12 June 2019: In one of Theresa May’s last acts as prime minister, she announces that the government will adopt the 2050 net zero emissions target, which had recently been recommended by the Committee on Climate Change (CCC).
Such was the consensus on this issue, the amendment to the 2008 Climate Change Act enshrining the new target was nodded through the House of Commons without even a vote and a debate that lasted just 90 minutes.
The question ever since has been how to turn this ambitious headline goal into reality. The task has been complicated in the intervening year as the UK has seen Parliament prorogued, a general election, formal withdrawal from the EU and the biggest pandemic in over a century.
So, amidst this wider turmoil, how much progress has been achieved on net zero?
While an enthusiastic proponent of the 2050 target, shadow energy minister Alan Whitehead admits that the vote was held under “strange circumstances”.
“We had a 90-minute debate, which for something as relatively momentous as that might have seen something a bit more far reaching.
“Since we didn’t divide, a lot of stuff was left hanging in the air and has been there ever since
“It was never clear at the time what this means in policy processes and still isn’t.”
The last three months have of course seen a spectacular fall in emissions across the world as the world’s most advanced countries have locked down their economies to thwart the spread of coronavirus.
“You could argue that we weren’t making lot of progress until 20 March and then boy have we made progress,” jokes Lawrence Slade, chief executive of the Global Infrastructure Investor Association.
“We know emissions have come down considerably as a consequence of lockdown but it’s not the way to reduce emissions,” says Professor Sam Fankhauser, director of the London School of Economics’ Grantham Institute, which focuses on climate change issues.
COP out
The biggest climate policy casualty of the Covid -9 crisis has been the COP26 UN summit, which was due to take place in Glasgow this November. The summit was postponed in March, first with a view to it taking place next Spring and then rescheduled for 1 to 12 November 2021.
Fankhauser says: “It’s better to have a successful COP in November than a half-baked one in May and it buys us time to get it right.”
The rescheduling of the summit took place after the abrupt sacking in January of ex-energy minister Claire Perry as COP president.
“They got the COP quite late and with Brexit and the rest, they had quite a slow start. I’m sure they are quietly grateful for the extra time,” says Fankhauser.
“We don’t have a year to waste but it makes sense.”
The COP delay means a bit more time for the CCC, which is due to publish advice to the government on how to meet the net-zero target later this year, to do its work.
And even the government’s sternest critics acknowledge that officials and ministers have had little time to get to grips with anything other than the impact of the pandemic over the last three months.
But the government shouldn’t be let entirely off the hook, says Fankhauser: “Nine months of the twelve were unaffected by Covid so I’m not sure that can be too much of an excuse.
“There could be a world where there was a beautiful bill that was about to go to Parliament in March and didn’t happen, but I’m not sure there was anything tangible to be derailed.”
He believes the best news has been the wider momentum that has developed around the climate change issue over the past year, at least until the coronavirus struck.
“In terms of climate awareness and political ambition we made huge progress,” he says, pointing to the two thirds of councils to have declared climate emergencies in the past year and the commitment by all major political parties to back net zero at last year’s general election.
“There’s been a competition on targets which is a sign of political willingness to be ambitious.”
But Fankhauser is less impressed by the progress on policy over the last year.
“What hasn’t changed is there is very little underlying policy. I can’t think of too many measures over the past year which are exploring responses to the new targets.
“Ambition has moved way ahead and delivery hasn’t followed.”
Richard Black, director of Energy and Climate Information Unit, agrees. “In terms of concrete policy, there has been pretty much nothing,” he says.
Lack of radical thinking
Doug Parr, head of policy at Greenpeace UK says that the pace of change has not altered sufficiently to take account of the new 2050 target. “We haven’t accelerated our efforts and are still proceeding at the same rate as before, which was not fast enough.
“There seemed to be no sign of radical change in direction.”
The plunge in emissions from the power sector, which was overtaken by transport as the biggest source of UK emissions in 2018, is largely the result of the dramatic reduction in the use of coal.
“You can only do coal once and can’t do it again”, Parr says.
“We acknowledge there are emissions reductions but you can’t get to net zero just on the back of taking out coal.”
Whitehead agrees that the pace of change hasn’t shifted sufficiently.
“You would expect there to be indication of some serious thought given to change of pace and change in direction but there really hasn’t been anything forthcoming.
