What barriers does the UK face on its path to reaching net zero carbon emissions?
We were joined by Chris Stark, Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee, on 7 February 2024 to explore the challenges and opportunities along the UK’s road to Net Zero.
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My name is Jim wson I’m director of The Institute for sustainable resources at UCL um we’re really really pleased to have uh Chris Stark with us this evening uh Chris is the chief executive of the committee on climate change that’s the official advisory body to the UK
Government on our CL carbon budgets on our climate Target our Net Zero Target and providing lots and lots of advice and evidence on how doing on the way to get there and uh what more needs to be done and there’s certainly been more emphasis on the what more needs to be
Done in recent years um I’ve got Chris’s bio in front of me that I’m not going to read it out uh to embarrass the poor man but um I would just say I I first met Chris when he worked at Scottish government where he headed up their
Energy and climate change Division and I was director of the UK Energy Research Center and it was a really really productive uh time um luckily for us uh the Scottish government was developing their own uh climate um energy strategy and we had a really good dialogue and I
Think um helped to shape amongst many other people uh that strategy which really put transitions at the heart of what Scotland want to do and now that’s become very common in countries around the world um Chris is uh going to be uh leaving the committee on climate change
In a few months time so as you equipped to me earlier this is part of a sort of fair will tour but I’m sure he’s going to give a talk which is just as interesting as ever um Chris is going to talk for about 30 minutes and then
There’ll be plenty of time for questions after that and um and then some drinks afterwards so without further Ado I’d love to hand over to Chris and uh please tell us what you’ve got to say thank you Jim um so thank you to Jim and yes Jim
And I have have go back a while now actually so I’m in a sort of reflective mood now so I’ve been uh I’ve uh I’ve decided that it’s time to move on from the climate change committee and I should probably address that now so I’m not leaving in a half so that’s the
Main thing I wanted to say uh I’m mainly leaving because it’s an amazing job and you don’t want to get stal in this job I think it’s really important that we have fresh eyes on this Challenge and although I think I do have some thoughts on what we could do differently next
Time the other thing that you accumulate in this role is baggage so there’s a lot of baggage um and you may know I’m going to talk to you tonight mostly about Net Zero uh Net Zero has definitely been the theme of my time in the CCC um
Uh and amongst that that work for Net Zero we’ve done uh this the advice for the sixth carbon budget which is the you know the latest of the targets that the UK set we’re about to do the advice for the seventh and it’s more than that more than anything actually that’s what made
Me think it’s time to move on because the question will be not what’s in it but why have you changed your mind so I don’t want to kind have I don’t want to I think someone else should have a free go at that so um this is a good thing
The climate change committee so we’ve had it in this country since 200 8 uh under the legislation that is also a good thing the climate change act uh that determines what the UK is doing about climate change um and I’m going to talk tonight about climate Politics as
Much as I am about the the technical story of what the UK needs to do to address climate change um and I think we’re in a you know we’ve been through several phases of climate politics since we’ve had the climate change act uh back in 2008 and this organization has
Successfully matched a right it way through those various waves of you know really strong support for action and climate change with periods of very strong concern about action and climate change I don’t know if we’re in one of those right now I’m kind of interested what you think about that it certainly
Felt tougher in the last year or so than it has in the five years prior to that for me but also I think that’s really why the clim change committee is such a useful thing because we’re here at that point just to stick to the numbers stick
To your knitting as we say in Scotland so uh so this is definitely a sort of stick to your knitting moment so I’m going to talk about all of that tonight um but I’m going to just start with this chap um I said I was being reflective so
This might be a very long discussion so we’re back to 1859 with John Tindle um why am i showing you a picture of John Tindle apart from the fact he’s it’s a tremendously striking photo uh and beards were definitely different in the 1850s um this is he’s generally thought
To be the sort of father of climate science and I’m showing you this because you might notice that if he is the father of climate science it is quite a long time ago that he fathered it so we’ve known for a very very long time the science of climate change uh Tindle
Was the one who was credited he’s an Irish academic credited most I suppose with putting out there the SS of it he did some work looking at the properties of various gases and how much how much heat they trapped um this is the other photo I like this one better this is
Unice fut and she uh she’s sort of badass academic who doesn’t get enough uh uh credit at all for doing very similar science actually uh 3 years prior uh to Tindle um and slightly crudder experiment very similar she was the one who first noted actually that carbon dioxide in particular had these
Properties that should concern us um given that we are burning lots of phosph fs and creating carbon dioxide as we do so and she spotted back in 1856 that that might have some impact on the climate um and Tindle did very similar things um so this is not new and I kind
Of wanted to make that point to start tonight because I I think occasionally we um we forget just how settled the science is there’s definitely some debate about some of this but it’s easy to be seduced by what you read on Twitter or X whatever you call it you
Know there is indeed debate about some of this but there’s not debate about the fundamentals and the fundamentals um are best described here now in all of the charts that I have shown in my six I am very reflective tonight I’m sorry I won’t do that very much but in all of
The charts that I’ve used over the six years it’s definitely the the one that I find has the biggest impact for those who are not working on climate change so last uh week uh in Scotland actually around the Scottish cabinet table I was invited to speak to all of the Scottish
Political leaders about where we are on climate change which is a great privilege to do that and this was the chart it got an audible gasp actually from some of the people around the um around the table so why why is it so important 8 100,000 years there uh which
We have a very good record of this is this is from uh samples of bubbles trapped in ice so we’ve got this nearly million year record now of the carbon dioxide concentration on the planet it has this lovely cycle to it we have other ways of looking at the temperature
Over similar periods it looks exactly the same and that’s because there’s a near linear relationship between the the temperature on the planet and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere now there are other gases at play too of course as well but this is the simplest
Way to demonstrate it and this is the bit that got the gasp right so that’s what we’ve done in the last 150 years 200 years and of course that’s the story of fossil fuels and the point I wanted to make about this is obviously it’s dramatic I mean
You’re seeing a tramatic shift uh we’ve been at these concentration before as a planet but not for a few million years and it was a much warmer Planet when we had these concentrations before um uh sea level is probably you know 20 M higher maybe than it is today when we
Were at these concentrations before so that gives you a sense of how much change there is but the point in this is that I don’t want to be one of the people that says to you that this is adulterated bad this is you know what what that line represents is a story of
Enormous progress uh in the global economy and you can see the story of what’s happening in the global economy in that line you can see how rapidly it’s gone up over that period and this is what’s lifting people out of poverty and driving the global economy and the
Challenge is not to stop doing that I think it’s to change the basis of that but we better get on with it is the message here because we’re well over 400 parts of million I 425 I checked it today and what that red box represents is 1.2 de Centigrade of warming um which
Sadly is not as it doesn’t sound as big a number when you’re presenting it to an audience that doesn’t deal with climate change but it’s a hell of a big number when you think of you planetary scale and how quickly it’s happened so I sort of I start with this because I think
It’s important that we keep returning to it there’s there’s not really to debate here actually and and in climate politics I sort of feel we debate things that are often at the margins and I’m going to that’ll be a theme of the talk that I give you tonight as we go along
But we got to keep coming back to the fundamentals which are this we do have a problem I’ve put climate crisis with a question mark next to it because crisis is a loaded term but I think it is a crisis and that is how we should look at
It um and the other part to this again in more well 13 years now working on climate policy in total is is that we also forget to present why it’s important to act on it I mean this is compelling enough for me at least but another thing I’ve done recently one of
The things that I will always remember actually in this job is I went to I did an all staff event for the the ministry of defense and uh I I thought fair enough I’ll go and speak to the ministry of Defense that’s quarter of a million
People um so they didn’t all turn up uh so uh that’s a hell of a room but um uh basically this was the one that they were most drawn into and really interesting this is what the Met Office did a few years back now just just kind
Of portraying what a 4 degree world would look like we talk in a minute about whether 4 degrees is the right temperature but it’s really interesting to again we should be doing more of this I think just presenting as clearly as we can why this is not a world we want to
See so I’m going to just show you a couple of takes on that this is looking what we call the wet bulb Globe temperature which is heat and humidity greater than 32 for more than 10 days per year this is again 4 de World basically you can’t live for very long
In this kind of conditions you need to be in an air conditioned building in these kind of temperatures you can see the parts of the world that are affected by that there um this is drought so extreme drought here different parts of the world there you can see you know
Edging closer to us here some really interesting stuff uh happening in South America as well uh this is River flooding so more than a million people affected by river flooding um uh which is one of the ones I think we should be thinking about more here of course as well uh and wildfires
Which which to me is the one to watch actually because I think more than anything this is one that’s pricking the public Consciousness now so if you went on holiday to the continent last summer you were probably near a wildfire at some point if you went to North America
North Americans really saw this last year um this is very high wfire risk again in that 4 degree World um and the other thing you can do which the Met of has did very well I think is just bring that together in a you know in one
