How much ambition is enough?
Colin Grenville has worked with Greener Energy Futures on many of our projects, delivering valuable insights into how to decarbonise commercial and public buildings. I don’t think there’s been a customer who’s not valued his good humour and insights based on 20 years working on energy in the built environment. Here he discusses the challenges of accelerating action on climate change:
“In March I mentioned the Government’s “Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution” and their ambition of installing 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to deliver low carbon home heating. Since then, the Government’s “Green Homes Grant” has been shelved and hundreds of £millions of funding withdrawn, leaving capital investment support for homeowners looking to install cleaner heating sadly lacking. Fuel taxation remains skewed to make gas cheap and electricity expensive and unless this changes it appears the heat pump market won’t expand with the level of ambition required any time soon. With approximately a quarter of a typical person’s greenhouse gas footprint relating to home and accommodation emissions, this now looks like a policy area needing an urgent rethink to remove reliance on natural gas and oil.
“Cheap and easy gas won’t help the push for zero-carbon heating!”
Without solving low carbon heating, “net zero” by 2050 is not feasible. As previously discussed, Norway is proposing to tackle this by more than tripling carbon taxes on fossil fuels to make it uneconomic to pollute. Whilst this is a potential lever to drive low carbon heating uptake in the UK, this approach needs to be balanced with the need to not exacerbate fuel poverty in the short to medium term. The social impact of policies requires careful management.
Perhaps then we should look at some of the other options to address climate change? After all, the level of ambition needed requires us to “Do everything, and do it faster”, to challenge and reframe our mindsets, and for greater ambition in national and local government policy. We need to seek not incremental but fundamental changes to how we live and consume within a finite biosphere. The global human population has grown approximately four-fold in the last century. Our profligacy cannot continue - there aren’t the resources for nearly eight billion people to continue as we have.
“The throwaway culture needs to change”
Taking waste as an example, the idea that there is an “away” where things can be thrown is always accompanied by the idea that there is an “other” who does not matter; a group of people, a species, a future generation… Recycling is imperfect and for many items it is also just not possible, so resources are lost. We have seen many examples of our waste being sent to developing countries for recycling and then finding it dumped in rivers or burned. We need to reframe our ambition as individuals from doing a bit of recycling to fundamentally changing our habits to eliminate resource waste. Ask the question “What is the essential value that this item provides?” before buying. New “stuff” has a significant footprint which needs to be avoided where possible.
Changes to our personal transportation is another area with significant opportunity to reduce our individual impacts. It is clear that one cannot solve traffic and environmental problems entirely by just cashing in your gas guzzler for an electric car. The implementation of Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods in response to COVID has provided a wealth of evidence and opportunity to make previously unthinkable improvements in road safety, environmental performance and community placemaking a reality.
The French National Assembly has just taken a further policy step and added e-bikes to their own car scrappage scheme. If you are getting a government subsidy to exchange your highly polluting car you must be offered the chance to trade it in for an e-bike or have access to a higher bonus for an e-cargo bike. With many UK workers likely to remain at least partly working from home for the foreseeable future this sort of scheme could encourage people to ask, “Do I actually need the car at all?”
“Government policy signals are vital to drive change quickly”
It’s been a strong month for environmental policy announcements from France with MPs approving a bill to ban domestic flights that can be reached by train in two and a half hours. Interestingly, the proposal came from a Citizens’ Climate Convention, not originally from government. By comparison, planning approval has just been given to expand Southampton airport. Perhaps a workable alternative may be a frequent flyers tax, to tackle the minority of travellers who undertake a significant proportion of all flights and contribute most to harmful emissions.
But is that ambitious enough?”
Colin’s well thought-out technical and political take on tackling the Climate Crisis is spelt out more at https://erebusenvironment.co.uk/