The Committee on Climate Change should demand alignment with the Paris goals
The world has warmed by one degree, and the mercury keeps rising. Even if nations meet all the pledges they’ve made so far, warming would still increase to three degrees.
And so, faced with ever-increasing climate impacts, the world’s nations have agreed to take greater action. They have ratified last year’s Paris Climate Agreement. Its aim is to keep temperature rises ‘well below’ two degrees, and to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees.
This 1.5 versus two degrees versus three degrees stuff really matters.
To give just one of a myriad reasons why, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) says today that the numbers of people affected globally by coastal flooding at 2°C, 3°C and 4°C “are a factor of three, eight and 13 higher than at 1.5°C, respectively.
So what should the UK do? As the CCC also made clear today, our current climate targets ‘are not aimed at limiting global temperatures to as low a level in the Paris Agreement.’
Pretty clear eh? The next step should be to tighten our targets, right? To reflect the Paris Agreement’s goal for keep to 1.5 degrees, not the 50:50 chance of two degrees our current targets are based on. Yes?
No. The CCC’s first main conclusion is that we should ‘not set new UK emissions targets now’.
What, stay as we are? Faced with what John Barrett from the Priestley Centre for Climate Change described as ‘the need for emergency, rapid, deeply transformative change’, the CCC’s answer is ‘don’t align the UK with the Paris goals‘?
The CCC offer an argument for this, but for me it does not stack up.
They argue that the UK already has tough targets, and — critically — we are way off-track to meet them. The priority they say is to ‘vigorously pursue’ measures to get us back on course. Concentrate on the targets we’ve got.
This is, in part, excellent advice from the CCC — the Government has an urgent job to do far more to help people have energy-efficient homes, to make our transport sector low-carbon, to continue the switch away from coal and into renewables. It really is urgent that the Government steps-up.
But this is not an argument against also making it crystal-clear that the Paris goals require far stronger and faster action than our current targets.
If politicians do not see how urgent climate change is, or how much the UK approach needs to change, they will continue to take actions that make climate impacts worse.
Just last week the Government overturned local democracy and gave the green-light to fracking in Lancashire. Next week the all the rumours point towards the Government giving the go-ahead to Heathrow.
Building a new fossil fuel industry and allowing the continual expansion of aviation are incompatible with the Paris goals, but the UK Government can maintain the pretence that all is fine because the current climate targets appear to contain wriggle-room – the idea that sectors or projects can heavily increase emissions, because other sectors can take up the slack. There is no slack.
The CCC has published three reports today. As usual they are full of sensible, pragmatic, excellent advice on how to cut emissions, and why doing so is good for people, jobs and the economy, as well as the environment.
They stress the need for action now. All this is good. It is allied to a clear, positive story unfolding on climate change globally. Renewable energy is rocketing, and its costs are plummeting. A clean energy transformation has begun, and it will accelerate faster than politicians realise.
But will it accelerate fast enough to hold off the worst of climate change? It needs politicians to stop backing 20th century coal, gas and oil companies, and stop holding back progress of clean technologies. Seeing the grave urgency would help them do that. Politicians in the UK and abroad need to hear it loud, long and clear that preventing the worst climate change now needs a massively ramped up programme of action, beyond existing targets.
The CCC had the opportunity to say that today, and did not take it. There are not that many opportunities left.
Simon Bullock is a senior Campaigner, policy and Research co-ordinator at Friends of the Earth. Follow him on Twitter.
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4 Responses to “The UK cannot delay the adoption of more ambitious climate targets”
CR
What a total waste of money.
James Kemp
Green rubbish again! Sorry, when green energy closes the energy gap then we can build 100% but until you work out a way of holding power. Then realising it on demand then you will always need either coal,gas or nuclear power plants to close the gap.
If we don’t open new airports here they will open in another country that will not give a stuff about green it’s that simple. Same with many businesses, I have a problem with go green and kill your economy like this report wants us to.
Anon
The climate will continue to change, as it has done for millennia.
CO2 is good for plant life and is helping to re-green some areas of desert.
The reputation of science is being trashed by this nonsense.
Andrew McGowan
Politicians can only think as far as the next election. They fear that green measures will harm the economy in the short term and that will lose them the next election. However if they continue to delay on the measures needed the result that the people who really know (climate scientists) tell us will be…
– more severe storms, floods, droughts, heatwaves, sea level rise
– crops will fail, homes, factories and other buildings will be destroyed on a massive scale
The result of all this will be…
– wars over the remaining more habitable parts of the Earth (the richest and most well armed will kill the vulnerable to achieve this)
– people will be concerned with their own immediate survival needs, they will not turn up for work
– there will be economic, social and political collapse.
If there is any detrimental short-term effect of green measures on our economy (which I doubt) it will be nothing compared to the above.
James Kemp – there are already ways that renewable energy can be stored and released on demand, for instance reservoirs with hydro-electric dams, salt furnaces using concentrated solar (as in the Nevada desert) battery storage (as they are currently doing in Orkney).
All of Norway’s energy production is renewable (though they do import some electricity from neighbouring countries). No-one is saying that we can’t use a little fossil fuels, just that we need to cut back, not just by substituting renewables but also by reducing consumption (insulating houses, better public transport, electric or hydrogen vehicles, LED lights, etc.)
We all need to tell our politicians to open their eyes to the reality. The public will accept these measures if they understand the facts and if they feel everyone is taking their share.