Single thing just to say what would that mean if you had multiple impacts happening at once and I think this is quite a good way of portraying an unlivable world this is this is going to be enormously difficult look at some of the parts there in in in Africa and and
South America where you’re seeing multiple impacts multiple severity um real Challenge and I suppose the other thing you can say is that this this coincides sadly very well with those areas where we’re presently seeing increasing population so if you want to see the migrant problem behind behind
Climate change is there on that map and that’s where a lot of the iCal difficulty comes from of course as well now I’m showing you all this because I think it’s good to start with a bit of a warming about a warning rather of why we
Should care about this now in this room I suspect you know all of this but we don’t as a trade those of us who work in climate change do enough on communicating this with impact and actually I think this was a really good piece of work from The Meta office now
Four deegree world is definitely not a world we want to get to and happily it’s probably not the world that we’re going to get to and it’s a Fool’s eron to predict anything really but given that we have known the science of climate change for so long we can also say quite
A lot about where we may end up given where we are on emissions and the global trajectory for emissions so this is a nice chart that we update fairly regularly now in the climate change committee looking at the global story and this was the position actually preop
28 we we we’ll be able to update this shortly but this is a very important chart because you can probably see the history here on the left of historical Global emissions which are heading of course upwards and continue to head upwards but you can also see the colored
Lines on this chart with a little temperature at the end of them which is the median of that particular pathway for emissions and I think this is just a fact we could spend an hour just looking at this and talking about it and I won’t
Jim will be glad to hear but what was interesting about cop 28 was that it I think it was actually a very useful cop now there cont controversy always about every cop but it was in a Petra State uh it was a in a place where they chose to
Host it despite being an economy that is resting at present on fossil fuels and of course they need to talk about the transition and this was a cop that really was framed by the transition away from fossil fuels and the reason why we got some text that had that language in
It is partly because of diplomacy on climate and of course that is a big feature of the story on climate in recent years certainly since 1990 but mainly it’s because the underlying transition is now definitely under we so we are definitely seeing the move from fossil fuels to cleaner energy systems
Um around about the time I started this job back in 2018 that’s probably the time nothing to do with me starting this job incidentally but it was probably the time when when spending on clean energy over took spending on fossil fuels so we’re now seeing the benefit of that I
Suppose you could say now benefit is a word that we could talk about too but more importantly the Ia and others have said that we’re now in what they call the plateau period for fossil fuel use which means we’ll get to a Peak at some point for our use of fossil fuels and
With it at some stage very close to it the peak and Emissions will come too and that story is not told enough either and that’s why you know even States like the Saudis felt able to sign up to language like that because it’s actually happening and they see that and if you
Evidence of that you can just see particularly from the pet states that the investment levels in new production for oil and gas are just much lower than they used to be because they’re expecting to supply less and I think what’s interesting to me is if we if we
Are in the plateau phase I think we are you never know when you’re in a peak so this may be this could even be the year when we see Peak what’s interesting is not this year it’s what where we’ll be shortly and we talk about these temperatures in a second but for me
What’s really interesting is that this is when the big disruption is likely to happen so as we move away from oil and gas you’re going to see some very odd things happen in the oil and gas sector itself we’re going to see consolidation I suspect there will be a lot of
Consolidation I actually have quite a lot of time for those oil and gas producers who are honest about where they think they’re going to be so you’ve got a few of them now saying they’re going to be the last man standing they are generally Men by the way they say
This so so they are and that is an honest position at least I get that and it sort of frames I suppose that there is a challenge beyond that and this is quite nice actually if you look at that purple line at the top which is we called existing policies I think that’s
Deeply conservative um uh and if you look at that you’ll see that that takes you to a temperature of 2.7 de Centigrade um if I had presented to you before the Paris agreement in 2015 I would have been talking about an existing policy line that was probably
About 1° Centigrade higher than that so that gives you a sense that since 2015 to where we are today we have successfully knocked off about 1° Centigrade from that median pathway uh again there’s always debate about this it’s a far more complex version of this that shows you all the uncertainty that
That that plays out over time but I I don’t think we will be on that path because I think when the transition takes hold you’ll get this exponential impact which again we’ll talk about in a second um 2.7 degre Cen before you get excited about it is utterly
Catastrophic so you know it would be terrible for the planet so it is not where we want to end up Paris agreement talks about keeping temperatures to well below two and if you look at that red line there that has the ndc’s as they’re known that’s the country pledges to the
UN process for 2030 and it has the Net Zero Targets in there that many countries have signed up to including the UK and if you believe that we’ll deliver those things which is a big F because I don’t believe that we will at the moment that takes you to in this
Pathway at least 1.8 so there is a path to below too um and those of you who were around at cop 26 uh when the UK hosted the cop in my hometown in Glasgow that was all about keeping 1.5 alive uh that’s what you need to believe
If you want to keep one and a half on the on the table uh so it’s it’s alive but it’s mostly alive in a model um uh sort of kicking trying to get out so that’s the one and a half degree pathway and the reason that’s so tough is
Because what matters to climate change is the area under the curve it’s not that it’s not the destination it’s how quickly you bring it down and one and a half requires us to bring it down very very quickly and even a pandemic didn’t really do that so that requires deep
Deep shifts in patterns of investment and shifts in the way that we use fossil fuels towards cleaner Technologies very very rapidly um I doubt that we will do that let’s put it that way um but I’m not willing to kill off that pathway just yet I think 1 and a half degrees is
Still a worthwhile thing to talk about I mean obviously if it’s not 1 and a half we should be aiming for 1.6 and if it’s not 1.6 1.7 every fraction matters here but more more than that actually it’s still a useful way of it’s a sort of containment for throwing everything at
It and it’s useful for us to look at it that way and I think we should continue to look at it that way whether we keep calling it 1 and a half degrees that’ll be another challenge I’m sure for the community to that talks about these
Things but other thing to say about this is I am an optimist about the Energy System shift particularly um but let’s not forget that these are still catastrophic outcomes so even one and a half actually is going to be tricky uh and 1.8 if we were to hit that
Kind of temperature involves huge shifts huge change in the climate and huge impacts with it so the other big message on this chart is that we’re going to have to adapt to this so wherever we are on this we have no option but to adapt
To it and I think I wouldn’t talk about so much this tonight although I’m very happy to take questions on it later but but I think the next Frontier for those of us who work on this is to try and build in the adaptation story more effectively and and integrate it
Properly into the story of also of cutting emissions whilst adapting so achieving Net Zero and a warming climate is what we’ve been talking about recently in the climate change committee and it’s hard to do that because we don’t have the ability to frame it in the same way to build the same Pathways
That sit underneath that and I think we should try so that for me is really exciting if I was highing around at the CCC that’s what I would be pushing for I think whoever replaces me that will almost certainly be their mission so that’s a really interesting thing to
Do okay let’s get back to the UK let’s talk about Net Zero so um when I started this gig uh we had a target for 2050 that was not a net zero Target so we had a target for the country it’s the emissions territorially produced within our territorial borders to hit
80% an 80% reduction by 2050 on a 19 90 basis and uh in the first year I was in the job we were given the task of looking at the Paris targets and asked basically a pretty simple question are they right is that 80% Target the right
Target is this the right framing for the UK’s uh support of the paranis agreement and we concluded that it wasn’t so we did a lot of work to look at uh raising the ambition um uh and we concluded that Net Zero was the right ambition now in
This room you know what Net Zero is but it’s basically a you know position where we’re putting as much into the atmosphere we’re taking out having reduced our emissions as far as possible whatever’s left we’ve got to net that off somehow and that’s the net bit of
Course in net zero and what has Str been astonishing to me since we did that is the the degree to which that’s become as much as slogan as a scientific goal but it is a scientific goal um and in particular net0 CO2 is the scientific goal so net0 CO2 is the point science
Has fmed up really well on this that that’s the point we start warming the planet a global goal of net zero for carbon dioxide we stop warming the planet until we do that we keep warming the planet so it’s quite simple uh and the UK’s Target is actually a basket of
Gases including carbon dioxide but including some of the other gases too so if we achieve Net Zero it’s slightly harder than doing it for carbon dioxide alone we’ll actually achieve a very small cooling impact on the planet if we pull it off uh which is good I think but
I think more than all of that the task here is not just to get to it it’s to demonstrate how to do it because we’re doing something something very useful that goes beyond our borders if we do that I’ll talk about that now so here is
Where we are now on that UK territorial emissions basis and there’s quite a few things on this chart I’m going to keep returning to the red line in this chart as I talk through it so the story uh you might have seen yesterday UK ministers and others uh trumpeting the story that
We’ve have emissions since 1990 um and you can see that on this chart so in fact emissions have been falling in the UK for quite a bit longer than that since the 70s probably um I wish I knew what date they peaked but that’s the story of coal and some of the
Early heavy industry losses that we saw prior to 1990 but what’s happened since 1990 is is about a number of things there’s a bit of that de-industrialization going on there’s not that much fact the gva manufacturing is more now than it was when we started the climate change act 2008 um but very
