The UK risks missing its 2035 climate change target by a “huge margin” because only a fifth of the emissions cuts needed are being addressed by effective government policies, the British government’s watchdog on climate change has warned.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) was formed under the Labour government’s Climate Change Act (2008) to advise the United Kingdom’s Parliaments on tackling climate change. It sets carbon budgets (designed to place a limit on the level of emissions that can be emitted in a five-year period).
In 2019, the CCC recommended the UK adopt a net zero by 2050 greenhouse gas emissions target. The British parliament subsequently amended the Climate Change Act to include a net zero commitment.
The road from COP26
The pinnacle of climate leadership for the UK was in 2021 when it hosted the COP26 climate change talks in Glasgow. Those glorious days of global leadership now seem a long way off. The latest report from the CCC is scathing: it slams the government’s aggressive road building programme, support for airport expansion, and its slow progress on heat pumps, renewable energy production and home insulation.
“The UK has lost its clear global leadership position on climate action,” says the report, which also blames a lack of effort to engage the public in existing solutions, backing for the first new deep coal mine in 30 years, for oil and gas expansion in the North Sea, and an overreliance on future technofixes. These are all raised in this report as obstacles to creating the zero carbon Britain that most people in the UK say they want.
In his introduction, which also serves as a farewell after 10 years as chief of the CCC, Lord Deben cannot hide his hurt. “I urge Government to find the courage to place climate just as the rest of the world wakes up to the opportunity of net zero.”
“Our confidence in the achievement of the UK’s 2030 climate goals has markedly declined. Drastic action is required to take the national effort to every corner of the economy.”
The report lists eight important messages:
- Stay firm on existing commitments and move to delivery
- Retake climate leadership internationally
- Take immediate action in the priority areas
- Develop demand-side and land use policies
- Help households and communities to make low carbon decisions
- Make sure fossil fuel production is in live with net zero
- Develop a framework to manage airport capacity
- Make sure policies are radical enough to support net zero.
New policies are urgently needed for hard to abate industries, especially in the steel sector where the Government has high ambitions for decarbonisation but no policy to deliver it, as well as wider incentives for electrification of industry. Policies are required to step up the rates of tree planting and peatland restoration.
Greenhouse gas emissions have been falling by just under 3 per cent a year, but this will need to double over the next eight years, said the CCC.
In a statement, Green party MP Caroline Lucas commented: “This government routinely boasts of its climate leadership and has set plenty of targets but this report from the CCC lays bare the true extent of the delivery gap.” Action, not pledges and targets, would be needed to avert catastrophic climate change, she added.
A UK government spokesperson responding to the report in a statement said: “Any suggestion we have been slow to deliver climate action is widely off the mark.”
China to take the lead?
If the UK were still part of the EU then its climate ambitions would probably be about on a par with Eastern European countries, if a new report by CEE Bankwatch Network is anything to go by.
This report looks at the climate ambitions of individual European Union member countries. Of these only Spain, Croatia and Slovenia have submitted their plans to decarbonise by the annual EU deadline of 30 June.
It says that since the start of the war in Ukraine, Eastern European countries have turned to fossil fuel companies to supply their energy needs. “This trend is particularly evident in central and eastern European countries, where measures have been taken to slow down the transition away from fossil fuels, backtrack on previous commitments, or even de facto recarbonise the economy,” the report says.
It echoes a third report, this one from the European Court of Auditors, which warned of a “significant funding gap” standing in the way of meeting the European Union’s climate targets.
Most countries are failing to allocate sufficient budget to back up decarbonisation policies.
What we don’t want to see in Europe is a “race to the bottom” of countries failing to show climate leadership at a time when China reports that it is to meet its goals for installing new solar and wind renewable energy capacity an astonishing five years ahead of its target.
Objectors to taking climate action can no longer use China as an excuse for doing nothing themselves. They can use millionaire Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Tory government instead.