Talking renewables, but promoting nuclear
Gordon Brown’s renewables conversion on the Damascene road to climate change is extremely welcome, but like all miracles needs to be examined very closely. It is magnificent that the bar for green achievement has now been so dramatically raised, but until plausible mechanisms to get there are set out, the claims ring not a little hollow.
Britain has long been committed to a 60% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 compared to the baseline 1990, as demanded by the Commission on Environmental Protection in the 1990s. In the base year 1990 Britain’s carbon emissions were about 160 million tonnes CO² (mtC), so by 2050 they have to be down to some 64 mtC, i.e. a reduction of 1.6 mtC every year for 60 years. So in the ten years since 1997 they should have been cut by about 16 mtC. In fact, initially over that period carbon emissions were cut significantly, but then over the latter part of the period they rose substantially, with a net increase over the whole decade of 2%. If then over the last 10 years emissions have gone up by 3 mtC rather than down by 16, what assurances are there that in the next 43 years emissions will be cut by 2 mtC every year from now on to meet the 60% reduction target by 2050?
To Gordon Brown’s credit he is now going further and committing to an 80% cut by 2020, which is indeed what the world’s scientists are now saying is necessary. But that only sharpens the question still further. To meet that tougher target, how exactly are we going to cut by 2.7 mtC every year from now to 2050?
When it comes to Brown’s new targets on renewables, acclamation must give way to incredulity. At present, Britain generates just 4% of its electricity from renewable sources of energy. In most of the EU it’s 10-20%, and in Scandinavia it’s 30-50%. The PM is now committing the UK to meet the EU target of 20% of its energy (not just for electricity generation) from renewables by 2020. Since it is all primary energy that is being referred to (i.e. for space heating and transport), that would mean some 40% of our electricity must come from renewables. To paraphrase, c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas l’ecologie. How precisely is a 10-fold increase in renewables to be achieved in the next 13 years?
What makes these objectives less than credible is that it is Gordon Brown himself who has blocked most of the mechanisms that might have delivered these targets. When the Government (I know because I was a Defra Minister at the time) was planning to put into statute a requirement on the top thousand companies in the UK to report annually on their emissions so that the public would know whether each year they were reducing them or not, Gordon Brown unceremoniously ditched the commitment in 2005 because at a CBI dinner just beforehand he wanted to flaunt his de-regulatory credentials. He also dropped in 2000 the fuel duty escalator which increased the price of petrol each year by more than the rate of inflation in order to encourage motorists to use their car less wherever they could because of the environmental damage involved. And it is Gordon Brown who has continued to provide huge subsidies year after year to the fossil fuel industries of oil, gas and coal which are the basic cause of the whole climate change problem.
The other oddity of this sudden spurt of greenery is that it sits uncomfortably alongside a raft of policies pulling in exactly the opposite direction. The Government is still committed to triple airport capacity in the UK by 2030 (and only yesterday announced a third runway at Heathrow) which with the huge number of extra flights entailed would make it virtually impossible to reach these ambitious new climate change targets. Gordon Brown is still committed to a massive nuclear energy revival which, given the enormous costs, would certainly squeeze out any sustained expansion of renewables. And the Government has continued to block measures which would give a major boost to the woefully low standards of energy efficiency in housing and other measures like the Merton Rule to expand the use of renewables in house construction.
So, Gordon, bully for you with your latest aspirations, but how exactly are you going to achieve them?