Boris Johnson’s delay in publishing internet zero emissions strategy has left an area for climate sceptics to “complain, attack and undermine” on cost grounds, and other countries could do with seeing more “proper leadership” from the united kingdom before Cop26, the government’s independent climate adviser has said.
Lord Deben, the Conservative peer and chair of the global climate change committee, said critics of internet zero policy had been vocal within the debate because “it hasn’t been put into context by the government”.
Johnson has stuck to Theresa May’s policy of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050, but the govt has not yet published a roadmap of policies, a Treasury review of costs or a number of its sectoral strategies.
These are now expected in September, just two months before the UN talks in Glasgow, after rows with the Treasury about the way to spread the value of changes, starting from green boilers to decarbonising transport.
In an interview with the Guardian, Deben said the absence of detail had “given an open opportunity for people to form all kinds of statements with none response from the government”, which was why he was “pressing very hard to urge this work out”.
He said Johnson should take credit for sticking to internet zero policy, and he praised the government’s preparations for the Cop26 summit under its climate envoy, Alok Sharma.
However, he said there had been a “fundamental problem” for Sharma to influence developing countries to check in to steep emissions cuts when the united kingdom had cut the aid budget. “It was a really serious mistake to chop back on overseas aid,” he said, which had made it “very far more difficult” for Sharma in his negotiations.
In reference to internet zero strategy, the peer said: “Other countries would be far more willing to recognise that this is often proper leadership if they see a programme intimately , but we haven’t committed ourselves thereto .”
The global climate change committee’s sixth carbon budget analysis found that the longer term cost savings from not having to shop for oil and gas will almost offset the £50bn-a-year investment needed in low-carbon power, transport and residential heating across subsequent three decades. It predicts that after investing in net zero policies, the UK’s GNP would be only around four months behind where it might otherwise are .
However, the projected costs of net zero have are available for criticism in recent weeks, with the backbench Tory MP Craig Mackinlay forming a gaggle to challenge the worth tag. Steve Baker, the previous Brexit minister and prominent Tory, has become a trustee of the worldwide Warming Policy Foundation, the climate science sceptic outfit travel by the previous chancellor Nigel Lawson.
Deben said it had been important for the govt to stay stressing that the general cost of tackling global climate change was “a relatively bit and positively perfectly doable”.
Asked whether the Treasury was blocking policies on cost grounds, with the Office for Budget Responsibility suggesting the general cost might be £1.4tn over 30 years, Deben said he believed that Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, was “thinking very seriously about this” which he had to “keep some reasonable control over public expenditure”.
He said it had been right for the Treasury to be watching how the value is “fairly and fairly spread across society”, highlighting the unfairness of the prices of renewables having all gone on to electricity bills within the past.
But Deben said it had been a problem that the government’s overall work on net zero had not yet appeared, although he acknowledged that it had been a posh thing to figure out.
“The problem is that because that’s very late, because it had been alleged to be done considerably earlier, in fact it’s given every opportunity for everyone who wants to complain, to attack, to undermine what has got to be done and to form an excellent fuss about the varied costs.”
He added: “Boris Johnson has done some remarkable things within the sense that he has clearly signed up to the toughest targets of any country within the world. But the matter for this government is that having done that, we still haven’t seen the delivery programme.”
Deben singled out the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs for criticism for not arising with an adaptation plan, and therefore the Department for Education for not talking enough about skills and training for green jobs.
He said it had been important to acknowledge that the planet was “much further forward today than either you or i might have thought 10 years ago” within the effort to affect the climate emergency, and it had been important to worry that it had been possible to stop the worst scenarios.
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