photo by Bruno D Rodrigues, courtesy Creative Commons
Wow. So last week the committee responsible for advising Parliament on climate change told the government in no uncertain terms that Britain needed to slash its carbon emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050. In 2000, policymakers came up with a target of 60 per cent, and have resisted calls to increase it for some time.
In their letter to the new Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband (which is, incidentally, charmingly friendly – “Dear Ed… Yours ever“) – the committee explain it pretty clearly.
Reductions of this scale are required to limit the expected global temperature increases to around 2 degrees centigrade… and to reduce the chances of exceeding 4 degrees centigrade… Temperature rises above 2 degrees are likely to have a major and increasing impact on human welfare and the natural environment. Temperature rises above 4 degrees centigrade could be catastrophic.”
So what would an 80 per cent reduction mean?
At most, we could only expel 118 million tones of CO2 each year.
That might sound like a lot, especially as it’s got the word million in it, but last year British CO2 emissions totalled 544 million tonnes. And by 2050 there’ll be a lot more people around.
An 80 per cent target will put the UK at the vanguard of climate change mitigation. It will also have immediate implications for existing energy policy, as Greenpeace’s exec director John Sauven explains:
The new target should sound the death knell for new coal-fired power stations and Heathrow’s proposed third runway.
A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that a new fleet of coal plants would hole the new target below the water line, while Labour’s current ambitions for aviation expansion would finish it off.”
In fact, aviation would account for Britain’s entire carbon budget in 2050 unless the industry shrinks dramatically.
Of course with the financial meltdown currently dripping its doom all over the globe, lots of people think we can’t afford to worry about other worrying meltdowns, say, in the Arctic. Thank goodness Ed Miliband disagrees. Yesterday he told the Guardian: “I don’t think there is an option not to act.”
Then today, he passed that message on to Parliament, telling MPs he accepted all the recommendations from last week’s report, and committing Britain to the 80 per cent target.
Good work indeed, dear Ed.
Indeed. I was surprised and impressed at the 80% commitment. The cynic in me tells me that what we can expect in reality is some Olympic standard wriggling to get around that, like we’ve seen with renewable energy. But I’m not listening to the cynic in me right now, and just to take on the target is a big step forward.