Net Zero
In order to get a handle on the consumption side and our role in causing climate change, we need to take a close look at our own carbon consumption and understand not only how much climate change each of us is causing, but also what we can do about it. By understanding our personal carbon consumption, we can then work out how we can minimise our own impact, and what that means for our local community and therefore the collective responsibility for climate change. Net zero for us, for local government, and for the UK as a whole requires net zero carbon consumption – and net zero carbon consumption requires attacking both the production and consumption sides.
Some areas of carbon consumption are pretty obvious, and figures have already been calculated for us. Take our cars, or our travel by planes. It is not hard to work out the staggering emissions from an aircraft flying, for example, from London to New York. This might amount to a little less than a tonne per passenger, compared with the average per capita emissions of carbon production in the UK of around 10 tonnes per annum (average carbon consumption is likely to be much higher). Similarly, the emissions from different types of cars are documented. There are apps you can consult. To end your contribution to climate change you would need to stop flying (at least until there are very low-emissions aircraft, sadly a long way off), and switch to electric cars and public transport, although even here some carbon emissions will remain. The electric car is very much more carbon-intensive to build than a conventional petrol or diesel one; the electricity is not – and probably never will be – completely carbon-free, and nor will the trains, buses and other forms of public transport. To be truly carbon-neutral, you will need to work out how to offset what you cannot mitigate. That will be expensive for you.
Yet this is just the tip of the carbon consumption iceberg. To get a much more complete picture of your carbon consumption, and hence what consumption for all of us will need to look like in a truly net zero world, let me suggest an exercise for you. Try writing down (perhaps with the help of one of the websites or apps) a carbon diary, your very own carbon diary. The idea is simple, even if the detail is complicated. This will give you your best guess at the carbon embedded in everything you do in your typical day, from the moment you wake up to getting back into bed. Think how your day starts. Go to the toilet, and the toilet paper is energy-intensive to produce. Check your emails and download a newspaper, and the energy-intensive servers kick in. Breakfast comes in packaging and contains lots of fertiliser-based foods. Pesticides are probably involved too. Then there is the milk and the cows and the methane, and that palm oil mentioned above. Fry some bacon and eggs or eat a croissant, and think just how much carbon might be involved. You will be wearing carbon-intensive footwear and clothing, much of it washed in a machine using carbon-intensive detergents and energy. All of this before you travel to work, go for lunch, and have a night out on the town. Your lifestyle – and everyone else’s – is riddled with carbon. Put another way, our standard of living is utterly dependent on carbon, and it is this lifestyle as reflected in your diary which the developing world aspires to, and the extra 2 to 3 billion people coming along this century will want too.
The point of this is not to make you feel guilty, although you may well end up being very guilty. It is rather to reveal what the world will have to look like if we are to decarbonise. It is what would have to change on the consumption side, and it is way beyond replacing coal and gas power stations with wind turbines, solar panels and nuclear power stations, important as these steps are.
Try to imagine what your carbon diary would look like in 2050, supposing for a moment that net zero is achieved. Almost all of the carbon listed in your current diary would have to go, and anything left would have to be offset by measures to sequestrate it. By comparing the two, it is possible to recognise just how radical net zero is going to be. This is no walk in the park.
What your carbon diary will also tell you is that a lot of your consumption comes from overseas. It is not just home carbon emissions that matter. These carbon imports are the result of energy- and carbon-intensive production abroad. All that stuff ‘Made in China’ is for you – your mobile phone, laptop, flat-screen TV, household appliances, clothes and trainers. This stuff is all part of your carbon footprint. Other stuff, like palm oil and beef, might come from countries that are clearing their rain-forests to produce it, and hence the loss of the carbon sinks, the carbon leaking from the soils and the loss of biodiversity are all for you too. Many of the products in the supermarket contain palm oil, often under different names. The data servers are usually overseas.
Our kitchens and bathrooms are awash with chemicals; our clothes made from synthetic fibres; our food comes from fertiliser- and other chemically assisted agriculture; our houses are made with steel and cement; and an increasing number of gardens are covered with artificial turf. The list goes on. Even if you buy ‘renewable’ electricity, it has lots of embedded carbon in the turbines and the solar panels, and needs fossil fuels to back it up. Invest in an electric car, with an electric battery, and your carbon footprint will still remain a big one. Think of the cobalt in the battery, the materials in the car frame, bodywork and interior, and of course the tyres and brakes. An electric car takes twice as much carbon to produce than a conventional one.
