Climate change: The government's carbon-cutting target is spot on, but is it over-promising?
Tom Clarke
Former Science Editor
The UK government has announced one of the most ambitious carbon-cutting targets of any major economy.
The pledge is to reduce carbon emissions from our domestic economy by 68% compared to 1990 levels. It’s been welcomed by climate campaigners as an essential step towards avoiding dangerous levels of global warming we’re on track to see by the middle of this century, if things carry on as they are.
It will require the major shifts in how we generate electricity to accelerate. That means more offshore wind power, more solar and possibly nuclear generation.
It probably also means more projects that capture and store carbon from industrial activities that are hard to “decarbonise” like making steel and cement.
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It also means a radical shift away from fossil fuels to drive transport. That means more electric or hydrogen-powered cars and more electrified trains.
Toughest of all, it means radical and really rapid changes in how we heat our homes and businesses to replace the natural gas that currently dominates.
That leaves many observers welcoming the ambition, but questioning the government’s willingness, and ability to deliver them.
Take one of the trickiest sectors to make greener: improving the energy efficiency of homes. There are eight million houses in the UK with hard-to-insulate solid brick walls.
Nearly all of them are heated by gas boilers and alternatives to them, like air source heat pump, are several times more expensive.
And homes are a great illustration of where current government policies are failing. This year, the government launched a £4 billion “green homes grant” scheme for homeowners to spend up to £10,000 to improve the energy efficiency of their homes.
However, two months into the scheme, although 42,000 applications had been made, just 267 vouchers had been issued.
Some campaigners also argue that while the government cannot be criticised for its statements of ambition, its spending priorities contradict it.
In the latest spending review, £27 billion was allocated for building roads, that for the next couple of decades at least will be filled with fossil fuel-powered cars.
However, today’s announcement is also timed to coincide with an international summit to try and persuade other countries to do more. Next year, the UK is hosting the UN’s global climate change summit, COP 26.
Britain had to make a world-leading pledge to cut its own emissions if it was going to ask other countries to do the same.