UK announces new climate targets despite criticism

The UK lacks policies to achieve more than half of the carbon emissions reductions that will be legally required by 2030, according to the Committee on Climate Change (CCC). The committee’s annual progress report warned that although emissions from electricity generation were decreasing, pollution caused by transport was increasing and attempts to reduce emissions from homes had gone into reverse. The CCC also stated that the Brexit vote had raised questions about the future of the country’s EU-related climate policies. The report comes on the same day as the UK announced ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions to 57% of 1990 levels by 2030. The “fifth carbon budget” will be legally binding and increases the previous target of a 40% reduction of 1990 levels by 2030.

The UK has no policies in place to meet more than half of the carbon emission cuts required by law by 2030, the government’s official advisers warned on Thursday, the same day ministers committed to the target.

The advisers also warned that the UK’s Brexit vote had thrown some EU-linked climate policies into doubt.

The Committee on Climate Change’s (CCC) annual progress report said emissions from electricity generation were falling fast, but that pollution from transport was rising and that action on cutting carbon emissions from homes had gone backwards.

The alert comes the day after energy secretary Amber Rudd said the UK’s vote to leave the EU could make it harder to tackle climate change, which she said is a “serious long-term risk to our economic and national security”.

The energy industry, including the National Grid, has also warned that Brexit is likely to lead to higher bills for customers and lower energy security for the nation. The CCC said that uncertainty over climate policy had delayed projects and increased costs even before the Brexit vote, which spooked some investors further.

The government went some way to reassuring investors by announcing on Thursday that it had accepted the advice of the CCC to cut emissions by 57% by 2030, compared to 1990. But Matthew Bell, CCC chief executive, said progress to date had been mixed.

National carbon emissions have fallen by over 4.5% a year since 2012, but almost entirely due to increases in green electricity from renewables and lower coal use, with virtually no reductions in the rest of the economy.

“In those other areas, policy has either changed or gone backwards,” Bell said. “Buildings are probably the biggest gap right now, where we called very clearly in 2015 for a new strategy for low-carbon heating and efficiency efficiency. The best way to keep consumers’ bills low and to tackle climate change is to make sure houses are properly insulated.”

However, the CCC found the rate of installing insulation in homes has fallen up to 90% and the government scrapped plans for new homes to be zero carbon.

“The last thing we need is to be building homes we know we are going to have to retrofit in 10-15 years time, because that will inevitably be more expensive,” Bell said. On Wednesday, the government said it was cutting support for energy efficiency from £870m to £640m after 2017.

Before the EU referendum, ministers had committed to produce an emissions reduction plan by the end of 2016 to plug the gaps identified by the CCC and acknowledged by Rudd in November. But the political turmoil following the Brexit vote is set to make this more difficult to deliver.

Barry Gardiner, Labour’s shadow energy and climate change secretary, said: “Today’s report sends a red alert that the Tories’ energy policies are dangerously inadequate and are sending the UK woefully off track to meet our climate targets. The Conservatives’ repeated attacks on clean energy over the past year have opened up a 50% shortfall to meet our carbon budgets beyond 2030.” He said an emissions reduction plan in 2011 had failed to plug gaps identified at that time.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: “We have already made great strides towards our target of an 80% reduction by 2050 but there remains work to do. We are investing in innovation to secure cheap and clean energy that our families and businesses can rely on in the long term.”

Sue Armstrong Brown, at the Green Alliance thinktank, said: “Yesterday, Amber Rudd was unequivocal that a tough stance on climate change will be an essential quality in the next Conservative leader. The CCC’s report today makes clear that a robust emissions reduction plan will be the first test of that leadership.”

Bell said the nation’s carbon targets were set in UK law by the climate change act and are not at all linked to EU legislation.

But he added: “What is undoubtedly the case is that a lot of the mechanisms we were using to tackle climate change were linked to the EU, like the EU emissions trading scheme that governs the power sector and heavy industry and emissions standards for vehicles. That is now thrown into doubt, and those were relatively efficient ways of trying to achieve emissions reductions.”

“So the question is, post-Brexit, how do we ensure that we continue to be able to pursue climate change policies as efficiently as possible,” Bell said. “That is certainly an added complexity we did not have before.” The CCC will now examine the impacts of Brexit in detail but Bell said: “In general, reductions in your ability to trade is likely to increase costs.”

Brexit might also present some opportunities for better climate policies, he said, for example in how the farming subsidies are used: “Arguably, after the vote, the government has even more control over low carbon policy.”

Some of the strongest criticism in the CCC report was of the government’s abandonment of a £1bn competition to spur the development of carbon capture and storage technology (CCS), which will be needed to trap and bury emissions. The CCC and others have warned that tackling climate change will cost twice as much without CCS.

“We know CCS is a crucial component of meeting our ultimate 2050 objective” of an 80% cut in emissions, Bell said, adding the cancellation was a big setback and that a new plan was urgently needed. He said CCS was also an opportunity for the UK, which has expertise and storage potential in its North Sea oil and gas industry: “The UK may even in future be earning money from CCS.”