Killing the carbon targets

GWPF reproduces an FT article which suggests that the government is under pressure from engineering companies who want to see the UK's unilateral carbon targets reduced. Apparently senior Conservatives are keen to see the targets killed off, something that could happen if a review by the Committee on Climate Change finds that the UK is moving much quicker towards decarbonisation than the rest of Europe.

Of course, under Lord Deben's stewardship the review is unlikely to come up with the required answer, and the Liberal Democrats represent something of an immovable object on this front too. They are, not to put to fine a point on it, willing to throw granny from the train (or let her freeze to death anyway) in order to keep their green voters.

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The last minute amendment

I may have been mistaken. The big story of today may be that at the very end of the Energy Bill debate, the government sneaked in a new amendment that amounts to a decarbonisation target by the back door. As Booker reports:

By 2020, [the amendment] said, Britain must reduce its electricity use by “103 terawatt hours”, rising by 2030 to “154 terawatt hours”. This could have been understood only by someone aware that we currently use each year some 378 “terawatt hours”. So what was being proposed was that this must be cut down in six years by 27 per cent – more than a quarter – rising 10 years later to a cut of more than 40 per cent, or two fifths.

Update on Jun 9, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Commenters think that Booker has this wrong. See here.

Davey rants and raves

Desperately trying to put off a decision on a 2030 decarbonisation target, but beset by the serried ranks of woolly-jumpered Lib Dem backbenchers, who are all demanding that he take the UK back to the 17th century, Ed Davey has decided to do what climate secretaries always do. He is going to give a speech bashing global warming sceptics! Nice one. That will please LibDem MPs, earn him nice write-ups in the Guardian and the Independent, and distract attention from the fact that he will be unable to give them what they want.

...some sections of the press are giving an uncritical campaigning platform to individuals and lobby groups.

This is not the serious science of challenging, checking and probing.

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More evidence that nobody believes in climate policy

The Economist notes that far from pulling back from the oil and gas business, governments - allegedly concerned with climate targets - are actually expanding their fossil fuel businesses and that exploration activity is expanding across the board:

Such behaviour, on the face of it, makes no sense. One possible explanation is that companies are betting that government climate policies will fail; they will be able to burn all their reserves, including new ones, after all. This implies that global temperatures would either soar past the 2°C mark, or be restrained by a technological fix, such as carbon capture and storage, or geo-engineering.

Recent events make such a bet seem rational. On April 16th the European Parliament voted against attempts to shore up Europe’s emissions trading system against collapse. The system is the EU’s flagship environmental policy and the world’s largest carbon market.

Putting it at risk suggests that Europeans have lost their will to endure short-term pain for long-term environmental gain. Nor is this the only such sign. Several cash-strapped EU countries are cutting subsidies for renewable energy. And governments around the world have failed to make progress towards a new global climate-change treaty. Betting against tough climate policies seems almost prudent.

All change

Further evidence of the decline influence of green extremism in the UK, with two news stories today. The Mail on Sunday reports that a go-ahead appears likely for Cuadrilla to resume shale gas exploration in Lancashire. Work was suspended after some minor earth tremors were reported.

Meanwhile, hot off the presses is the news that the UK will oppose the idea of the EU producing a new renewables target for 2030 - the existing one runs out in 2020. Given the damage that greens - including those in the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties -  have done to the UK economy already, this is probably wise, or at least not quite so extraordinarily foolish as previously.

Lawson in the FT

A nice letter from Nigel Lawson in the FT.

From Lord Lawson.

Sir, I would like, as a former energy secretary, to wish Ed Davey, the new secretary of state for energy and climate change, the best of luck in his new job. He has the opportunity to enter the history books as the only minister to use his position to abolish it for the wider public good. The yoking together of energy and climate change has given this country the worst energy policy for a generation – bad for the economy, bad for industry, bad for the taxpayer and bad for the consumer. The time has come to put responsibility for climate change policy back into the environment department, where it properly belongs, and to put energy policy into the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills from where Mr Davey has just emerged.

Nigel Lawson, House of Lords

Well, one can hope, I suppose.