My point is that this highlights just how unsustainable our lifestyles have become.[2] We are becoming addicted to a way of living in which flying is regarded as essential by many, and an aspiration for most. Even Greta Thunberg, in her noble efforts to get world leaders to take climate change seriously, had a support team flying backwards and forwards to the 2019 UN summit on climate change as she sailed in a ‘zero carbon’ yacht. They had, it was claimed, no option. Very few of us could afford the costs of Greta’s yacht. She demonstrated that it could be done without many emissions, but not in a way the rest of us could emulate. Others could simply have chosen not to travel. The actor Emma Thompson flew 5,400 miles (emitting around 1.6 tonnes of carbon) from and back to California to be in the Extinction Rebellion protest boat in London’s Oxford Circus, and Prince Harry used a private jet for his holidays, having preached the environmental message on climate change a few weeks earlier. What is wrong with fibre and video links? Wouldn’t that have been a much better example to all of us? This is something that the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us – it can be done without all the travel.
Now you see where consumption comes in. Our demand leads to production and supply. Without us consuming all these carbon-intensive goods and services, they would have no market. And once the focus shifts to consumption, a wider truth is revealed.
Climate change is pretty simple as a conceptual problem: it is about a small number of gases, and it does not matter where they are emitted. It is also about the ability of the environment to naturally sequestrate them – the ‘net’ bit in net zero is the carbon that we will keep emitting after we have done all the mitigation we can and hence must put back into trees and plants and soils and into the ground. What we need is to stop the emissions, wherever they are occurring, and to encourage natural sequestration to mop up as much as it can.
Now the radical implication. It is not enough to clean up our own backyard. This does not stop us contributing to global warming. It is a fantasy, propagated by politicians, the CCC and some activists, that if we could only get to net zero for our own territorial emissions – for our carbon production – that would mean that we would have crossed the Rubicon and no longer be causing any further global warming. It is an extremely dangerous delusion.
Worse still, net zero only at home could actually increase global warming. This is arguably what has happened under Kyoto, which resulted in the Europeans obsessing about their own carbon production and theirs alone. Think how you would quickly get carbon emissions down in the UK or indeed the whole of Europe. The best place to start is closing down energy-intensive businesses that produce the most carbon. Close down the remaining steel, aluminium, petrochemicals and fertiliser factories. Stop making cement. Do all this and territorial emissions will fall. Drive up energy prices to make sure these businesses face a serious competitive disadvantage.
That is what has been going on since 1990. There are virtually no large energy-intensive investments in Europe at all now. For the existing factories, shifting car production abroad, moving petrochemical businesses to the US and closing down the remaining bits of the steel industry will all help to push territorial emissions down further. Making sure that the servers for the digital world are all overseas helps too.
As long as we keep consuming all this stuff, global emissions will almost certainly go up as a result of importing from abroad rather than producing at home. It makes climate change worse. Think of all that coal burnt in China; think of the heavily polluting shipping to get this stuff to our home ports.
Once carbon consumption is taken seriously, all sorts of other unsettling results follow. Take the great carbon villain of the piece, the US and especially Trump. The simple mantra that the Europeans are the good guys and the US the bad guys is not quite as black-and-white as it seems. The US has a thriving, energy-intensive manufacturing base. As cheap shale gas has come on-stream, it is not only switching from coal to gas, but it is also reshoring lots of energy-intensive businesses from China and elsewhere, and attracting European investments too. It is swapping energy-intensive imports, based largely on coal, for domestic production based on gas. It is sobering to reflect that the US could even have a better record than Europe on carbon consumption, and without any of the European policies and their costs. Higher European energy costs to pay for the renewables may actually have contributed to the European companies switching their investments to the US.
Looked at this way, the European and UK approaches, and all the excitement about net zero carbon production targets, are a lot less convincing as a solution to global warming. A genuine net zero policy on a unilateral basis makes sense only if it is net zero carbon consumption, and hence applies the carbon policies and prices to imports as well as to home production. But this means higher bills, and a correspondingly lower standard of living. All that imported stuff in your carbon diary would be more expensive.
Looking through the carbon consumption lens helps to explain why so little has been achieved since 1990 (and why the Covid-19 lockdowns had such a big impact). Emissions know no boundaries, and the problem can be cracked only if everyone does their bit. The search for a global treaty is a noble effort to solve the classic collective action problem, but so far it has produced nothing by way of actual reductions in emissions.
Only the Europeans have been in the serious business of Kyoto and the efforts of the last 30 wasted years. They tried to set an example by starting to decarbonise their domestic production. By ignoring carbon consumption, the efforts have been largely in vain. If this poor outcome had been achieved at low cost, if it had created new global European renewables giants, and if it had avoided causing collateral economic damage, this might not matter too much.
