ARE WE REALLY SERIOUS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE?
Bully for Ed Miliband, pledging the Government to an 80% cut in UK carbon emissions by 2050 compared with 1990. The previous target, set in 2000, had been a 60% cut. All those who care about fighting climate change (which ought to be everybody) should be pleased. The only question is: how credible is it?
Britain’s CO2 net emissions were 161.5 million tonnes in 1990. A 60% reduction therefore requires that UK carbon emissions should reduce by 96.9 million tonnes by 2050, and that implies that emissions should reduce on average by about 1.62 million tonnes a year. On that basis carbon emissions should have reduced by some 16.2 million tonnes over the last decade since 1997. They haven’t. They’ve gone up.
If we have failed so dramatically, so far, with the 60% reduction target, why should we be any more likely to hit an 80% reduction target? The real test is not turning out ever more radical targets, but putting in place effective mechanisms which will make certain we reach more modest targets, and then even tougher mechanisms to make certain we reach tougher targets. Britain’s problem, which we share with many other countries, is that we have done the opposite.
We are actually putting in place mechanisms which will ensure we do not reach even the modest targets, let alone the more stringent ones actually needed. The Government has committed itself to trebling airport capacity in the UK by 2030 which, if it happens, will neutralise their entire carbon-cutting programme in every other sector. The Government, or at least DBERR, is committed to building the first coal-fired power station in this country for decades, at Kingsnorth in Kent, even though coal is the most polluting fuel of all and CCS to filter out the pollution is nowhere in sight anywhere in the world.
Gordon Brown is determined to go ahead with a new round of nuclear build which will crowd out the desperately needed promotion of renewables in this country. We have more wind and wave and tidal power capacity in the UK than anywhere else in Europe, yet we currently generate just 4% of our electricity from renewables compared with 10-25% in France, Germany, Italy and Spain, and 35-50% in Scandinavia. Yet the Government is actually this year trying to whittle down the EU’s renewables target for the UK.
The Government is still opposed to bringing the airline industry into the Kyoto Protocol (or even into the current Climate Change Bill), and has no effective programme for promoting carbon-neutral cars. Industry is still not required to report annually sector by sector on its emissions, to give transparency in reducing them year by year. Household carbon allowances have been mooted, but nothing done except talk about them. And the Government is still doing all it can to extend the fossil fuel era, as most dramatically illustrated by the UK announcement that it is annexing one-third of a million square miles of the sea-bed off Antarctica because it may hold repositories of oil and gas.
An 80% reduction target by 2050 is great. But don’t expect it to be greeted with other than a hollow laugh so long as nearly all the Government’s other policies are pointed in the exact opposite direction.
This article first appeared in the Guardian on Commentisfree on 17 October 2008.

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