Much a story of Chang in the power sector particularly um and also a story of Energy Efficiency which doesn’t get enough attention I think actually really important part of why we’ve been able to cut emissions is that we’re just using energy much more efficiently and some of
That is to do with things like EU regulations a lot of it though is to do with just the march of technology so you don’t have massive Tes and fridges any longer that soak up all that energy we’ve got different ways of doing it so this is that’s the story here you see
The gray blocks on this chart um they’re the carbon budgets under the climate change Act and the Really clever bit of the climate change Act was that it’s not just a 2050 goal uh it also correctly I think identify that government’s not that good at sticking to long-term goals
Controversial um uh it’s it also needs more of an incentive in the short term and the carbon budgets are that incentive so the legal Target is actually one every 5 years um we now know what happens if Government looks like it’s not going to hit that the
Courts are willing to act we’ve actually had a successful legal challenge that has prompted the government to produce a different plan so there this piece of legislation that is doing something very clear cly it’s a legal obligation of the government to hit the target but they
Can do it in whatever way they see fit and that’s the kind of beauty of it really it’s it’s not me telling them how to do it although I’ve got ideas it’s politics and policy and that is quite rightly something that the government gets to decide and there’s lots of ways
In which that might play out the story you see here is that the government has fairly comfortably actually met the first of the three the first three carbon budgets that were set all of the blocks that you see on this chart were the product of advice from my organization the climate change
Committee um the first three We Set uh really not really knowing how things would play out I’m going to be honest with you that so we didn’t know for example the impacts of the financial crisis on the economy um they’re they’re loose basically I I if we’ gone back in
Time we probably would have advised a tighter set of targets and we’ve outperformed them um and in a sense it doesn’t really matter it’s past history what matters is what coming next and you know that was I suppose on one hand yesterday’s news confirmed yesterday that we’ve have emissions is is
Something really worth celebrating not not every country in the world has done that uh and the fact that we’ve met all the carbon modies is also worth celebrating but there’s rather too much of a kind of retrospective look I think on this I think the key thing is not
What’s happened in the past is whether you’re on track for what comes next and on that front I will talk a lot about that tonight it’s just much harder so the last half inevitably ways harder than the first half um and you can probably see this one here carbon budget
Six that was mine uh so uh carbon budget six is quite a bit lower than the ones prior to that uh which is not me saying that previous holders of this rule got it wrong it’s mainly that we that’s the first carbon budget that was set since
We reset the Net Zero go to to in 2050 so it’s the one that matters most here it’s the one that guides that path um other thing just to say since there’s an audience that’ll probably appreciate it International Aviation and shipping emissions not in the ACT not in the
Carbon budgets uh although government promises they will be in from uh cb6 so at the moment they’re not but we’ve always tracked with with international evation shipping in there so I actually feel we should be we should be happy to celebrate this I think let’s the more that we bring some
Positivity to this the better could we have done more absolutely should we have done more absolutely but we’ve met these things they continue to be a real constraint on the making of policy in this country and the climate change act so far at least has lasted uh since its
Inception to today through some periods of pretty difficult politics um let’s just look at that path now so this is just the same path and I’ll just draw on it now some just some clarity what’s in it so we take the carbon budget out of it
Um our NDC which we set it at cop 26 in Glasgow was to reduce emissions by at least 68% by 2030 um I remember having uh discussions at the time with unnamed officials certainly they will not be named who said why can’t it just be 70 um which you know different age but
The the reason it can’t just be 70 is because we couldn’t we couldn’t show you a path at least without doing things that were beyond our advice that would’ hit that um without stepping quite a bit beyond what we saw as credible policies and it might not sound a lot but that 68
Is really hard so you know that is that is our 2030 Target we were the hosts when it was set it is still I think amongst the most ambitious ndcs that you’ll find uh of any country and then Net Zero is the 100% reduction that we need to achieve by
2050 okay this is the same chart but this is our view this is a few a couple years old now but this is this is really important thing that we do whenever we do our advice in a carbon budget is that we draw a baseline so this is the the
Baseline we drew uh at the last bit of uh advice this is a kind of a world where we turn off climate policy so that’s what we would have expected to happen to emissions from 2020 onwards and then that’s the path beneath it and then the really interesting thing is
That we can then color in get our crayons out the steps that are needed to take you from that Baseline of no climate policy to the one that we think the country should try and hit and the great thing in having a climate change committee is
That this is not the first time that we’ve done this so you get this and it’s a really useful thing to have some sort of independent body periodically asking the question how do we do this other countries in the world do not have it and it’s tremendously useful not just to
Government it turns out this is the real I think advantage of the CCC and the climate change it’s also useful to people in Industry to people who are working on a host of other things some of them nothing to do with climate change because it gives you something
That anchors the future um and something that is often said of me is that we do forecasting um actually we don’t do forecasting what we do is is stand here and look back um it’s hindcasting really to use that term and that is very powerful so I am Duty bound to say that
The country has hit its Targets in 2050 and what I’m asking there is not whether we hit them it’s how do we hit them and each you know time we come to do it we ask a question of what would we done what would we have done differently what
Would we wish we’d done early to get more quickly onto that path what are the things that may not be apparent now but really are in 2050 and that is a very powerful technique really and I think you know I encourage any of you who’ve
Got the chance to do it to do the same thing actually it’s a bit of a sort of climate change that requires you to be a sort of futurologist I suppose very interesting to do it that way but what this shows really clearly and we’ll do
Another one of these next year um is the very broad actions that deliver un Net Zero so uh I’ve divided them into four here the top one is about how we use energy demand reduction much loved by academics not much achieved in practice so we talk about that um uh Energy
Efficiency resource efficiency is in there too I think the thing to say about that is by 2050 it’s not that big it’s not that much of the you know it’s not part it’s not a huge part of the abatement but in the early years it really is and that’s a clue that it’s
Something you can do quickly uh and therefore it’s a way to save emissions quickly um since we drew this some of that has happened but not nearly enough so it’s really interesting to say that it’s also the cheapest way to cut emissions usually so it’s a slightly
Slight conundrum that we don’t do more of it um but this is big politics playing out definitely in that in that wedge um I’ll go to the third one uh because it’ll be easier to go to the second one after that this is the story that gets the most attention is about
Low carbon energy production and I’m as guilty as anyone else and thinking it’s the it’s it’s sexy and it’s interesting in this room I’m sure there’s people that work on it too and there’s a lot of that still to do so we’ve got to build a
Lot of wind farms we’ve got to build some nuclear we’ve got to do hydrogen there’s a lot of stuff in there but the wedge that you see there is mainly us cleaning up the electricity system and that is still a remaining challenge so uh we’ve got quite a lot of that to do
And of course the last half of cleaning up the electricity system is the difficult bit because you you’ve got to have a system that is reliable and operable and as it moves to being more and more renewable based uh doing that in a way that you can be confident of is
Is harder and harder now we I’m very sure we can do it but it’s not so settled that we don’t quite know exactly how we’ll do that so in that wedge is hiding a whole host of fascinating stories but it’s not the biggest story
That’s part of why I went to it next but let’s imagine that from at some point in the 2030s we do reach a point where we have nearest damage cleaned up eletricity production that’s a very important offer to the country because at that point we can switch to the second of these um
Which is about the switch over and I think you should think of it that way that the country’s got to make to use that clean energy now of course we’re in the middle of a switch over right now but from the middle of the 2030s onwards
2035 was our advice that we should have clean power that’s a huge offer to the country because what we’re saying to you then at that point is anything that’s electrical you plug it in it’s zero carbon and that is a really clear story that we don’t have at the moment Jim and
I were just talking about the latest apparent controversy about electric cars uh a lot of that just goes away at that point I think it’s really important that we hit it and labor of course want to do it even earlier which is a big ask but
It’s a good thing to push for so the biggest wedge here is electrification this is of us moving to especially electrified transport and electrified heat electricity and Industry as well we use hydrogen uh in this chart too so you can see the red wedge there that’s say Hy very very controversial topic
Particularly for home heating but we need a lot of hydrogen uh we’re going to be using it extensively in in the in the future energy system and at the moment hydrogen is a problem for climate change so that hydrogen supply has got to be clean uh we’ve got a bit of CO2 capture
For those areas at this stage when we were doing this work there’s quite a few areas in Industry particularly where we couldn’t see a way to not use fossil fuels but we want to capture those emissions as we come to do it again I’m sure that wedge will get slightly
Smaller it tends to do that over time but there are really important applications for CCS that are in that yellow wedge and if you do all of that that’s not zero so the green bit there obviously is the off setting bit of it and that’s mainly about what you’re
Asking from nature and this is another area where if I was hanging around I’d be pushing more to do on this the interaction between emissions reduction adaptation and nature and biodiversity there’s a lot going on in that green wedge there that we need to understand better so that we can be confident in
Asking what we need of nature the other thing that’s in there is removals another controversial topic um we over the years have advised that it’s really important that we have greenhouse gas removals in the UK strategy we’ve been more handwavy about what that is so you broadly got two strategies you can