Europe failed on all three counts. All the world’s great renewables companies are outside Europe. Many of those wind turbines in the North Sea and those solar panels harvesting the sunshine in Germany have come from China. China had a massive export market created for it and paid for by the European consumers and producers, and as these extra European energy costs drove down European industrial competitiveness, China’s export market to Europe for energy-intensive goods grew.
You might think that, notwithstanding this failure to date, it is only a matter of time before these shiny new renewables are going to come to the rescue and solve our climate change problems. Aren’t renewables already grid-competitive against the fossil fuels, so won’t everyone, including the Chinese and the Americans, be switching from fossil fuels anyway to remain cost-competitive against the Europeans?
Sadly, none of this is true. Current renewables, once all the costs have been properly taken into account, are not cost-competitive with the fossil fuels (and prices). Nor is nuclear. Worse, they are not going to be anytime soon. As fast as renewables costs are falling, so too are fossil fuel costs (and prices), and although there is great and welcome progress in getting the costs of renewables down, they will require subsidies for some time to come. If you believed the lobbying, and believed that renewables are already grid-competitive, then you would be witnessing demonstrations outside parliament demanding an end to renewables subsidies. Sadly, the cheap renewables cavalry is not about to turn up. Getting out of fossil fuels is going to be a lot harder and needs more subsidies, not fewer. There is no free lunch here.
The carbon consumption lens not only tells us why the efforts so far have been such an utter failure, but what needs to be done if we really want to tackle climate change, and have a stab at holding to 2°C warming. Consumption starts with us, at home. Instead of relying on the regular cycle of the annual UN COP, on Paris and its successors, we can start from the bottom up. We don’t have to wait: we can unilaterally decide that we want to at least ensure that we no longer cause further climate change.
This means adopting a net zero carbon consumption target. Thinking back to your carbon diary, you will immediately realise that this is altogether more radical. It must include eliminating not only the carbon in the stuff made at home, but for imports too. That will hit your standard of living much harder, but it is what is necessary to get onto a sustainable economic growth path, underpinned by sustainable consumption. We are living beyond our climate means, and we have to reduce our carbon-based consumption, and only then can the contribution of ideas and new technologies put us on a stable growth path.
How do we do this? How do we design a sustainable economy? There are three key principles: the polluter pays; the provision of public goods; and net environmental gain. They are all good 101 economics and a sustainable economy needs to implement all three of them.
Of these, the polluter-pays principle is the most important. Carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions are all examples of pollution costs that should be incorporated into the economy, not ignored. Pollution has to be costed and these costs have to be integrated into every decision made by businesses and consumers. Making polluters pay is just good economics. To leave these costs out is inefficient.
Now another radical implication. If pollution costs are built into the economy, then the prices of all the carbon-intensive stuff in your carbon diary are going to go up, and some by quite a lot. That is why you will be worse off. You and I, the ultimate polluters, will have to pay the price of our carbon-intensive lifestyles. Less-carbon-intensive goods and services will now be relatively cheap and, over time, as we strive to get to a net zero personal carbon budget, we will do a lot of switching.
Reflecting this carbon cost in the prices means there must be a carbon price at the border for imports, as well as for domestically produced stuff. Put simply, there is no point in pricing pollution at home, only to ignore it for imports. That is how we got to the mess we are in, and encouraged offshoring the carbon pollution and closing down energy-intensive businesses in the UK and Europe. The only way to unilaterally tackle climate change, bottom up, is to have a carbon price that applies to all the various sorts of consumption. There has to be a carbon border tax.
The second principle is the provision of public goods. When it comes to climate change there needs to be low-carbon infrastructures that are fit for purpose. Climate change won’t be addressed unless the transport, energy and fibre networks are designed for the sustainable low-carbon economy. This means full fibre and quickly to serve the emerging digital and electric economy. It means road and rail systems that embed smart charging and regional travel, and less aviation. It means decentralised smart energy networks and systems that incorporate storage and an active demand side.
Ironically, the good news is that the UK and many developed economies have infrastructures that are in very poor shape and need a major upgrade anyway. These new infrastructures will need to cope with the new technologies to make the transition to the low-carbon economy because the existing ones are not going to be able to do the job on their own.
Current wind turbines, current solar panels and current nuclear power stations are not enough. The first two are low-density, disaggregated generators, and the latter, in their current form, are expensive and hard to build. New technologies do not arise spontaneously. The good news is that R&D is comparatively cheap when compared with the rewards. A lot more of this vital public good is needed too.
