UK climate plan: Boris Johnson’s ‘green industrial revolution’ labelled ‘inadequate’

Typhoon Vamco has left 42 people dead, 20 more missing, and thousands displaced around the Philippines capital Manila in the past week.

Vamco is the 21st tropical cyclone to hit the country this year, striking in regions recently battered by Goni, the most powerful typhoon of 2020.

Following the disasters, the country’s president, Rodrigo Duterte, whose brutal “war on drugs” has led to the deaths of thousands of Filipinos, renewed calls for wealthy nations to be held accountable for the climate crisis that is being acutely felt in the developing world.

Louise Boyle has the story:

Oxford University students have voted to stop selling beef and lamb at the canteens on campus, joining the likes of Goldsmiths College, University of London which banned beef from its campus last year. 

The students’ union passed the motion by a two-thirds majority at the weekly student council, which means union representatives must now lobby the university to bring in the meat ban at restaurants and takeaways on campus. The reasoning for the ban is because of the impact of meat on climate emissions.

Ben Farmer, representing charities and the community at the union, told reporters today: “I welcome the mandate to engage the university on this important issue. It is important to recognise that food-based changes may not be possible for every student or staff member at the university. Further, food-based changes are just one part of changes we’d like to see the university make to tackle the climate crisis.”

It is believed Oxford officials will want to enforce the policy so it can rival key competitor Cambridge University, which has already banned beef from campus canteens.

The motion read: "As the UK’s premier university, the nation looks to Oxford for leadership, but Oxford has shown a lack of leadership in addressing climate change. The banning of beef and lamb at university-catered events and outlets is a feasible and effective strategy to help the university meet its revised 2030 goal.

“A change at the university level will open the gates for similar change at the college level. The university has a commitment to anti-racism, and this requires urgent action to minimise greenhouse emissions.”

The students’ union is unable to change university policy itself but exists to represent students in university decision making; Oxford’s has 22,000 members.

While Boris Johnson’s promise to bring forward the ban on fossil fuel-based vehicles has been praised by many, others have argued that the UK is not properly built to support a widespread rollout of electric vehicles just yet.

Kirk Taylor, head of development at Kajima Partnerships, for instance, has said new infrastructure, which Britain does not currently have, “is crucial to power this shift”. Mr Taylor told The Independent:

“The UK government bringing forward a ban on the sale of new fossil fuel vehicles by 10 years to 2030 is undeniably a promising move in the right direction but for this to effectively inspire the transition to electric vehicles (EVs), we will need new infrastructure across the UK that is essential to support this switch.  

“In January, the Department for Transport (DfT) pledged to double its EV charger funding to £10m but limited residential, workplace and public charging infrastructure remains a pinch point for rolling out EVs in the UK.

“Without the necessary infrastructure to encourage and reassure people about the viability of a shift to EVs, we will struggle to see uptake at the speed required for the change to have a meaningful impact on the UK’s carbon emissions.”

It is mid-November and the Arctic has already been plunged into 24-hour darkness for the winter, but two months after the normal point at which the sea ice begins to refreeze into the huge sheets which cap the top of our planet, enormous areas of open water remain.

The record-breaking delay comes after the average ice extent for October was the lowest in the satellite record. The lack of ice means the Arctic sea ice extent is currently the lowest for this time of year, for at least a thousand years. Harry Cockburn reports:

As Britain struggles with a pandemic-related economic slowdown, using stimulus spending to create new green jobs could move the country toward its net-zero emissions goal, cut inequality and win broader support for climate action, economic analysts said. 

Boris Johnson’s 10-point plan, which he called a “green industrial revolution”, has promised to create up to a quarter of a million jobs through measures such as expanding building retrofits and offshore wind power.

John Gummer, chair of the Committee on Climate Change, which advises the government, said the plan could bring benefits including “improved health, a stronger economy (and) a boost to UK jobs”.

The pandemic could lead to the loss of at least 2 million jobs in Britain - but more than half of those could be made up by boosting green employment, from home retrofitting to clean energy, said Hannah Martin, co-executive director of the non-profit Green New Deal UK, at a London Climate Action Week event.