Either use nature to mop up the carbon and then use it in an energy process and capture the carbon and bury it or you can use machines to do it directly um I don’t know what’s going to win there but I do know that if we’re going to use
Biomass like that we’ve got to be super clear that it’s sustainable so you know this is another really important part of this story but without it we’re going to really struggle so it’s really important to keep these options in play I think but this is the sort of rainbow chart as
I call sometimes I find is really useful in communicating what the country’s got to do to get to Net Zero what happens to drive that is why it’s so interesting to work on this stuff so let’s look again at that path and look at it in a
Different way and this is the other way to look at that so uh the other work that we do in the CCC is to look at where emission starts so we look at the the sectors as we call them you can see them on the right here we don’t just
Look at those sectors but these are the sources of emissions and what we’re looking at here is how in our work last time round for the sixth carbon budget we determined each of those sectors could decarbonize we actually had five scenarios looking at that this is this
The sort of central scenario uh the balance pathway as we called it um and it’s just a fascinating thing to do this work so when we started back in 2008 it was very much driven top down so we were looking not entirely but we were looking
At you know a lot of the Energy System modeling involved in this now when we do it and others do the same it’s very bottom up so we’re looking at strategies in each of these sectors to cut emissions and asking that question I mentioned earlier how could we do this
More easily sort of looking back from 2050 and in each of those sectors there is a different set of things happening so this idea that you just put a carbon price on it and let the market decide it just won’t work that way so we’ve got different stories playing out in surface
Transport and some of it involves carbon pricing of course but there’s a role of Regulation playing out there’s incentives there’s things that we think can make some of this go quicker than other sectors um and that’s broadly how you see it there and you can really see the importance of removals under the
Line there it’s more easy to see that way the black bit is the engineered removals the green bit is land use sinks so that’s what we’re asking of nature I think the other thing to say from this it’s not entirely clear on this but when
You hit this kind of point here 2040 the energy story we should be close to getting done so we should be getting close to the point where the energy driven emissions as the fossil fueled emissions were were down to fumes and you know that’s not far away so in terms
Of the infrastructure challenges that drive that we’re in it now so this is going to be the point when we really decide whether this is ever going to be you know this is going to happen or not on time and I think the point I really
Want to draw out of this chart is not all of that actually but crucially that it mostly now what we’re what’s constraining us to go faster is pretty practical stuff so we’re not doing what we would have done in 2008 which is Imagining the strategies and you know
Wondering what they are what we’re actually we’re pretty clear now how you do it and there’s definitely options here but the the broad Solutions are not the challenge it’s getting it done that’s the challenge so it’s it’s it’s practical issues and by that what I mean
Is how quickly do we we replace those fossil fued assets the dirty assets with the clean ones do we for example look at scrappage something we’ve traditionally not looked at in the CCC but actually in a world of really high fossil fuel prices scrapping Capital assets that use
Fossil fuels is not a bad idea that might make that path go quicker but more than that do we have people in the right Industries do we have the skills to do this stuff and install this stuff do we crucially have a planning regime that lets the infrastructure go to the places
That it needs to go on time and in the right places and will consumers wear it and will people wear it consumers is probably the wrong term here and I’m going to talk about the people bit of this at the end of this discussion but of course that is absolutely critical to
This but maybe I’ll say now that I don’t think the people bit of it is as important as some of the politicians you might hear speak about uh think it is I think it’s actually the other stuff that matters more certainly at the moment it’s about getting stuff done uh Net
Zero is much more about building new things than it is stopping things and building new things in a world where planning basically prevents it is going to be really tough so that is the biggest constraint now this could be a very short section uh so uh are we on track
No we’re not on track and it’s very important to say that could we be on track yes so I’m very happy to say that the options are still there before us but it will take policy and it will take a response from the private sector and from people in this country to deliver
It um I’m very happy to say that if we do all of that I’m pretty sure the outcome will be very positive but um back to my chart here and just to draw on it again the 2030 pledge so this is probably the best way I know at least of assessing progress so
You can assess progress on you know future carbon budgets or the Net Zero but 2030 is a number and we’ve done some work just to look at what it would take to deliver the 68% reduction from where we are and this is stuff we published just last year so you may seen it
Already but it’s very useful so let’s just do what we have is emissions data from 2022 so let’s look at the 2022 position and let’s imagine a a situation where we can look at the progress we made eight years prior to 2022 and then we can we know broadly
What needs to be done in the 8 years after 2022 if we’re going to hit the 2030 Target and that information comes from the government’s plan so this is what the government say they want to do uh we and the CCC have our own view on
That but it’s similar so this is what we did in the 8 years prior to reduce emissions this is the average emissions reduction per year in the8 years prior to 2022 and it’s a good story it shows you you where the priority has gone in policy terms so it’s the power sector in
Other sectors things are happening uh but as you will see not at the scale required for 2030 so if we want to hit where the government wants to be in 2030 to reduce emissions by 68% in every sector other than the power sector we’ve got a very dramatically increase the pace of
Progress to reduce emissions uh sub substantially increase the pace of progress and some of this isn’t you know agriculture is quite an interesting one because by 2030 we’re not anticipating that much so this isn’t actually telling you the full story of Agriculture after 2030 we’ve got to do a
Hell of a lot to cut emissions and you don’t see that there but we’re not seeing that kind of progress so that’s the sectoral look um this is the I think the more compelling way of looking at it so we can go back to the whole econ we stripped out shipping and Aviation
Because it’s still doing funny stuff after the after the pandemic but if you look at every other sector again eight years back eight years forward eight years prior to 2022 we were cutting emissions by about 3% per year and in the eight years to come that’s got to
Double so we got to double the pace of decarbonization over the next eight years if you want to hit the 2030 goal um but as you know that rests on the power sector so if we take that out I think you get the reality of where we
Are in terms of the policy program so in the 8 years prior to 2022 we were only cutting emissions by 1% per year and if you want to hit 2030 that’s got to quadruple so the pace of progress has to quadruple um now the Prime Minister tells us that he’s confident we’ll hit
That and he said so uh in Downing Street back in September I hope he’s right but I don’t see before the work we’ve done and others I do not see a policy program that has quid RUP power and I think whatever government we have and I’m not making predictions about the next
Election this is what they’ll have to tackle or they’re going to have to say to the UN process oh I’m sorry about the Target that we set we didn’t hit it so you know that is a big challenge I think for our credibility uh on the world
Stage but more importantly for that path that I showed you before now um so far so miserable but um uh I still think we’ll do it maybe not 2030 um we’ll see um but Net Zero is definitely a thing that we can achieve and why do I
Say that well it’s because of this now in this room I suspect many of you work on energy but we are seeing astonishing things happen in the technologies that will drive that transition and it’s not just an energy transition if you ask me truthfully what am I optimistic about is
The energy stuff what am I pessimistic about is land use and agriculture um but on energy tremendous things are happening so we are seeing still to this day exponential uh decreases in the cost of the key Technologies this is solar and this is a log scale so it’s amazing what has been
Achieved in solar it is absolutely astonishing uh the red lines on this are the iea’s cost projections they’re terribly wrong so it’s kind of it’s they’re consistently wrong on this and although we have seen a bit of a blip after the pandemic this continues to
This day to be the case and this is some really interesting work I fully recommend if you go and find it looking at um not just the kind of story in the past but sort of making some probabilistic forecasts if we see big deployment of these Technologies which
Is I think the way we should think of it and this just shows you what that future for the price levelized cost of energy will be could be in the future so that’s solar and I S of wish it wasn’t a logarithmic scale because you would just
See the stunning fall it’s like 99% reduction you know uh over the over the past 20 years or so this is wind uh not quite as dramatic but still pretty dramatic and of course this is going to be a big story for the UK again IIA getting it wrong again uh I’m not
Blaming the I this is batteries with the I have been so far off it’s crazy so you know this kind of amazing stuff happening in batteries which is then the story of transport and just because we’ve got it I put electrolyzers on there too so that’s another interesting
Way it’s not quite the same data set but you see some evidence of the same exponential stuff happening there too now all of that is good okay I think that is why we should feel confident the other interesting thing is that we can look at fossil fuels in the same way and
The really interesting thing with fossil fuels is that probably today as I’m talking to in kind of real terms we pay the same price for fossil fuels today as we did 140 years ago so we’re just not seeing that same story playing out and that is just a transition happening you
Don’t need to care about climate change to see that happening and I’m super optimistic about that therefore the challenge is going to be partly about politics of this we going to end on that in a second but actually let’s not dismiss the technical challenge of building energy systems that actually
Deliver this and can be relied upon because it is more challenging and the other challenge here is how you pay for it so the economics of this are really clear you pull something out of the ground you burn it and that’s what the consumer is paying for it’s a commodity
Being burned well Renewables isn’t like that uh nuclear isn’t like that and uh you know that requires I think policy to make it work now if we have policy we reveal a very cheap price to the consumer because what the consumer is paying for is the capital cost of the
Thing that uses the free energy source but policy has got to stick and you need good policy over a long period to make that work so you know I’m super optimistic it can be really quick but it still relies on enlightened policies to make that happen and this stuff doesn’t
