Achieving net-zero carbon is about to get a lot harder

Boris Johnson has today set a new target on the way to making Britain carbon-neutral by the middle of the century. For those who support the net-zero policy, the new target is a good tightening up of the trajectory.

The target is to cut global warming emissions by 78 per cent by 2035, the point at which 75 per cent of the time between the baseline of 1990 and the deadline of 2050 will have elapsed, so it is ahead of the straight-line timetable. In addition, it now includes Britain’s share of international aviation and shipping, which closes one obvious loophole.

As a supporter of New Labour, I am all in favour of targets. Some of the important achievements of the Labour government were delivered by setting demanding targets that forced the pace of reform, such as the 18-week target for NHS operations and the four-hour waiting limit for A&E.

I am not so keen on the late New Labour innovation – enthusiastically adopted by Conservative governments since – of putting targets in legislation, which seems to be using the statute book in place of a press release saying, “We really, really mean this”.

The problem is whether – as Ed Miliband, the shadow business secretary, alleges – these are “targets without delivery”. Miliband claims that the target is good, but that the government doesn’t have the policies to reach it.

That may be true, but it is not clear that such policies would be acceptable to the voters. These targets are not like NHS waiting times, in that they are likely to require universal changes to the way we live. While nearly everyone thinks it is important to take action to slow down climate change, most people have not heard of the term “net zero” and have only the haziest idea of the policies and costs that might be involved.

This is partly because the targets have moved so quickly. In the 2017 election, not one party – not even the Green Party – mentioned net zero, but two years later, in 2019, 96 per cent of people voted for parties with net zero as a manifesto promise – as Tim Lord at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change points out.

In between, Theresa May, the unsung hero of the climate emergency, had committed her government to achieving net zero by 2050 as one of her last acts before departing the stage, which transformed the debate about what was possible.

But it is a debate that has hardly begun to move out of the jargon-filled world of select committees and think tanks. The scientific consensus has shifted dramatically in recent years. The science of how to achieve net zero is reasonably well understood, although it is not yet clear whether houses will be heated by electric heat pumps or hydrogen boilers (with the hydrogen made by clean electricity). Estimates of the cost vary widely, and depend on a lot of wishful thinking about economies of scale, inspired by the recent falls in the prices of wind and solar power.

Those reductions in costs of generating green electricity have been the great success of climate-change policy over the past two decades. So far, the UK has made remarkable progress in cutting carbon dioxide emissions almost by accident. First, there was the dash for gas, which is more efficient than coal; then there was the expansion of offshore wind power, which turned out to be cheaper than expected after the early cost-hump was passed.

There is no guarantee, though, that the next phase is going to be so easy. Electric vehicles are obviously going to work, but decarbonising home heating along with much of our country’s industry is going to be more difficult and more expensive. Everyone agrees with green policies until they start to cost more than 5p for an occasional plastic bag.

At that point, there will be a backlash – not about the science of climate change, or the urgency of acting to minimise it, but about how far ahead of the global consensus one nation, responsible for just 2 per cent of emissions, can afford to be.