With my feet in a hot bowl of water and an ice pack on my forehead, I am ready to dig further into Labour’s manifesto. Today it’s the turn of energy policy. On this front it would be very hard to do any worse than the Tories, who egregiously seem to be back tracking even on their climate change targets. But of course we’ve seen Labour backtracking too, dumping its £28 billion per annum spend on green things in favour of £8.3 billion on ‘Great British Energy’ (GBE) over five years and £6 billion on home insulation over the same period, which it seems will help pay for five million homes to be insulated. As I have blogged before, there is a great danger that the lion’s share of any public investment in energy will be gobbled up by current and new nuclear power stations. Hydrogen also gets a few mentions amongst the new technologies to benefit from public investment—there’s a clear connection here with nuclear power, which in all probability will generate the electricity needed to create hydrogen. Hydrogen has to be created in sufficient quantities to make it worthwhile, especially for fuelling transport. I doubt that the timescales involved will have much bearing on reducing carbon emissions as soon as the manifesto writers would wish. Another technology is our old friend carbon capture and storage (C&C). C&C has been knocking on politicians’ doors for decades (indeed, going back to the days of the Miners’ Strike Arthur Scargill was always banging on about 'clean coal'), but to my knowledge hasn’t been rolled out on a commercial scale anywhere. The technology certainly exists, but to make it cost efficient is another story. I am also sceptical about the five million home insulation promise, at least if we’re talking about older properties. Put simply, unless there is some form of compulsion involved, take-up will be a challenge. Nowhere in Labour’s climate change commitments is there a mention of behaviour change. The idea is that we will reach our ’net zero’ targets without anybody noticing a thing. Therein lies the danger.
One idea in the manifesto that seems not to have attracted much attention is this: ‘Labour supports the introduction of a carbon border adjustment mechanism. This will protect British industries as we decarbonise, prevent countries from dumping lower-quality goods into British markets, and support the UK to meet our climate objectives.’ This would be a turnaround from the days when a Labour environment minister (Joan Ruddock) didn’t seem to comprehend that by offshoring much of our manufacturing to places like China our carbon emissions could be presented as falling. Now—if this proposal is enacted - there will have to be some way of measuring carbon emissions from imports. Somebody is going to have to come up with an international framework to fairly apportion emissions. Without such a framework we would inevitably be drawn into accusations of protectionism, and a trade war would be the result. As well as higher prices for imported goods, of course. I wonder who wrote this paragraph? Have they worked out the likely consequences?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
December 2024
|