Go away so we rely on this today and very important point is I think actually the language that was in the cup 28 uh cover agreement is the right language transition away is better I think than phase out because that is what we need to do we’ve got to transition away in a
Way that is genuinely sustainable in all meanings of that word but I think this is why we’ll do it um so what’s the hold up um well there’s lots of holdups here but this is where we come to the story of politics but I want to just say it’s not just
About politics it’s also about how we who work on this Frame it so I think my other reflection on this is that we use words like fundamental and we use words like radical and it is definitely the case if you work on energy that this is a fundamental shift in the energy system
So this is something actually I did recently was just to look at what’s in that same pathway this is broadly what it says about energy demand it’s quite surprising actually that at the moment roughly 2,000 tatt hours of energy demand today most of that obviously oil
And gas and by 2050 we’re going to have energy demand now how will we do that I’m not some sort of magician here we’ll do that mainly because we’re going to Electrify the economy we’re going to use less energy to do the same stuff so it’s not magic uh that’s us not wasting
Energy in the form of heat not wasting primary energy by burning stuff and losing most of it and you see that there so this is again our Central pathway you know this electricity system is double the size and then a bit more and we’ve got a hydrogen sector that’s in there
Too that’s about 2third of the size actually the electricity sector we are still using oil and gas but we’re using it in a very different way gas in particular and I’m sure when we come back to it we’ll shrink that still further but we’ve got to be confident
About how we do that gas is very important but increasingly we know to do how to do it without it oil’s in there but mainly just jet fuel so it’s h it’s a that’s the that’s the transition now we present that often I’m guilty of this
As much as anyone else as a fundamental change big big shift and no doubt it is but it’s not a fundamental change to society and I really important Point definitely what I’ve learned over six or seven years doing this is it needs to be normalized like the world in 2050 is
Basically the same world as we have today it’s not a big shift so uh Karen laquer who’s on my committee I remember she asked this question we gave the advice on Net Zero what kind of world is it in 2050 and how radically different is it and it’s not radically different
So you’re still eating meat we’re still driving cars we’re warming our houses we just pay pay less for energy um I think we could do better at describing it in normal terms this is a transition that is going to happen and you’re going to
Like it so this is a sort of thing that we need to talk more about but no doubt there’s a hell of a lot to do so the transition in buildings in particular and Industry for that matter has hardly begun at all and we need to be creative
About how we present that so let me just end on this now leveling with the public is what the Prime Minister city wanted to do and here’s a few different takes on that challenge this is a bit of work that we did back in the sixth carbon
Budget that we didn’t give as much attention to that I I sort of regret not doing more on this at the time when we do the next car budget we’re going to throw a lot of time and resource at the what we call the distributional impacts of this because that’s I think that’s
Really exciting and really interesting this is just one way of looking at the distributional impacts and we had other ways in the sixth carbon budget report as well when we have that technical work on the pathway that I’ve been showing you today it allows us to do something
Really cool which is to look at what’s in that pathway and Cally make some broad assumptions about how much it might cost so the the challenge for the country is the investment challenge we need to do lots of capital investment to hit Net Zero more than we would be doing
Otherwise um and then we also get a saving in using all these particular electrical assets that we’ve bought these Technologies cars and heat pumps um now we can net that off so you the sort of capex cost Opex saving that’s the that’s the way to think about it
Um and what’s interesting is that when you look at it over 30 years and net it all off you get to a figure that’s not far of zero so the kind of net position of Net Zero in aggregate is you know is zero cost on those on that basis it’s
What we call the resource cost now I’ve talked about that others have talked about it too and it’s true I think that is absolutely the case and interesting as the cost of fossil fuels goes up the relative cost of decarbonizing goes down basically so probably if we did the same
Work today with the f price fossil fuel prices we have today you’d get a net saving to the economy was pretty significant over that 30e period 25 year period but no one experiences the aggregate so I think the really important thing is that you your circumstances will matter immensely over
This this is one way of looking at this Challenge and we could do this that sort of net cost resource cost we’re looking at here the first bar in each of these sectors is that net position in 2035 in that pathway I’ve been showing you capex
Minus oft PC saving um and then in 2050 so this is quite a quite an interesting illustration of the challenge that the Prime Minister I think rightly has highlighted that we we do need to level with people that it’s not a free lunch this is definitely not
A free lunch and particularly not over the next 10 years or so we got to do things that will cost the country money and the question is if you believe that we’re going to hit those targets the question is not you know to duck that entirely but to ask a question of how
We’re going to do it but it’s quite interesting to look at this so know again when we do this work again almost certainly we’ll see that the the cost reduction some of these sectors get even bigger so you think of it in that way but you can see very clearly here that
For transport in particular you’ve got this net saving going on this is just moving particular to electrified transport system also traveling a bit less with vehicles on the road and that net saving grows into the future but in other sectors notably buildings that’s not the case there is a payoff to
Putting heat pumps in buildings but it’s not immediate and I think it is good to say that we should be leveling with people about that now I like to think we have leveled with them actually but there are other ways to look at this and the cross income distributions for
Example or across geographies but we should be quite happy to do so because the benefit to this is enormous not just to The Climate but to all the industries that we’ll grow as we do these Investments and I think that story of green growth which Chris gbo and others
Have really thrown a lot lot at and really highlighted is completely legitimate but we’re not looking at that here this is just the raw resource cost and there are costs and if you buy that argument of investing to save that is the goal for Net Zero then investing to save is a
Good thing to do for all sorts of reasons but there is a there is a shortterm cost to that particularly over the next decade or so so the next Parliament and the one after it will have to Grapple with that uh and I don’t want to stand before you tonight and say
Anything other than that but it’s totally worth it and we haven’t done uh lots of work to look at the dynamic benefits of investing at that scale but this is a country that is a good reason to do this stuff is to just invest more and the industries that
We’ll grow are not in the southeast of England they are right across the country particularly the buildings transition they’re in places that need that investment so there’s all sorts of good reasons to do this even if you don’t care about the climate and we should care about the climate and that
Story of green jobs is really important and I’ll come on to how you might frame this in a second but uh Jim asked me to speak about this and I think I’d shown this didn’t I Jim when I spoke last night I absolutely love this right
So I think this is one of the more recent occasions when we as a country have tried to do something difficult and uh this is a different age so I don’t if anyone reads Country Life Magazine I bet you don’t but there is Country Life Magazine’s been around for a while in the
1960s uh the cegb the central electricity generation board the wholly state-owned entity that was doing all the investment in the power system at the time planning the power system uh that we had now was grappling with issues actually the story of putting infrastructure in difficult places was
What they were looking at they were upgrading the power system to 400 KV and I love this and if you’re interested I’ll show you the whole advert afterwards but what I love about it is they had a series of full page adverts in the places that would be
Affected by this infrastructure and they fully acknowledged that it’s not that easy to do this uh this is my favorite one um so where would you run the pylons and it’s it’s quite an interesting thing to do cuz they framed it up in a really clever way they said look this is going
To be a tricky thing for the country but it’s completely worth it and they spelled out the benefits as well as the dis benefits to this and acknowledged that not everyone’s going to be happy with this and I think often the planning issues are going to be like that and
There are lots of these types of challenges um and I think the challenge for politics is that we’re not going to do this well unless we have politicians that are able to be similarly honest and upfront about this and it’s not just going to be the climate change committee
That needs to do that we need to have Brave politicians that present the benefits and the rough edges to it and you know we need to do the same in power lines this is a you know a grid question we’ve got to do huge things right across
The country all of which are worth it um on all sorts of bases um but many of which are going to be tricky and facing down some of the critics is definitely going to be one of the big challenges for politics at the moment I worry that
We don’t have that type of politics so we have lots of people who are willing to talk about Net Zero as a slogan or you know how green they are and you have lots of people who are will to say the opposite too but that in reality we need
To be serious about the actual things that need to be done and and put around that um uh proper messages to people living in this country and businesses operating in this country my final point on this General issue is the other political challenge I think definitely something I’ve picked up in recent years
Um is that we get to distracted by minor issues uh so we have debate about things like you know what ran Atkins said about electric cars rather than actually the big challenges that sit before us this is one of those so I’m going to end on
This but um and I probably won’t say too much about it but we’ve had a huge debate on oil and gas licenses in this country for two years now and that has been a conscious political decision from political leaders and in the opposition to have that debate that’s been the
Framing of it um I mentioned earlier that we need gas in that transition SO gas is definitely the challenge for us in this country because you can see here this is a hard fought data that was sitting in the North Sea transition Authority they weren’t that Keen to
Publish it but they now have published it this is their View and remember their job is to try and maximize this stuff so this is their view of the amount of natural gas fossil gas that will be produced in the North Sea over the next
