Chief executive of the Climate Change Committee criticises government’s ‘remarkable softening’ support for climate policies
Good morning. A good way to think about the most important stories of our time is to imagine, if someone were to produce a news bulletin about what happened in the 21st century, what would be in it. Newspapers cover the most important stories of the last 24 hours. Live blogs, like this one, cover the most important stories of the last 24 minutes. But the story of the 21st story is obviously, obviously, the climate crisis, and this does feature in the daily news agenda too.
This morning Chris Stark, chief executive of the Climate Change Committee, was on the Today programme and he was withering about the government’s backsliding on green issues (partly a matter of rhetoric, but there have been some policy shifts too) since the Uxbridge byelection result last week, which persuaded some Tories that fighting net zero measures could be an election. winning strategy.
Stark said that there had been a “remarkable softening” in support for climate policies in recent days, and that this was worry. He said:
It’s a worrying situation. As somebody who works on climate issues, climate policies, we’ve seen this week a remarkable softening of the stance and the rhetoric from our political leaders on climate, in a period when frankly, we should be seeing the opposite.
He said that, although Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, said in an interview on the Today programme on Tuesday that the government was fully committed to implementing the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030, by then the damage had been done. He said:
I was very reassured by what Michael Gove said when he sat in this chair. But, nonetheless, the damage was done because we had this discussion following Uxbridge result about whether the 2030 goal was the right one for the country.
That’s one of the things I’m very worried about, because we’ve just heard the the environmental case for having a net zero target ….
Stark said it was “crackers” to allow people to think the 2030 deadline might slip. The government was trying to promote investment in the electric car industry, he said. He went on:
So it’s crackers, frankly, to invest £500m pounds in bringing Jaguar Land Rover to the UK to invest in a new gigafactory for making the batteries for those cars, and then similarly, almost within almost the same week, start to talk about softening that 2030 goal, removing the market for the vehicles that Jaguar Land Rover want to make.
And he said the government was not making enough progress towards its net zero targets. He explained:
The progress we’re making in this country against the targets that are set in law is just not fast enough. Let me give you one illustration of that. If you removed from the equation the one sector where we have been doing pretty well in this country, which is the power sector – we are moving towards a more renewable, cleaner electricity system – if you take that out of the equation and look at all the other sectors where of course the challenge now lies, decarbonizing our economy, moving towards a score of net zero, the average in recent years has been about a 1% fall in greenhouse gas emissions.
If we’re going to meet the 2030 goal that the government set in that Cop26 process back in Glasgow, that needs to quadruple over the next six or seven years. Now we are not seeing that kind of progress and the government’s plans.
