak is just rolling back on all of those measures, but in a way that appears to me to be a kind of pulp populism that is not necessarily actually targeting the Government goals, but it's kind of looking to win over voters for an upcoming general election, and that, I think, is just incredibly sad.”

Last month, Mr Sunak announced a a five-year delay in the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and nine-year delay in the ban on new fossil fuel heating for off-gas-grid homes to 2035, among other measures.

Steve says: “We're looking for a 2050 Net Zero target that most scientists thought we wouldn’t reach anyway, so any big step you do that's going to set us back from that is going to make that less likely for us to achieve it.

"But it's more significant that he can stand up and then in one speech,” says Backshall, take “pot shots” concerning different environmental issues.

"Like talking about meat taxes and seven different recycling bins and all these kind of nonsense things that have nothing to do with policy. It quite obviously is what I guess people would call dog-whistling, or, even more appropriately, gaslighting.”

It is a serious end to a conversation in which he enthusiastically describes how Ocean will treat audiences to stunts, tricks, stage science, outtakes, “big screen beauty” and “bad dad jokes”.

People’s interest in sealife begins with the “obvious stuff,” says Steve, who was part of the presenting team for Blue Planet Live and is known for other shows such as children’s television programme Deadly 60.

“You start with the with the great whales, and with the sharks and turtles and sea horses. And then you start to get a little bit more unusual.

"You start talking about sea dragons and bizarre polychaete worms and yeti crabs and giant squid and flamboyant cuttlefish and all of the the obscure, weird creatures that are found in the depths of our oceans.

"I think it's really good to see quite how excited people are about the unknown, about the things that might still be lurking somewhere underneath our oceans that we know nothing about.”

The ocean is another part of the environment subject to big issues and “overexploitation is a massive one,” he says.

"We need to better regulate the amount that we're taking from our seas. We need to be more targeted on fish that regenerate quickly,” he adds, citing that species like herring, mackerel and pollock “are much more easy to to fish sustainably, and the same is true worldwide”.

“But more importantly than that, I think, is having proper marine protected areas that we can use to really protect the breeding grounds, the feeding grounds and the birthing grounds of particular species of fish, and if we protect them properly, then they bounce back and they bounce back quick.”

A Government spokesperson said: "The UK has already overperformed against our previous targets and we’ve cut emissions faster than any other G7 country.“We are adopting a fairer and more pragmatic approach to meeting net zero that eases the burdens on working people.“The Government remains completely committed to its Net Zero commitments, set out in law. Our targets keep us on track to meet that legal commitment, and to meet international commitments including those under the Paris Agreement.”

- Ocean comes to Sheffield City Hall on Sunday, October 22; St George’s Hall in Bradford on Thursday, November 2; and Hull City Hall on Friday, November 3.