For the past two years I have been fretting over a mystery. Though Labourseems to have done everything possible to ensure that it stays out of office,there remains a possibility that it might form another government at some pointbetween now and 2050. This means that its climate change bill, which will becomelaw in the autumn, could come back to haunt it. Despite its evident flaws, thisis radical and unprecedented legislation. It imposes a legal obligation onfuture governments to cut carbon dioxide pollution by 60% or more by 2050, withbinding interim targets every five years.
The government has some good climate policies. It also has some bleedingdisastrous ones, which appear to commit the United Kingdom to high carbonpollution for the entire period covered by the bill. A future Labour governmentwould find itself snared by its own current policies. Surely it wouldn’t befoolish enough to set such a trap for itself?
One policy alone seems to doom future governments to prosecution: the planneddoubling of the capacity of the UK’s airports by 2030. Using the Departmentfor Transport’s projections, I estimate that by 2050 aeroplanes will accountfor 91% of all the greenhouse gases the country should be producing. Under theless optimistic figures published by Defra, the environment department, theproportion rises to 258%(1).
Until now this hasn’t been a problem: the government has refused to includeaircraft pollution in the 2050 target. But following an amendment in the Lords,the draft bill imposes a duty on the government either to include it or toexplain to parliament why it hasn’t done so, within five years(2). Thegovernment claims that it might not be possible to add these gases to the UK’scarbon budget because, "in the absence of an internationally agreedmethodology", no one knows how to calculate what proportion of this pollutionbelongs to us(3).
It’s a knotty problem, isn’t it? If you were the government and you knewthat 67% of the passengers using UK airports were residents of this country(4),could you work out what proportion of aircraft emissions should be counted inthe UK’s carbon budget? No? Me neither. Wouldn’t know where to begin.
This ridiculous excuse can’t be sustained for much longer. At some pointaircraft gases will have to be included in the carbon target. Throw in thegovernment’s road-building programme and its intention to approve newcoal-burning power plants and you can see that it has a problem.
The only factor now holding down carbon emissions is the price of energy. Theyfell by 2% last year, and the government admits that this "was largelyexplicable in terms of price relativities."(5) In other words, it has againbecome cheaper to burn natural gas in power stations than to burn coal, whilethe cost of oil has encouraged people to drive less. The 2% reduction means thatthe UK’s carbon budget is now a grand total of 0.8% smaller than it was in1997(6). The government can post a 16% cut in greenhouse gases since 1990 onlybecause of the accidental reductions made during the dash for gas under theTories and the sharp reduction in methane and nitrous oxide from rubbish dumpsand industry. Neither of these cuts can be repeated.
But this doesn’t even begin to describe the government’s problem. Its newclimate change report contains a tantalising figure. It is expressed in such aback-handed way that you have to perform half a dozen small calculations todiscover what it means. The report boasts that even when emissions in countriesexporting goods to the UK are taken into account, "the total annual reductionof UK greenhouse gas emissions since 1990 was around 240 million tonnes ofcarbon dioxide equivalent [MtCO2eq] below business as usual".(7) Thegovernment says that "business as usual" would have led to an increase of40% in emissions since 1990. This gives us a figure of 1079MtCO2eq(8). Subtract240 from 1079 and you get 839, or 187 MtCO2 eq above current emissions(9). Thismeans that instead of declining by 16% since 1990, as the government insists,the greenhouse gases for which the UK is responsible have risen by 9%.
When I finished this sum I sat still for quite a long time. The UK’s entireclimate change programme is based on a statistical artefact. The only reason ourpollution appears to have declined is that we have outsourced our emissions. Afair account of our carbon emissions would include those we import minus thosewe export: a balance that can only worsen in a post-industrial economy.
So how can the government reconcile its energy policies with future politicalhazard? Well the mystery has at last been solved. The key to the puzzle is foundin a minor briefing note just published by Defra. It explains that, during thelatest stage of the bill, the government "remov[ed] the quantified limit onthe use of internationally traded credits in meeting the UK’s targets"(10).In other words we could buy the entire cut from other countries.
Given that we are outsourcing some of our greenhouse gases, you might think itmakes sense to outsource our carbon cuts as well. But there are three problems.The first is that we are exporting emissions that are difficult to address andimporting, through carbon trading, the easiest and cheapest cuts.
The second is that while the emissions we export are certain and verifiable, thecuts we buy through carbon credits are often fraudulent. For example, as thewriter Oliver Tickell documents, 96% of the carbon credits from hydroelectricdam construction were issued after construction had begun: the dams would havebeen built without the carbon market, so no additional cuts have beenachieved(11). Around 30% of all carbon credits comes from the sale oftrifluoromethane cuts by Chinese and Indian companies making refrigerationgases. Many of them are still producing this pollutant only because they make somuch money from cleaning it up: the carbon market pays them 47 times more forthese cuts than the gas costs to remove(12).
Behind these problems lurks a much greater one, which is mathematicallyimpossible to resolve. You can trade your way out of trouble when the cut youare trying to achieve is a small one. But when the global cut required toprevent two degrees of warming is 60 or 80 or 90%, then every rich nation mustreduce its emissions by roughly the same amount. Otherwise half the world wouldhave to buy credits equivalent to 180% of the emissions produced by the otherhalf.
The government will have to impose some kind of cap on carbon trading. But I betit will be set high enough to cover any failures in domestic policy, as measuredby the rigged accounting methods civil servants use. This means that successivegovernments will have no legal incentive to change their energy policies. Thecarbon trading provision torpedoes the useful content of the entire bill.
But at least the mystery has been solved, and it will no longer keep me awake atnight. Now I can focus on the real nightmares.
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References:
1. The calculations are explained here: www.monbiot.com
2. Draft Climate Change Bill, as amended in public bill committee, part 29.www.publications.parliament.uk
3. Defra, 15th July 2008. Climate Change Bill: Update following House of CommonsCommittee Stage. www.defra.gov.uk
4. Sally Cairns and Carey Newson, September 2006. Predict and Decide: aviation,climate change and UK policy. Environmental Change Institute, University ofOxford, p8. www.eci.ox.ac.uk
5. Defra, July 2008. UK Climate Change Programme. Annual Report to Parliament,July 2008, p17. www.defra.gov.uk
6. The figure for 1997 was 548.1MtCO2. The provisional figure for 2007 is 543.7MtCO2. See Table 2, Defra, July 2008, ibid.
7. Defra, July 2008. UK Climate Change Programme. Annual Report to Parliament,July 2008, p18. www.defra.gov.uk
8. The 1990 figure was 770.8MtCO2eq. Table 2, Defra, July 2008, ibid.
9. The latest figure (2006) for all ggs is 652.3 MtCO2eq. Table 2, Defra, July2008, ibid.
10. Defra, 15th July 2008, ibid.
11. Oliver Tickell, forthcoming. Kyoto2: how to manage the global greenhouse.Zed Books, London.
12. ibid.