20 years or so and that is a 19 8 7% reduction in gas production um this is the production from development of undeveloped discoveries basically ones that we know about and that is the licensing debate that we’ve been having for the last two years so it’s the it’s
That red wedge that we’re still having a fight about right now with a bill in Parliament and it doesn’t matter now I know there’s a bigger challenge here on what we’re doing globally on this stuff and I don’t I’m the first to knowledge that that’s a challenge but this is
What’s sucked all of the political Capital out of the discussion about heat pumps it’s what’s prompted this is why we’re not having a debate about what to do with farming and if we keep doing this we’re going to be gummed up in the wrong stuff I’m not saying this isn’t
Important what I am saying though is that that’s a 95% reduction rather than 97% reduction so we’re having debate about 2 percentage points rather than the fact that the biggest story on that chart for me is that it’s either 95 or it’s 97 and that is a massive shift for
An industry that employs lots of people in the northeast of Scotland particularly we’re not having that debate either and I just worry really that that’s what we’ve got to tackle now we’ve got to move into a different sort of politics where we get real about this for all sorts of reasons I’ve been
Saying recently that the successful recipe I think to make all this stick is actually probably to put climate second as a priority for doing all of this it’s green jobs or jobs I hate green jobs but jobs um and it helps the climate it’s about investing in regions of the UK
That need the investment and it helps the climate it’s about landscape Beauty and it helps the climate it’s about National Security and it helps the climate and my experience is that when you put it second often the people who care about the first thing like it even
More as a solution uh even if climate isn’t the thing that you wakes them up in the middle of the night so don’t be distracted would be my main message to whoever takes over after the next general election and the last thing I’ll say is if you’re interested in any of
This um and God there’s an even longer version of this if you’re interested um we’ve got so much material on the CCC website but I’ll stop there Jim thank [Applause] you Chris that was truly fantastic talking about the problem um a mix of pessimism and optimism some real geeky
Stuff and then some high Politics as well and I particularly i’ I’ve also um worked quite a bit on your green graph and I agree it’s an entirely distraction but uh we we need to show that graph more often certainly amongst many of the other things and I endorse what you just
Said at the end about the websites a m of information and uh analysis so we’ve got uh quite a bit of time 20 minutes or so for for questions I’ll take them in twos or threes if you just say who you are when you ask a question please ask a
Question please keep it brief those are the rules so you first uh great thanks Chris so um Ed G I’m the leader of the climate party nationally so I quite just to ask about the way we’re framing it and then get your take on it actually so um I’m not discussing currently the
Targets because our Target is 2030 decanalization for particular reasons um and the framing is look there’s a hell of a lot of money to be made and it’s not just the jobs prosperity for British people in the 2030s and 40s if we beat everybody else to get there at the
Moment we’re not and it’s all about the fact that we need moneyy for an HS our police and everything else and we don’t have it because we’ve got this General spiral down in ter our man manufacturing capacity reducing down percentage of our GDP coming from it so the whole framing
Is upside it’s all about money in the pocket tomorrow and it’s all about we won’t have enough money for the NHS and the police unless we invest and if we invest and move really early which is coming to 2030 and bring before all the other countries we can lead that clean
Industrial Revolution there’s not a mention of green there’s no mention of savings it’s all about profit uh thank you well should I take a couple more right I mean not sure that was a question I guess ask for reflection on it I was going to go to this side just
At the back there for the second one and I’ll come to you please yes yes okay hi I’m ABD I work on carbon footprint measurement my question is basically we see great progress with um on the graphs really lovely what the UK has done but the question is how much of that is
Outsourced emissions so for example with charcoal you know there’s a lot of regulations about sustainable charcoal in the UK but then you can just import unsustainable charcoal very easily and so we’re all in the same Planet so is there any value in the UK having its emissions reduced but globally it’s
Maybe in some other countri it’s increased great I can that third question just here hi um Hayes I work for the energy security committee at the house of comms so we’re in an election yeah what could the government reason get done before the election to get a further forward on
Great right question yeah great question so I mean I I I made the point several times I was talking about territorial emission but you’re absolutely right we’re responsible for more than that uh I think the first thing to say is it’s still the biggest bit so you know in
Terms of our footprint globally it’s what we produce here within our territory that is still the most important bit of that but you could probably add another half again onto those emission stats to to look at what we call consumption emissions they’re also falling though so I think it’s
Important to say I don’t want to miss it but I think if if the world goes on the journey that I showed you right at the top of my presentation then our consumption emissions would be much less clearly by the time we get to 2050 but it’s really important that we take a
Rounded view to it so I’m slightly constrained by the remit that we have which is the remit that the UN requires of the UK to look at production emissions but we do take a rounded view in the work that we do and and in particular the advice that we give to
Government about this is not just about reducing um domestic emissions it’s also about reducing overall footprint and the other thing to say on this is that I think the other big story that’s been playing out and continues to play out in the time I’ve done this job is now it’s
Question of actually drawing borders around territories uh and actually applying a tariff if you’ve got a high carbon production happening somewhere else and um you know that is you saw that actually in the UK very recently when it was apparent that we’ve we’ve decoupled the ETS in the UK from the EU
And it was suddenly apparent that our ETS price was much lower than the eu’s price and clever people said said well hang on a minute if we export stuff into an EU that has a cbam around it a carbon border around it we’ll just be paying
The EU uh monies that otherwise would go to the UK exer and it was a kind of really realistic uh appraisal I think for the first time that we need these carbon borders around uh around products so that we have a Level Playing Field for producers here in the UK for those
Products and you know the one area where we don’t do any of this really is food and um it’s hugely problematic I think if you a well sheep farmer that you can get well sheep’s probably not a great example a beef farmer let’s say in Northern Ireland you can be blown out
The Water by Cheap Imports of uh beef produced in other parts of the world with really low uh low standards of Environmental Protection and lots of carbon emissions or methane emissions associated with them so I think this is going to be a continued theme but I did
Want to make the point that we we do absolutely look at it and as do my colleagues in government I me it’s it’s a we do have a pretty well-rounded view of it I think in the UK other countries perhaps not um what should the government do before the
Election I don’t know because I don’t know when the election is going to be but um uh get a bloody move on would be the first thing uh I think the more more useful perhaps thing to say is well two things stop flip-flopping on policies it’s so destructive to do it we’ve been
Through quite an interesting and very weird period since the Prime Minister made the speech in dowy Street and incidentally if you read this speech I recommend reading it actually it’s a good speech it says a lot of stuff that I agree with but it was spun and
Presented as a sort of retreat from Net Zero and uh I think the first thing to say on that is when I went to cop this year it was it was pretty embarrassing actually so we had lots of people saying what are you guys doing and you know
It’s hard to answer that question but in real what we actually do well actually we’re doing loads of climate policy so what we seen since the climate speech that the Prime Minister made is more climate policy than we were seeing prior to it but weirdly uh the Prime Minister
Doesn’t want to own it it’s strange that so and Chris Gore calls it green hushing I think it’s quite a good term actually so let’s do it but let’s not talk about it so you know that sort of messaging matters so I would like firm up the
Messaging and stick to your guns would be my first thing to say perhaps but then the other story on flip flopping is there has been some genuine flip-flopping and it’s very very destructive because it destroys the confidence of Supply chains and suppliers especially and we’ve seen that
In the past with Energy Efficiency where we had in the austerity years the government pulled the rug from a lot of the support schemes on home insulation particularly and we’ve never recovered from that because understandably Supply chains the people that would do the installations were really burned by it and I worry
That we’ve just done that again with electric vehicles even though we stuck with a zero emission vehicle mandate which is actually the one that really matters in terms of emissions a very important policy the message that we gave to the consumer is don’t buy your electric car so you create this kind of
Really weird situation where we’re telling the manufacturers of vehicles to produce them but we’re telling the consumers not to buy them yet so so that’s going to be an interesting one to watch and we may be doing I don’t know but we may be doing the same with uh
Boilers and heat pumps and whether we are or not that’s the discussion now and we don’t have uh and it’s notable a set of politicians are out saying no actually we’re going to stick to this and we’re going to do it because it’s the right thing so I think the more that
We can land certain messages and be clear about the future the more we’ll get some economic benefit from this and the less damaging it will be politics is politics I’m not a politician but that would be my top thing and then the maybe the other thing and I’m sure the civil
Service is doing this is and this is the dark secret is there’s not that much difference between the conservatives and labor on this stuff maybe there will be but broadly the stuff that I referred to earlier is what each party wants to do they just might want to do it in a slightly
Different way but even that’s you know not not much that much difference so as a civil servant if you’re preparing for the potential change of government there’s lots of ways in which you can get going on things that you know the next government will want to do and I
Very much hope my colleagues are doing that so that power Target for example decarbonizing power whether it’s 2035 or 2030 labor 1 2030 Tor say 2035 doesn’t really matter you got to do the same stuff so you know that’s a very sensible safe territory to really push um push
Accelerated action and I hope that’s what they’re doing at the moment in government that’s definitely my advice thank you um I’m going to go over here I saw a lot more hands than I saw there somebody I’m going to take you right the back next to the person um work ination I’m particularly
