Top Highlights

• in the foreword to its recent report ‘Net Zero: The UK’s Contribution to Stopping Global Warming’: By reducing emissions produced in the UK to zero, we also end our contribution to rising global temperatures.[2] This is misleading in that the net zero target the CCC advocates is for territorial emissions in the UK, and unless every other country we...
• For a deindustrialised economy with only 20 per cent manufacturing, this is particularly pertinent. To give a simple example, if British Steel had closed down (something which was under active consideration at the time the CCC published its report), UK territorial emissions would have gone down, but the subsequent increased imports of steel from, s...
• If the UK wants to make no further unilateral contribution to global warming, which as I shall argue it should, then it is the altogether harder net zero carbon consumption that matters, and not just the easier bit of net zero carbon production.
• if those countries exporting carbon-intensive products face a carbon border tax on a level playing field with home producers, this encourages them to introduce their own carbon price and keep the money rather than pay it to our government. I will explain how all this works to get much more effective global action than Kyoto, Paris and Glasgow.
• how we use the land is a very big part of how we crack climate change, and that it is a key part of net zero. Instead of focusing exclusively on carbon emissions, we also need to take seriously the other side of the equation: the natural sequestration by the land, by the trees, soils and peats, of those emissions. Nature, if protected and enhanced,...