“It doesn’t look like the machinery of government has changed to facilitate the requirements of the new direction.”
As an example of how little the net-zero target has been incorporated so far into government thinking, he points to the Clean Growth Plan.
The 2017 document, which remains Whitehall’s key carbon reduction blueprint, has yet to be updated to take account of the new and more demanding 2050 target.
Another example of how net-zero goals have not been translated into detailed policy is the recent decision to only limit the carbon intensity of generation secured through the capacity market from 2024.
“Presumably that’s the point when coal is coming off the system so it’s pretty meaningless”, argues Whitehead.
“If you had brought that forward to 2021, it could have made a lot of difference.”
Landmark policies missing in action
Meanwhile, the list of policy initiatives stuck in a Whitehall pending tray is getting longer. The energy white paper was originally due to be published in the summer of 2019 but many do now not expect it to see the light of day until this autumn. Ditto the national infrastructure strategy, which was due to appear alongside the Budget in March.
“In so many sectors, we need plans to get to net zero and they don’t really exist,” says Parr.
The biggest gap exists in relation to heating and energy efficiency.
The “road map” for decarbonising heat, long promised for this summer, looks unlikely to be delivered in time.
Whitehead says he was “very disappointed” with the government’s recently published proposed new regime for supporting low carbon heat.
The proposed Green Gas Support scheme, which is due to replace the Renewable Heat Incentive when it runs out next April, will be limited to the production of biomethane.
Expressing his concern about the document’s lack of support for heat pumps, he says: “If that is the direction of thinking, it doesn’t look like a particularly good map.
“I’m not against injecting bio-methane but it’s a starting point not a final solution. If that is regarded as a final resting place, it’s very worrying.”
A further disappointment is that there were no moves by Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak to start spending the £9.2 billion committed in the Conservative party manifesto for energy efficiency upgrades.
While the government has consulted on moves to improve the thermal efficiency of new homes through a revamp of building regulations, the picture is less clear on how existing properties will be improved.
“There’s not much sign of strategy or action or plan. They can’t give any indication of how it’s going to happen,” says Parr.
He points as an example to the target, which has been in place for the last three years, to bring all homes up to energy performance certificate (EPC) band C by 2035, for which a strategy has yet to be put in place.
And on the central question of the role of Ofgem, the government has yet to bring forward legislation to implement the National Infrastructure Committee’s recommendation that the regulator should be given a statutory sustainability duty to promote sustainability.
And in some areas, there have been backward steps. The Feed In Tariff regime which provided a guaranteed price for surplus electricity exported to the grid by small-scale solar projects, was scrapped at the beginning of this year and there is dissatisfaction with the replacement arrangements.
Green shoots
In some areas though, there has been progress. On carbon capture and storage, the department for business, energy and industrial strategy (BEIS) has published plans to support the creation of new clusters.
“There are many steps before it becomes a reality but it’s a start,” says the ECIU’s Black.
A big move by BEIS this March was to reopen Contracts for Difference auctions to onshore windfarms, reviving a route to market that was closed off following the Conservative party’s 2015 general election victory.
Another area of progress over recent months has been on electric vehicles (EV). The government has come forward with proposals to bring forward the phase out date for new internal combustion engine cars and vans from 2040 to 2035 or even earlier.
On both renewables and EVs, the policies are in place, Fankhauser says: “It’s a matter of holding nerve and seeing it through.”
However, while progress is happening in these individual areas, there is some disquiet about whether there is a sufficiently over-arching strategy to bring them all together coherently
The establishment of a cabinet committee, chaired by the prime minister, to co-ordinate efforts to get to net zero is seen a step in the right direction as it ensures that the issue will receive at least some top level attention.
But Slade, who was chief executive of Energy UK until the end of last year, would still like the government to go one step one further and appoint a dedicated secretary of state for net zero.
“Achieving net zero will affect every facet of the economy. Until you get that, the worry is that people will not realise the implications from domestic and business point of view.
However, if the government is able to get its policy act together, Slade believes there is plenty of appetite from investors to support its climate change ambitions.
“They have a willingness among stakeholder communities to do something really good. We need to work through the current issues and do the best we can.”
Fankhauser agrees: “The planet doesn’t have an extra year so somehow we will have to catch up.”