Interested in de carbonization of Aviation so um uh you mentioned a lot of really interesting things in your talk I’d love to hear you um talk about how finance and um investment um can be incentivized specifically in this country but just more generally because a lot of innovation is happening there’s
A lot that’s going on in universi especially in startups but um it would be great to talk about the ways in which financial sector right thank you um the front here yeah I’m Paul Ute resoures thanks Chris I really enjoyed that twice during your presentation you mentioned High fossil
Fuel prices now my perception is that as the demand for fossil fuel is cut if it’s cut globally is we won’t be looking at high fossil fuel prices and it could actually reduce very fast indeed so my two questions are what will that do to the climate trajectory uh when suddenly
Renewables are not so much than fossil fuels and secondly and this is a bit outside your climate change committee Reit what does that do to macroeconomy when so much value in oil and gas companies is strong the share price falls off the clip because that is
Something which is going to hit us hard if we’re not in some way prepared for it thank you Paul okay so those two you want to do another one as long as you can remember them I forget more than two so okay well why don’t you do those and
Then I’ll come back to other people yeah because you got two SP two hours talking about that stuff but I can’t remember more than two questions uh the question of Finance let’s just deal with that and then Paul’s question uh which she Chek had two two questions um so on finance
This is another part of the story that’s become much more interesting I think over the last few years um because we used to think that everything had to be done with public policy and it had to be done mainly with public spending I think that was we didn’t say that I think a
Lot of the discussion of this was about how much to spend on it and what’s been really reassuring actually is the degree to which I think we should rely on straight up private sector privately financed investment to drive this but definitely one of the best things I’ve
Done in this job is is some work that we did alongside this the thing I’ve shown you which is to look at the conditions for that um and it stands up today um uh a good colleague of the CC Nick Robin who LSC did he led the work on it what
He looked at um I’ll be honest with you which is I the reason we asked Nick to do this because as we were doing this work we were getting the investment numbers and they’re big right so I mean we’re talking about an extra 50 60 billion of
Capex per year as a whole economy um and that’s quite a lot actually although I think there’s a big saving that goes with it um and if you roll that up you’re into as the Daily Telegraph quite like quite regularly tell me north of a trillion um again it’s not a cost but
It’s still a big number and what we were asking Nick to look at was firstly is that credible was what we asked the team of financi that he brought together and they said absolutely it’s about adding an eighth to the total capex the country does so that’s well within fluctuations
Seen before but only if the policy permit it and that’s the really interesting thing about it so what we need to I think continue to work on is um what are the policies that help shape private investment to deliver this stuff well and cheaply and the other thing
That goes with the cost story is that the you know the interest rate on that or the cost of capital is a big determinant of how expensive or otherwise this is and the and in turn one of the ways in which the cost of capital was driven is uncertainty and
That’s about policy flip-flopping back to my story earlier so there’s other things going on there too so we want to minimize that uncertainty as much as possible so I think mostly my view is that in those sectors you can’t just have one size fits all so you know the
The the the the the formula for a good policy to drive private financing to the transport transition for example is different to the one in power sector or particularly the one in the building sector so we should look at it broadly around those sectors and ask questions
About how to shape that with policies that are not just about spending money often public spending is a bad way actually to drive private Finance you can do a bit of crowding in with it but it’s not that successful and doing the job that markets do very well cutting
The price of those things but regulation is often another way into setting good standards is another but I mean I think again a much longer presentation could look at what’s in those things but that’s I think a really interesting question it’s not so difficult to achieve if you view it that way actually
As well so it’s not just about how much public spending the treasury permits in that world and um and for me that’s one of the most exciting things of all of this is that I think we can frame this up really well with good strong policies like the cfd and Renewables that really
Deliver and that’s a very well considered piece of policy but we could do that in other areas too and the cfd is not the model in some sets so we need different models and keep working on it because it’s fascinating I think it’s my top tip now Paul uh first question was
What first question is I told you go down price goes down you got two things firstly competition with Renewables secondly macroeconomic effect so I tend to agree with what you’ve said although other explanations are available so I mean I think that it’s a Fool’s erand to predict what’s happened what happens
With fossil fuel prices but in the long run I think you’re probably right that it’s likely they’ll go down rather than up although I keep being proved wrong on that I think the important thing for people like me is to make sure that the work that we’re doing is resilient to
That so we’re looking looking at one of the biggest uh not mistakes cuz I don’t think we could have predicted but one of my regrets about the work that we did here is we had to narrower range for um the underlying fossil fuel price and what we had was you know Russian
Invasion of Ukraine which blew that out the water and actually we’ve got to be we will do this in the next piece of work is look at a much broader range uh high and low um and I’m fairly confident because we’ve already started to do the
Numbers on it that this still Stacks up this the kind of first thing to say on that the second part of your question is the more interesting one I think actually what’s the broader impact particularly globally as that happens because you do see destruction of value to shareholders and those shareholders
Often are states so the sovereign states and that for me is why the cop process is so important actually is that we’ve got although I would love to see texts that had much more radical language in it that we’ve got to keep keep working at this because those parts of the world
That rely on oil and gas as the basis of their economy there lots of of them and this is people in jobs we’re talking about this is not some dictator that we’re talking about it’s actual people in jobs there has to be some future for those economies that Beyond oil and gas
Some of them will continue to produce oil and gas but they can’t do so with emissions and we haven’t really framed it in that way I think and I think I don’t have a good answer to your question because I think that there’s a big risk of big disruption with lots of
Uncertainty and lots of risk uh which manifests often in very nasty thing nasty ways and we’re sort of covering our eyes and pretending that’s not going to happen but as you go as you go down the other side of that emissions chart I showed you globally that’s when it starts to
Happen there’s already a few signs of that I think so the unrest there will be in the fossil fuel economy is enormous actually uh potentially and if you can harness that unrest to move more quickly in the green stuff that would be good um but uh you know we’ve got collectively
Difficulty in talking about that at the moment I worry about it too Paul maybe you’ve got an answer but I not sure I have okay um here at the front and then this one here please um hi thanks again for the presentation Chris head of Supply chair of the UK and electrical
Engineer um I’m going a little pug I’m sorry um there a previous comment from a colleague about um the opportunity in the economy and one of the recent papers that myself and colleagues have produced his uh supply chain analysis of offshore women offshore will become the the main form of elcy generation
Energy System in the next 20 30 years I just encourage anyone who’s interested in that economic story and the opportunity in economy and particular the skills and jobs to to have a look it if you’re interested I think Chris one of the things that you touched on is the
Messaging point com me and how it’s we’re in danger of seeing that as a threat to to the economy and indeed what current jobs we have how do you think we can improve the messaging around opportunity for skills and jobs given that we literally have thousands of people now working in the
Rable energy sector great question and then just one here please hi Chris my um my question is well my interest is in Supply chains and for me Supply chains is always 3,000 miles away some somewhere in India or Africa when I was at scope 3 talks this morning at another conference um they
Were saying that people have barely faed what scope one and TW yeah so I said what about scope three and this ISS Oh Yeah from the raw material I says no no no not from the raw material from the forests that we are deforesting this strip mining in India and Africa not for
The fossil fuels for running the diesel car but for the fossil fuels that we need in emptying amounts to get the lithium and the Cal out of con and all across Africa so my question is is there this delusion that’s still being pushed firstly Renewables of fossil fuel free
No they’re not secondly that this will clean the green well get these minerals you need to trash I mean you need to do a second invasion of Africa basically finish a job that was never finished 100 years ago because most of the resources coming from Congo and India and South
America we are losing huge amounts of forest so if the supply chain or scope three or even scope four where you quot was to include from us strict mining our forests and our water systems to the raw material would this Net Zero really be justifiable when those mines are Laden
With hundreds of thousands of women and children is that justifiable so we can supposedly go gree thank you okay yes yes absolutely as long as we do it well so I don’t want to have a fight with you about it let’s not do that tonight but the key thing is we don’t
Have to choose that future but there’s a huge amount of disruption that comes from bringing fossil fuels out of the ground as well there’s been quite a lot of good work done on the size of that versus the size of absolutely so I’m confident it can be done well the
Question is can we make it make it happen that way and not everything comes from the Congo uh and 60% it does but you could there’s already vehicles in the market that don’t use any Cobalt from the so so it’s the point is that is a that’s a soluble problem and it’s a
Much smaller one than the fossil fuel problem you can disagree but that’s definitely my view could you could you let Chris answer the question so I think so the the challenge is a good one though I mean I the job I’m off to is the issue that you’re raising is the
Reason I want to go and do this job because I think the broader question is the right one that we’ve got to think about this not in the in narrow I don’t think that was narrow but not we shouldn’t be narrow and scope 3 is the
