In 2008, the UK Parliament passed the world’s first Climate Change Act. At the time, this appeared to be almost universally approved of by the political class, with only three MPs voting against. Not only that, but the Bill was only passed after the government revised it to make it more stringent. The final Act enshrined into law a target of 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 (up from the original proposal of 60%) and included aviation and shipping along with land-based activities.
The Act also set up the Climate Change Committee, an independent body with a chairman and seven members, charged with plotting a pathway to the 2050 goal via a series of carbon budgets and advice on how to meet them. This is a powerful and influential group, essentially setting mid-term policy, and the government of the day ignores it at its peril. Being an independent statutory body, it effectively has control over the rate of decarbonisation of the UK economy and can also to an extent define its terms.
This month (perhaps rather infelicitously, on 1 April) the CCC has pointed out clearly to the government that the climate change room has a rather large elephant in it. Administrations in all so-called Annex 1 countries (that is, those which have emissions reduction obligations under the Kyoto protocol) have looked specifically at emissions from national activities, including power generation, industry and commerce, transport and domestic use. The attempt to include shipping and aviation in this spreads the net a little wider, but the inconvenient fact the Committee has now restated is that the trend in a country’s own emissions is worthless unless it is matched by a fall in the carbon content of all goods actually consumed.
The BBC’s Roger Harrabin reports this as UK CO2 emissions rising, government advisers warn: “The committee said although production of CO2 is down 20% in the past two decades, the overall trend is up 10% because the cuts in production emissions have been outweighed by CO2 in the form of imported goods.” This clearly puts the entire policy into a different perspective: in the context of rising global emissions, what is the point of the UK and the rest of the EU blindly pursuing cuts in domestic emissions to no overall effect?
The CCC was tasked with making this investigation by DECC at the request of the House of Commons Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change in a report published in 2012 (Consumption-based emissions reporting). One of the Select Committee’s recommendations was “... that DECC explore the options for incorporating consumption-based emissions data into the policy making process, and set out the steps it will take when responding to the Committee’s report.” As an aside, in this same report, the Select Committee concludes that much of the UK’s fall in domestic emissions was not actually due to government policy, but the move from coal to gas for electricity generation plus the economic downturn. It seems that government policy is not only ineffectual in a global context, but also less than stunning at a national level.
Having backed up the Select Committee’s view that consumption-based indices would be more meaningful, the CCC in fact decided that any system of reporting total emissions (including those embodied in imported goods) would be impractical, since they are too hard to quantify. The BBC piece reported David Kennedy, the CCC’s chief executive, as saying "High levels of imported emissions reflect the need for emissions reductions in other countries if climate objectives are to be achieved. We should focus on reducing emissions produced in the UK, and proactively supporting an international agreement to reduce global emissions, following which our imported emissions would fall."
The idea of expressing a country’s carbon footprint in terms of consumption rather than production is simply another way of putting what has been said many times before; that it is overall global emissions which matter rather than the amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere by individual countries. But the difference lies in assigning responsibility. If a production basis is used, then Annex 1 countries are doing fine by the modest standards set in the first Kyoto commitment period (although, as we have already seen, only part of the fall in emissions is directly due to government energy policy). On the other hand, if consumption is the starting point, this shifts responsibility to the consumer, and the not-so-subtle aim of the Select Committee recommendation seems to have been to influence personal consumption.
In a world where consumers are already feeling the pinch in difficult economic times, there is little real likelihood that many would willingly change their consumption patterns if it increased their costs. One suggestion which has been made is to erect tariff barriers for imported goods with high embodied emissions, and in the BBC piece we read “Mr Kennedy said border tariffs on CO2 embodied in imported goods should not be ruled out as an interim measure while the world struggles towards a global agreement.” This is hopefully just sabre-rattling, as the consequences of a serious trade war with China would be highly damaging.
But the difficulty of reaching a global deal on emissions is recognised, and one of the key points made in the report is that policy may need to be reconsidered if such an agreement is not reached this decade: “If other countries were to depart significantly from this course, an assessment of global ambition and therefore ambition in UK carbon budgets would be required...” In simple terms, unless China commits to a binding reduction in emissions by 2020, the UK would have to consider scaling back its own targets. To do otherwise would be economic suicide.
Although this statement is not highlighted in the report, it is a crucial one. It is a recognition of economic and social reality. The Climate Change Act may in theory commit the country to ever more stringent emissions controls, but it is not sacrosanct and the country will not necessarily be sacrificed on the altar of climate change orthodoxy. And where the UK leads, others would surely follow. Unless, of course, they get there first.
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