Weather presenter Laura Tobin clashed with Energy and Clean Growth Minister Kwasi Kwarteng on Good Morning Britain today as the pair argued about global warming.
The government recently announced that there would be 12 new renewable energy schemes, which they say will be enough to power over seven million homes.
Asked by host Ben Shephard whether he thought that the UK was in a "climate emergency" now, Kwarteng replied: "I think we're in a very serious situation and the government, as you know, is taking things extremely seriously indeed."
However he admitted that he wouldn't use "emergency" as the word to describe the situation, saying: "We can have a semantic debate as to whether it's an emergency or a crisis. I would avoid emergency simply because I think we are making steps.
"Now people say that we're not going further or faster enough, but we are definitely making steps in the right direction so that we have clean energy."
He added that the "biggest success" would be that coal will be off the grid in 2020.
Ben then brought in meteorologist Laura into the debate, who he said believed it was "absolutely an emergency".
"I think we can argue about the words, but it's a serious crisis," the Tory MP said.
However Laura interjected, saying: "It is an emergency and yes it's great that we've committed to say that we'll be carbon neutral by the year 2050 but there are no policies in place and there are only two countries in the world, Morocco and the Gambia, that actually set to meet their targets out of the whole world. We need to be doing better."
Kwarteng agreed but said that they had had some successes already.
Later, while presenting the weather, she reiterated: "Earlier we saw the climate stripes, I'm wearing mine to show how rapidly the earth has been warming, it's never warmed so quickly before because of carbon emissions, and the UK is one of the biggest contributors of that historically.
"So yes, change needs to come sooner rather than later."
*Good Morning Britain airs weekdays at 6am on ITV
