NFU renewable energy and climate change chief adviser Dr Jonathan Scurlock reports.
Photograph: 2024 UNFCC - CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Following advice last month from the independent advisory CCC (Climate Change Committee), Sir Keir Starmer told the COP29 conference on Tuesday that the UK is indeed committed to an ambitious 2035 goal of cutting GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions by 81% below 1990 levels.
Arriving in Baku, together with Energy Secretary Ed Miliband and Foreign Secretary David Lammy, the Prime Minister is one of a minority of G7 leaders attending the ‘climate action summit’ part of the talks, but the UK Government appears determined to resume world leadership in tackling climate change.
Noting that a global transition to clean power is currently well under way, Keir Starmer highlighted the benefits of being a “first mover” in setting the world’s most ambitious goal for an industrial economy.
While he would not dictate how people live their lives, the interim goal of ‘clean power’ by 2030 was a vital step.
Driving greater uptake of clean power
Startling though these promised emission cuts may appear on the international stage (in sharp contrast to the flip-flop climate politics of others like the USA), they are actually in line with previous expectations, given the legally-binding UK domestic commitment to set its own five-year carbon budgets.
Cutting our GHGs by more than four-fifths in 11 years’ time is already expected under the sixth carbon budget (equivalent to a 77-78% emissions reduction over the period 2033-37). More challenging, perhaps, is the previous UK commitment to a 2030 ‘National Determined Contribution’ of a 68% emissions reduction.
Incoming CCC chief executive Emma Pinchbeck, herself a veteran of the electricity industry, has already warned that driving greater uptake of clean power (electric vehicles and heat pumps) will be essential to meeting the UK’s medium-term climate ambitions, alongside public consent to a fair energy transition that yields perceptible economic benefits.