Four years ago, on this day, May 2, 2019, The UK Committee on Climate Change released its report on the UK becoming net zero by 2050
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 414.8ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that once the UK had signed up to the Paris Agreement, which it had ratified in late 2016, it was pretty clear that the existing target of an 80% reduction by 2050 on a 1990 baseline was not going to be adequate as the UK contribution to keeping temperatures below two degrees above pre-industrial levels. Therefore, the target would need revisiting. The logical outfit to do that revisiting was, of course, the Committee on Climate Change. It did the work and released it in 2019, by which time a bunch of MPs – including Conservatives who had campaigned for Brexit – were pushing for a 2050 net zero target.
What I think we can learn from this
Big, “round number” promises can have serious institutional consequences if there’s enough momentum underneath them. So, the 1988 Toronto target was a big round number target, but it didn’t have institutional momentum behind it. There wasn’t enough intellectual and political heft, whereas the Paris Target of 2015 was different, and has been more consequential politically. Not I hasten to add, in terms of real life reduction in emissions, but you can’t have everything
What happened next
And so it came to pass in the final days of the Theresa May administration, the 2008 Climate Change Act was amended to raise the target. This has had serious implications for the attention paid to sectors of the economy, especially industry, which had previously thought they could be in that 20% that could be emitting in the year 2050.
Lots of reports and activity about “Net Zero by 2050”. We shall see…
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.