Britain shouldn’t be smug about our climate targets — they won’t help much

We tell ourselves we are solving the problem, even as we live lives that are more carbon-hungry than ever
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Julian Glover @julian_glover18 September 2020

The other day Zimbabwean wildlife rangers were guarding rhinos deep in the glorious Hwange National Park when they came across a group of Chinese men drilling into the ground. They arrested them only to find that the intruders were taking samples for a planned coal mine. The government had given permission for a large part of the national park — one of the great elephant sanctuaries in Africa — to be wrecked.

Brave Zimbabwean activists have gone to court to stop this but their case has just been blocked on a technicality. The government now claims the park is safe anyway. Maybe that’s true. Probably, the Chinese will try again. Either way, it’s a warning that this week’s claim by China that it is considering carbon neutrality as part of a plan to beat climate change isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

In June this year, China backed more new coal plants than in the last two years put together. And that’s just in China. The country’s banks are financing at least 60 more around the world.

But this isn’t meant to be a dig at China. At least its leadership admits climate change is real — unlike President Trump, who is trying to turn wildfires on the west coast into a reason for red necks to re-elect him.

Here in Britain, we tend to be smug when we hear about Chinese mines and Trump’s talk. Hasn’t Britain abandoned coal? Haven’t we committed to net zero emissions by 2050? Aren’t our companies piling in to do the same? Aren’t we making lots of power from wind turbines? Hasn’t Covid crashed carbon emissions anyway? Say what you like about Boris Johnson but at least his Government says it recognises the problem. He’s about to make a big speech promising a hydrogen-fuelled future. Next year Britain is hosting major UN climate talks and the Prime Minister will want a success.

Julian Glover
Daniel Hambury

All these things are true but unfortunately they have turned out to be almost no help at all in stopping the world frying. Nothing in science is simple or settled. But there is one truth we do know and that is in all the time the world has been talking about beating climate change by cutting emissions, it has actually been doing the opposite.

This bleak reality is spelt out in a new book by the economist Dieter Helm, Net Zero. Its publication has been drowned out by all the many other fine books being released this month, but if you can stand a dose of depression you should read it.

“Since 1990 the world has witnessed the golden age not of renewables but of fossil fuels,” he points out.

It’s three decades since far-sighted leaders promised to stop global warming. Since then, atmospheric carbon has gone from about 355 ppm to more than 400 ppm. Temperatures have risen too. Covid may have stopped the rise this year but there is no sign that this will be anything other than temporary. Does that mean Britain’s expensive efforts to decarbonise have been pointless? No — but we shouldn’t fool ourselves that by cleaning up part of our own mess we are solving the problem we created. As Helm points out, Europe’s effort to cut carbon use has mostly driven pollution elsewhere. Those Chinese power plants burn coal to run factories making things which are shipped here for us to buy.

Britain’s 2050 net zero target is ambitious — and possibly impossible to meet. The collapse of plans by Hitachi this week to build a new nuclear plant in Wales will make reaching it even harder. But even this target isn’t enough. It aims at net zero at home: it won’t take account of emissions from the production of things we import.

There are things we can do. Helm is an economist and puts his faith in an economist’s answers: rethink GDP so that it doesn’t reward polluting behaviour, create a proper carbon price, and take account of all emissions caused by our activities wherever they take place.

He also points out that we need to do a lot more to decarbonise agriculture alongside transport and energy: including reversing the depletion of our soils (which contain, or should contain, four times the carbon in the atmosphere). Will it happen? It could — and if we try, we will gain anyway from a recovery in biodiversity.

The alternative is to tell ourselves we are solving the problem, even as we live lives that are more carbon-hungry than ever.