Government's latest claim on emissions

I was disgusted by the Government's move at the weekend to try and evade it's responsibilities over renewables - see news release here - also today I commented on the Heathrow protests last week here and haven't mentioned comment re seals last week here - but for this blog more on emissions....

Photo: Larch trees in Standish woods

The Government is claiming (again) it has made great strides towards reducing emissions with the provisional figures for 2007 showing a reduction in the Kyoto basket of gases and CO2 of (both) 2%. If these reductions prove to be confirmed, it is clearly welcome. However, there is little for Labour to jump up and down about.

Firstly, the figures are provisional and tucked away at the end of the Government's press release is a note that this year's figures are unusually uncertain.

Secondly, if the reduction proves real, it means that UK CO2 emissions (CO2 being the most important greenhouse gas) has fallen by just 0.8% since Labour came to power in 1997.

Thirdly, a large proportion of the 2007 fall is due to switching fuel supplies in powers stations from coal to gas ie it is not a structural change in the economy.

Finally, what is much more significant is that the figures that the Government continues to use are highly inaccurate. The National Audit Office recently produced a report criticising the accurancy of the figures used by the Government. The figures exclude international aviation, shipping and UK imports. FoE estimate that the missing CO2 from international aviation alone is depressing the total artificially by a range (varies year to year) of 20 to 40 million tonnes per annum.

Indeed the National Audit Office investigation shows Britain's climate change emissions may be 12% higher than officially stated. They also strongly criticised the government for using two different carbon accounting systems - saying there is "insufficient consistency and coordination" in the government's approach. See more here.

In addition to the NAO paper, there's another couple of very readable academic papers worth a quick read on this topic - they look at carbon emissions from a consumption point of view and suggest that the UK's supposed carbon cuts are significantly to do with the fact that we use a production-based accounting convention at the same time as offshoring all our manufacturing - so it looks like our carbon's falling because it now shows up in China's totals where all our goods are now produced. That shows how ridiculous it is when people trot out the old line about the UK only being responsible for 2% of emissions and claim that it therefore doesn't matter what action we take to cut carbon emissions here.

The papers are at
http://www.dieterhelm.co.uk/publications/Carbon_record_2007.pdf and
http://www.fcrn.org.uk/researchLib/PDFs/druckman_paper.pdf

Also while I am on this topic - transport is a very large producer of CO2 and is growing fast as car use rises (outside London) and lorry activity continues to grow at large rates - see my previous post today on the cuts to the no.46 bus service. Some have said to me, that well now there are lower carbon fuels and better engines (e.g. 120g/km of CO2) - however we need to remember that trends like longer distances to shop and work and reducing average vehicle occupancy can cancel out CO2 gains. Consumption defeats technology.

The Lancaster bypass will generate 24,000 tonnes of CO2 each year. New roads, extra lanes etc add to the problem. We have a massive road building programme that locks us into a carbon-rich future

Aviation is clearly one key area that we need to tackle - dozens of blog entries on this topic - also shipping which as noted gets neglected - but we need to be careful about just having the high speed train substitution for aviation as some have argued. If we get people out of aircraft and onto trains this frees up slots at airports that can be used for more flights to the Seychelles or air freight

If we had a "decent" carbon audit linked to budgets we would find that this dreadful government gives preference to spending that increases CO2 rather than the other way round......enough for now - need a cup of tea....