The conceit of the 2015 Paris Agreement is that the planet’s temperature can be centrally planned and controlled like a thermostat, with a target to hold the rise since industrial times below 1.5°C, or at the very least 2.0°C, by 2100. The mechanism for delivery consists of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC): each signatory nation’s commitments to achieve the target and adapt to rising temperatures, at least on paper. It includes a framework for how countries can help each other through pooling finance, technology and capacity-building (for example, by creating standards for global carbon markets).
In the UK, the Paris Agreement was pre-empted through the 2008 Climate Act, which committed us to at first a ‘legally binding’ 80% then 100% reduction in domestic greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 (which net are less than 1% of the global total). Implemented through five-year carbon budgets, progress is overseen by the Climate Change Committee (CCC), a combined regulator of emissions and low carbon lobby group. Budgets are then signed off by a Minister, lately Ed Miliband.
The CCC’s latest advice was to increase the UK’s 2035 NDC interim target from 78% to 81%, in pre-emption of more ambitious targets for the seventh, 2038–2042 carbon budget, in line with the raised ambitions for decarbonisation in the new Labour Government’s manifesto. The CCC proposed this might be achieved by speeding up deployment of ‘electric vehicles, heat pumps and tree planting’. The target was accepted publicly by Keir Starmer at COP29, albeit conditioned unconvincingly on the ideal that the government would not ‘tell people how to live their lives’. A promise that does not automatically accord with the kind of heavy-handed interventions that would be required to compel them not to drive petrol cars, replace their gas boilers or live next to a forest rewilded with grey wolves.
Some 35 years after the collapse of the 20th century’s most rigorous experiment in the failure of central planning, the fall of the Soviet empire, and comparative success of the capitalist West, it is hard to fathom how we’ve got into this climate communist mess. It should be self-evident that the planet doesn’t have a thermostat, let alone one easily adjusted by national leaders ordering technology to improve through a cascade of plans lashed to a target. Decarbonisation will happen regardless and is likely to go faster by inventing better solutions funded from the proceeds from growth, or bottom-up innovation. Rather than five-year battery-powered tractor plans, in the context of mission-led state direction – the latest reinvention of the language of failure by top-down socialist planners.
Heat pumps, for example, are a perfectly credible technology for electric heating. Whether they are better than gas boilers is a matter best left to homeowners, and nudged, if we wish, by an economy-wide carbon price. Such a price should be set pragmatically (to reflect affordability and competitive with rates in other countries), rather than as high as possible to satisfy lobbyists and activists, and to the exclusion of the public and industry who are stuck paying the ever-rising bills. Electric vehicles (EV) are an even more marginal case, with many articles written on the environmental and social costs (including child labour, increased fossil fuel use and conventional devastation of ecosystems by mining) when displacing petrol with batteries. The beauty of the price mechanism is that it can capture all these hard choices in one signal, in a way technocrats cannot. The numbers of heat pumps or EVs deployed by any future date is and should be considered unpredictable, not something that can be micro-adjusted to deliver a 0.03% change in global emissions in a decade’s time.
The climate knob-twiddlers have just had a second rude awakening in the United States, whose next President already ditched Paris once, and has declared himself ready to ‘Drill, baby, drill!’. The UK in contrast looks absurd, strutting between the Arab states hawking new field discoveries in Baku to assert global climate leadership by trashing our own resources and funding billion-pound pipe dreams to bury ongoing emissions in the vacated plots. This is not a growth plan, but accelerated decline. As a result, we will have fewer resources than the USA to invent the future, and those heat pumps and EVs will likely be imported. Global temperatures will continue to rise.
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