The UK government has been criticised after publishing a sweeping climate change strategy that didn’t show the carbon emissions savings any of its measures would deliver.
With the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow 12 days away and the UK off track for several of its future carbon targets, the laid out a crucial set of new policies for cutting emissions, including backing a large nuclear power station and mandating electric vehicles sales.
The strategy said the new plans taken together put the UK “on the path” to its tough 2035 target of slashing emissions by 78 per cent from the baseline of emissions in 1990. In a foreword, the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, said: “This strategy sets out how we will make historic transitions to remove carbon from our power, retire the internal combustion engine from our vehicles and start to phase out gas boilers from our homes.”
Advertisement
However, the strategy doesn’t detail any of the anticipated emissions savings that will stem from action on homes, transport, industry and more, and doesn’t give an aggregate figure for how much the moves will cut emissions.
91av has learned the government has a spreadsheet breaking down the emissions savings of individual actions, but has decided against making it public. That spreadsheet is likely to assume varying savings for different levels of technologies being deployed.
“They’ve said they are now on track and they need to show their workings,” says at think tank E3G in the UK. “If they don’t, there’s not transparency: how can we possibly hold them to account and test their claims are true?”
Government data published last year showed the UK needed stronger policies to reduce emissions by more than a hundred million tonnes of CO2 to meet its carbon targets for the end of this decade and the middle of the next decade.
at Carbon Brief in the UK says “we don’t know” what the remaining emissions gap is between the targets and the trajectory from policies, or whether it is closed entirely. “The fact [the government is] not publishing those numbers tells its own story. People can draw their own conclusions,” he says.
One possible explanation for the government’s reticence in publishing the figures is that it doesn’t want to expose itself to the risk of a legal challenge by producing data that shows it is off track for its legally binding carbon targets.
at Greenpeace UK says: “I would say what are they trying to hide? This is basic to the levels of trust that are necessary for international cooperation on climate change, that countries are transparent about what they’re doing and how they’re delivering it.”
A spokesperson for the UK’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy says, “We will be reporting every year on our progress, in line with the Climate Change Committee’s annual reporting cycle.”
Parr adds that it is “bizarre and unhelpful”, especially given that one of the issues being negotiated at COP26 is international rules on transparency about emissions. Moreover, he says on a domestic level “we need to know what the big ticket items are [in terms of how much measures cut emissions] and what the flotsam and jetsam is”.
The Climate Change Committee, a group of statutory advisers to the UK government, is expected to publish an independent assessment of the net zero strategy in the coming days.
“Personally, I think there’s considerable doubt that they are on track, based on what we can see,” says Matthew. The overall level of investment on climate change action is “derisory” compared to the , he says.
The measures in the plan include how to fully decarbonise power by 2035, and provide goals on hydrogen, transport, heat and buildings, nature and farming, and the use of technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
On homes, a key policy is an aim to have no gas boilers sold by 2035, and considering whether to phase out existing fossil fuel heating systems for homes that are off the gas grid. For power, the main promise is to secure a final investment decision on a large nuclear power station, which is a reference to ongoing talks with power company EDF Energy on its hopes to build a new nuclear plant at Sizewell in Suffolk. Miniature nuclear plants also get a boost, with £120 million extra funding.
Transport emissions will be tackled through a mandate forcing car companies to make electric vehicles an as-yet-unspecified percentage of their sales from 2024, and extra funding for charging infrastructure. Lower-carbon fuels for planes also get backing, with £180 million in funding for firms to build facilities manufacturing such fuels. New measures for decarbonising farming are much more modest.
Taken together, the UK government estimates the net zero strategy will create 190,000 jobs by 2025 and generate up to £90 billion of private sector investment by 2030.
Sign up to our free Fix the Planet newsletter to get a dose of climate optimism delivered straight to your inbox, every Thursday