Right way to think about it we know very little about scope 3 and to me that’s the challenge so making that work well is where I think we will make this thing stick and I absolutely think that the green economy whatever you want to call
It in the future is a better place to be in all sorts of ways and the mining question is one that lots of people looked at including notably the Ia last year and what they would say is yeah there is indeed a lot of mining that’s required for the minerals for Net Zero
But it doesn’t need to be disruptive and it’s a tiny fraction of what we’d be doing if we were bringing fossil fuels out of the ground at the same scale we do today so I mean I think it’s worth it basically as my answer to your question
Um there’s a link I suppose to the other point about how we sell this to uh to I don’t we need to sell it actually but I think to describe it perhaps in a way that looks more appealing and I think I don’t have all the answers for that because I’m not
A Salesman but I think one thing I’ll say is that we we have we have consistently overinflated the benefit in jobs terms from Renewables um I was once in the Scottish government and we used to have we used to talk a lot about all the jobs in
Dundee I’ll tell you what was know in dunde working in Renewables right I mean there might be some actually but they’re not the 30,000 people that was promised by Alex salmon uh I don’t know where you put 30,000 new people to working renales in in in Dundee but um I think getting
Real what these jobs are is my first thing to say on it and maybe the second thing to say is I hate I said this I hate the term green jobs I just don’t like it and um uh one of I won’t say who it is but one of the uh big energy
Companies in Scotland did a did a little experiment on this very issue um I I was told and I happen to believe it but uh basically a set of jobs that they were advertising uh that they described as green and set the same jobs that they didn’t put the green word in and
Interesting they had twice as many applicants for the second adverb and I think it tells you something about I mean there were there were engineering jobs but it tells you something about some of this is actually it puts people off actually so I think the more we normalize this the better but absolutely
Let’s talk about the the massive massive you know wi that there is is with these industries the point I really wanted to make when you ask the question is I think a more fundamental one the the odity of this is that I can show you
Charts like that and it can it can show you that there is a huge set of new industries that we don’t have at the moment or at least that we don’t have at that scale in 2050 um but we are sure of that but we don’t know what next year looks like so
You get this kind of really interesting conundrum if you just stick with offshore wind for example we’ve got a really good policy mechanism for developing offshore wind in the cfd but it’s an annual a and if you want to get the wider benefit to that that cfd is actually not very
Good at Landing a lot of the production that you want to see here because you can’t be sure how you get from here to there so I think there’s a quite an interesting question I think the cfd is a brilliant policy we shouldn’t lose it but there’s another question about how
Is there more that we can do to guarantee what that transition might look like given that it’s squillions in 2050 you what could we do to give greater certainty that there will be some sort of production for things like cabling for example those sorts of things and I think that is an
Interesting policy question and labor said more about that perhaps than the conservative party have but both parties I think have got a challenge to describe what how you bridge that gap which is more than just a cfd perhaps right thank you I’m going to squeeze in two more
Questions so apologies to those are going to be disappointed got one there and I’ll take one randomly I’ll take you over here sorry to those who I can’t read please thank you um so and Dan I’m here at the central bity environment research at um in my experience talking with people colleagues
About getting to that zero clate change there seem to be sort of two fronts so anoun you often get um is people kind of blaming The Big Industry saying okay well yeah most the emissions are due to the top number of companies mostly oil and gas companies but uh and
Then you’ve got the other front where people say oh you know it’s our own personal responsibility of consumers we need to change our um consumption Behavior you know eat meet all the rest of it uh which you know is a very clear point I’m just wondering what your take
On that what is the true story there what you know obviously neither side is is carrying the the whole truth and that the I’ve got my own thoughts on that just sure thank you okay and we’ll just do one more just in front of the camera then um
Hi I’m Louis and I worked for the UN principal’s responsible investment and one of the kind of roadblocks we’re facing with the UK is that the regulatory framework is actually in place you know the cccc’s goal standard and climate legislation and got the fca’s sustainability disclosure requirements and the green Finance
Strategy but where the UK is really lacking is on that kind of implementation and delivery of climate policies and I mean even we represent investors and these investors are calling out for those kind of long-term um policy signals from government but an issue we’re facing is like how do you engage with the
Government that sees energy security and fossil fuel expansion as like two sides of the coin uh so these are brilliant questions to end on I think actually um uh I mean I maybe deal with that one that one first if I can and I’ll come back to I
Think what your question is a totally fundamental one I’m not sure there’s an easy answer to it but I’ve definitely got thoughts on it so this question of how you build certain the delivery I I mean it’s the biggest frustration in my job people say to me quite often you
Must be very frustrated in your job I’m not frustrated to my job it’s a great job to have cuz I’m constantly hopeful that things will you know be delivered but I’m not that sure how so I mean I think this more and more the delivery question is the one I’m most interested
In again part of the reason for doing the job I’m moving into because I think I can probably do more on that front on the other side but I understand basically what you said and I think one thing to point to I’m glad that you think that it’s gold standard that we
Have as C I mean I tend to agree but the gold the bit that’s missing is that the the plans that follow the institutional framework and the legal framework that aren’t always as good as they could be and the missing bit is actually about deployment and delivery it’s like you
Know we we used to spend a lot of time looking for policies that weren’t there but now mostly we have policies in place just we’re doubtful there’ll be they’ll be successful so uh I think that’s the next Frontier is can we have better certainty over the policies are there
But can we have better clarity about how they’ll be delivered and I think the crucial point on this I think and to build conest confidence if Government wishes to pull a policy as it’s entirely legitimate for them to do so on electric vehicles for example I definitely feel
That one thing is missing is that there is not then a responsibility in the government to say what they’re going to do instead and I think that the the my answer often when journalists ask me questions about policy X being pulled or policy X being cancelled is well that’s
Fine it’s legitimate for that to happen but what’s next and I think you know the the boiler thing for example is another one of the example like there’s a sort of free pass to pulling policies without saying what you’re going to do next and that’s what investors say you know they
Shrug and walk away and I think the bit of institutional framework that’s not there actually is is that government and particularly bits of government like the treasury need to be need to be better at facing the consequences of the decision and being transparent about what the what the replacement strategy is so I
Think if you were to push me on it the work we’ll do in the CCC after I go is going to be much more driven by the need for contingency so as we get down the emissions curve you know you get to lower levels you got to be more and more
Certain that you’ve got not just one strategy but lots of strategies and I think then the question is if you’re not going to follow one of those strategies what you going to do instead and we should we should be able to provide some of that information I think there’s a
Collective push to generally being better at fronting up on that so I think I think we can do that but we haven’t got that in place yet interestingly uh the EAC uh in the um in the House of Commons also kind of all lighted on this
Issue that when it comes to doing the next carbon budget the processes that we offer our advice on what that should be and then government gets to think about it and legislate it hopefully what they’re saying is when the government decides what to do about our advice they
Should also be ready with a delivery plan and I think that’s totally legitimate so we’ll have a sense of what should be in that but I think that’s a really good addition to the process if we do that and that interestingly is what R sunak said as well and I firmly
Agree with it um on dowy stream um on this question about you know consumption versus Supply or you know heavy industry of course there isn’t a answer to this but my view on it is that we uh those of us who work on green issues often fall
Into the Trap of presenting it in such a way that it looks like you have to stop doing lots of stuff to get to Net Zero and that is then therefore you know a red flag to people who are very suspicious about this stuff and I don’t
Really make any judgment about that um one of the big dangers in my job is to imagine that the world’s full of goodies and baddies um and that’s just not the case people are doing stuff mostly for the right reasons they just got you know
Might have a outlook on it and I think again first thing to say on it is that got to keep understanding people’s views on this including those who don’t want to stop doing things that they enjoy and rely on in their life and that is totally just legitimate Outlook um what
I will say is going back to this is that there is indeed a bit of trimming of consumption involved in this that was the purple stripes if you remember that I showed you in just in the UK transition but I think the most telling thing about that is it doesn’t do that
Much so you know telling people to stop stuff is not a very successful strategy if you want to cut emissions quickly or cut emissions deeply actually that’s a better way to put it so in the end it is about a more fundamental set of investments in systemic things things
That deliver you long-term um emissions reduction that tends to be upstream or with big policy and with big response from multiple consumers and I think maybe this will be my final point I think it’s good that we I think we should be better at framing Net Zero um
As a sort of build it agenda rather than as a stop it agenda and more that we do that the more that we’ll have a positive discussion about it and my very final Point I’ve been saying this a bit recently and it’s I’ll stand by it I
Also think given what I said at the end about being distracted by it it is difficult to do this people like me for a long time have been talking about how difficult it is and things like for example the heat transition but it’s also quite exciting
To do it I think we should try and inject some of that back into it and I what I’ve been saying recently is the victorians had a lot to answer for but they wouldn’t have blinked at this actually they just got on with it and I think being a bit more Victorian it
Would be it would be the way to do it so I’m going to end on that fantastic