EconomicsGlobal Warming/Climate Change

Bonfire of Promises

The government’s new energy bill puts a match to its climate change commitments.

by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.

Energy policy in the United Kingdom looks like a jam factory hit by a meteorite: a multi-coloured pool of gloop, studded with broken glass. Consider these two press releases, issued by the Department for Energy and Climate Change last week.

Tuesday: the government’s new energy bill will help the UK to “move away from high carbon technologies”(1). Wednesday: applications for new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea have “broken all previous records”. This is “tremendous news for industry and for the UK economy.”(2)

The government knows that these positions are irreconciliable. Natural gas is mainly used for producing electricity. The draft energy bill, launched last week, says that if the government’s legal obligation to cut 80% of greenhouse gases by 2050 is to be met, electricity plants “need to be largely decarbonised by the 2030s.”(3) (This is a subtle slippage from December’s Carbon Plan, which said 2030(4)). The only hope of reconciliation lies in the universal deployment of carbon capture and storage: technology which removes the carbon dioxide emanating from power stations and buries it. But the government has made it clear that it does not believe this is going to happen.

The new bill sets a limit for the amount of carbon dioxide that power stations can produce. This is 450 grams of CO2 for every kilowatt-hour of electricity(5). Compare it to the 50 grams which the Committee on Climate Change says should be the average produced by power stations in this country by the end of the 2020s, if the government is to meet its 2050 target(6).

Modern gas power stations produce less than 400 grams/kWh, so the new limit won’t touch them(7). Worse, the level will be fixed – by primary legislation – until 2045 for power stations built today: in 33 years gas plants will still be allowed to produce more CO2 than they do at the moment(8). If the government believed that widespread carbon capture and storage (CCS) was a realistic prospect, it would ratchet down the emissions from gas plants, forcing them to use the technology. But CCS of this kind has not yet been proven at scale and is now beset with major problems. The government’s plans for cutting our contribution to global warming rely on vapourware.

As the energy secretary said in March, “I want a decarbonised grid in the long term, but we can’t take our foot off the gas for some time yet.”(9) In this bill we see the rupture of the cross-party consensus on climate change, and the abandonment of the carbon budgets required to meet the 2050 target.

But at least the government’s emissions limit will prevent new coal plants from being built without carbon capture and storage. Won’t it? New coal plants produce around 800 grams/kWh(10), so they appear to be excluded by the 450 gram limit. This would be consistent with the promise in the Coalition Agreement: the rules “will prevent coal-fired power stations being built unless they are equipped with sufficient carbon capture and storage to meet the emissions performance standard.”(11) But this promise has just been reclassified as biomass and used to ignite David Cameron’s pants.

The draft bill explains that any new coal plant that “forms part of” the capture and storage programme will be exempted from the emissions standard(12). What it does not say is that a single gram of carbon dioxide needs to be captured from the plant in question. The bill makes this explicit. It defines a power station in the capture and storage programme as one in which CCS “is or is to be … used in commercial electricity generation”(13). To qualify under the bill, a coal plant would need only to plan on fitting, one day not very soon, some CCS capacity, the quantity of which is not specified. As well as the coalition agreement, this rips up the commitments in both last year’s white paper(14) and the national policy statement(15).

So a putative green technology is being used as a means of absolving new coal plants from the need to reduce greenhouse gases. Through a series of subtle prestidigitations, both coal and gas plants have been exempted from any targets for cutting carbon emissions: and with that the 2008 Climate Change Act goes up in smoke.

Throughout this inferno of a bill there is not a single new commitment to energy efficiency. It relies only on the government’s Green Deal. But this will reduce the number of installations of cavity wall insulation from the 800,000 envisaged this year under the last government’s programme to 100,000(16). The government’s own figures show that almost the same number would have been insulated with no programme at all(17). In his first speech as secretary of state, Ed Davey insisted that energy efficiency “has to be right at the heart of what we do.”(18) But in his new bill it’s not even on the periphery. Its absence ensures a guaranteed market for the unabated gas and coal plants the government intends to approve.

Promises, targets, legal obligations, the act which was supposed to guarantee our carbon cuts: all are to be vapourised in the power station furnaces. This is a government of the old and the dirty, committed to the technologies of a previous century, without a wisp of concern for the future.

References:

  1. https://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/news/pn12_062/pn12_062.aspx
  2. https://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/news/pn12_063/pn12_063.aspx
  3. HM Government, May 2012.Draft Energy Bill, page 10. https://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/cm83/8362/8362.pdf
  4. See for example, Box 9, DECC, December 2011. The Carbon Plan: delivering our low carbon future. https://www.decc.gov.uk/assets/decc/11/tackling-climate-change/carbon-plan/3702-the-carbon-plan-delivering-our-low-carbon-future.pdf
  5. Draft Energy Bill, Page 89.
  6. Committee on Climate Change, December 2010. Fourth Budget Report. https://downloads.theccc.org.uk.s3.amazonaws.com/4th%20Budget/CCC-4th-Budget-Book_plain_singles.pdf
  7. Draft Energy Bill, page 218.
  8. Draft Energy Bill, page 33.
  9. https://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/news/pn12_025/pn12_025.aspx
  10. Draft Energy Bill, page 218.
  11. HM Government, 2010. The Coalition: our programme for government, page 16. https://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/default/files/resources/coalition_programme_for_government.pdf
  12. Draft Energy Bill, page 218.
  13. Draft Energy Bill, page 30
  14. DECC, July 2011. Planning our electric future:
    a White Paper for secure,
    affordable and low-carbon
    electricity. https://www.decc.gov.uk/assets/decc/11/policy-legislation/emr/2176-emr-white-paper.pdf
  15. DECC, October 2010. Revised Draft National Policy Statement for Fossil Fuel Electricity Generating Infrastructure (EN2). https://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/other/9780108509353/9780108509353.pdf
  16. https://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2012/jan/13/green-deal
  17. https://www.carboncommentary.com/2011/12/16/2208
  18. Ed Davey, 8th February 2012. Speech on the launch of the Energy Efficiency Deployment Office. https://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/news/eedolaunch/eedolaunch.aspx

3 Comments

  1. After reading this, my thought is ‘So what’s new?’. Where in the world can we see anything different being done? Certainly not anywhere among the developed nation states, including Australia with its new carbon tax which is purely window dressing in terms of what action is actually required to prepare for the future.

    The only way forward that I can see is for all of these states to bankrupt themselves and their financial systems, so that they can no longer afford to rape the planet.

    But wait! Isn’t that what we can see already beginning to happen? Bring it on!

    The sooner it gets started, the sooner it will be over and the sooner we, or those alive at the time, depending on how long it takes, will be able to settle down to a standard of living which is compatible with what nature can provide in the long run.

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