With the right training programmes to develop new skills and other key government investments, such a shift could create more stable, future-proof jobs and help reduce inequalities, she and others told the online discussion on Tuesday.

In addressing both the pandemic slowdown and risks from planetary heating, “we have to talk about inequality as much as we talk about climate change,” said Ms Martin, whose group seeks to reshape British economic priorities. Public support for such climate-friendly policies also appears to be growing, backers say.

An online poll published on Tuesday by London Councils, which represents Greater London's governments, showed 82 per cent of residents were “concerned” about climate change, with over half personally affected by problems such as heatwaves or flooding. Younger people, aged 25-44, were most likely to say they were affected, as were people from black and other minority communities, the poll of 1,000 “representative” Londoners found.

Among such groups, and more broadly, there is “a strong public willingness not to go back to before, but to build something better” during the coronavirus recovery, said Miatta Fahnbulleh, CEO of the London-based New Economics Foundation.

“We have to transform the economy and do this in a way that works for the majority of people,” including by creating new jobs, Ms Fahnbulleh said during the online event.

To achieve the needed shifts and its own net-zero goal, the government should commit a minimum of 2 per cent of GDP, building up to 5 per cent of GDP, to bootstrap and drive climate-smart shifts that also address underlying social problems, she said. That could fund everything from major job training and re-skilling programmes to reforestation, she said.

“The government is going to have to spend its way out of this recession ... It feels like an absolute no-brainer it should make this green,” she added.

Critics questioning whether the country can afford high levels of climate spending should take a hard look at the rising costs of not cutting carbon emissions, from worsening extreme weather to more precarious global food security, she said.

But “in return for consent to the scale of change, there has to be a good deal for public”, she emphasised, whether in the form of warmer homes, less pollution or more decent jobs.

Thomson Reuters Foundation

Joe Biden has been told he must bring US emissions down 45-50 per cent by 2030, and reestablish the US as a global climate leader, in just two of 10 hurdles the president-elect must overcome to confront the climate crisis. 

Research organisation World Resources Institute (WRI), who has issued the friendly warning to Mr Biden, has laid out the top priorities in an easy-to-digest graphic:

Mr Biden is all-too aware how important his approach to the climate emergency is, after Donald Trump’s outright refusal to acknowledge the trouble planet Earth is really in.

It is thought one of his first actions as president, once he is sworn in at the beginning of 2021, will be to re-enter the US into the Paris Climate Agreement. Mr Trump went to great lengths to remove the nation from it earlier this year.

Land protected for nature ‘vastly underestimated’

The government has hugely underestimated the amount of land already protected and the effort needed to deliver its pledge to devote 30 per cent of land to nature, according to an environmental umbrella group.

The Wildlife and Countryside Link, which represents 57 conservation organisations, said the “30 by30” commitment was very welcome, but the real amount of land already given over to nature was around 3 per cent, rather than the 26 per cent ministers had said.

And they had hugely underestimated the effort needed to deliver it, the group said, setting out tough measures on how the 2030 target could be met.

As prepartions are under way for the UN’s Cop26 climate conference, which the UK will host in Glasgow next year, international focus on the UK’s efforts to deal with the worsening climate crisis will be considerable. Harry Cockburn has analysed how Boris Johnson’s green ambitions compare with action being taken in other countries to reduce humanity’s impact on the environment, and finds the UK is not always the worst - but in many cases still has a long way to go.

Climate change chief welcomes plan but warns PM must deliver

The chief executive of the UK's Climate Change Committee has broadly welcomed Boris Johnson’s environmental pledges but said any announcement on nuclear power was "notable by its absence".

Chris Stark wrote: “As ever - the detail needs to follow. But for now, I'm pleased.”

He added that the prime minister had framed the announcements as one for jobs and industry, rather than for the environment.

Concluding a series of tweets, Mr Stark wrote: “2021 and beyond needs to be about delivery, delivery, delivery. ”