14th March 2024
Advance planning is key in tackling the climate crisis but it also has to be planning that can flex as circumstance change. The Climate Change Committee was preparing the UK’s fifth carbon budget for the period 2028-2032 back in November 2015. It the executive summary the CCC noted that the publishing of the budget was deliberately being timed to come out before COP21 in Paris – the COP where the Paris agreement was drawn up.
Amongst the various budget proposals – which largely focused on reducing the carbon intensity of energy generation, and of transport – featured things such as hydrogen powered buses no hydrogen for domestic heating. We now know that the science and the markets have gone down the line of electric buses, and that hydrogen has similarly not proved a practicable substitute for domestic heating – rather the trend has, if very slowly, been for heat pumps.
What the writers of the budget could not have predicted was the Covid pandemic which has altered working patterns and changed the pressures on the transport system. Nor could they have anticipated the war in Ukraine and the sharp increase in fuel prices which has served to reduce gas consumption.
The CCC is now working on the seventh carbon budget (for the period 2038-2042), having issued the sixth budget in 2020 (for the period 2033-2037). The advance notice of that these budgets give on the shape the economy and infrastructure need to take, should help industry with its investment plans but this does rely on the government both sticking to the plans – eg not changing the proposed date for phasing out new petrol engine cars – and facilitating change when unforeseen circumstances arise such as wars and global energy price hikes.
The Green Tau 