The third principle, net environmental gain, is all about compensating for the damage caused by our consumption, and in particular dealing with the hard to avoid and hard to mitigate emissions. Net zero does not mean no emissions. It requires the residual carbon to be offset. Here is where carbon sequestration comes in. Some of this will be carbon capture and storage (CCS), but the real opportunity here is for natural carbon sequestration, the stuff nature does for us for free all the time.
These three principles, which underpin a sustainable economy and sustainable economic growth, have to be comprehensively applied. There needs to be a common carbon price across the whole economy and for imports; the infrastructures need to be economy-wide; and compensating for environmental damage should be required where and whenever damage is done.
Their application will have the biggest climate impacts on the three main polluting sectors – agriculture, transport and electricity. There is good news here too. There are practical measures that can and should be taken now on the path to net zero carbon consumption. Agriculture should be sequestrating carbon, not emitting it. Carbon in the soils is good for productivity and good for biodiversity. Soils, which hold four times the carbon of the atmosphere, should be husbanded, not depleted. Trees not only mop up carbon, but provide multiple other benefits, from biodiversity, water quality and flood prevention, to mental and physical health benefits. Peat bogs are fantastically valuable carbon stores, and restoration makes them even better.
A transport revolution is in the making. The internal combustion engine has to go. Electric cars are coming, and in due course they may be autonomous. Smart charging is also coming. Long-distance railways have the chance to displace aviation, at least regionally. Hydrogen via electrolysis offers the opportunity to do something about the gross pollution of shipping. All of these will improve our air quality too.
Transport and agriculture will be increasingly underpinned by electricity (even the hydrogen will be made from it). The future is electric, because the future is digital and everything digital is electric. The future is also electric because it is hard to envisage any other energy vector to get us to net zero. The good news is that, of all these sectors, electricity is probably the easiest to decarbonise. It will need new technologies, but right now just getting out of coal would be the single most important step towards decarbonising our world. Coal is really evil stuff, and the benefits of getting out of it globally go way beyond climate change. New solar technologies are coming, greatly increasing the efficiency with which we can capture the infinite supply of solar energy. There is no shortage of energy. Energy demand per se is not the problem. It is carbon-based electricity generation, carbon-based transport and carbon-based agriculture that are the problems.
Close in on carbon consumption and make us, the polluters, pay. Reorient our climate strategies and policies to the bottom up, and not the top-down world of Kyoto and Paris and the great jamborees that climate conferences have become. Jaw-jaw, yes, but don’t expect it to crack the problem. Price pollution. Apply a carbon price to imports, both domestically and at the border. Invest in the twenty-first-century infrastructures to facilitate a low-carbon economy, and invest too in R&D to bring on the new technologies we are going to need.
Stop pretending and recognise the brutal facts about what has been going on for the last 30 years and why it has been such an abject failure. It is realism, not spin and fake optimism about progress and costs, that we need. Only then can we get going on what will work. Focus on the natural environment and especially on natural sequestration. Bring the trees, the soils, the peat and the marine world into the carbon play. Agriculture should be centre-stage, not an add-on held at bay by farmers lobbying for subsidies.
Do all these things and we can have a better natural environment, lead healthier lives, empower ourselves to do something, and make sure we really do leave better natural capital for the next generation. This is what sustainable economic growth is all about: it can be a green and prosperous land, but not if we go on as we are.
You may conclude that this is all unrealistic, that it is never going to happen, because we will not vote for politicians and political parties who can make it happen. You may be right, but then you would have to resign yourself to the conclusion that would follow – that climate change is not going to be addressed. What is set out here is what would have to happen to crack the problem. It calls for a different economic model, and a fundamental rethink of our consumption, of our environmental footprint. This book sets out how to do it – a plan that could and would actually work. Do this, and a country can be sure not only that it makes no further contribution to global warming, but also that it has embraced sustainable economic growth and has not harmed other aspects of the environment in the process. It would then be an exemplar for the world.
Sticking our heads in the sand, as we have been for the last 30 years, will not make climate change go away. Tackling it will seriously impact on our standard of living. We may think we have a choice, but we don’t if we care about future generations.
1
NO PROGRESS
Thirty years ago, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the UN which summarised the science as it was then understood and highlighted the need for global action to address the great ‘new’ climate change problem.[1] This speech is about as green as it gets for a politician. Although a great deal of subsequent research has refined that science and our understanding of the immense and subtle complexity of our climate, the main planks of the analysis were already in place back then, and they have remained remarkably robust ever since. The greenhouse effect is a bit of nineteenth-century science. The increase in greenhouse gases was already documented, and the step from increases in emissions to high temperatures was a simple and obvious one to make. By 1990, nobody could reasonably claim that they did not understand what climate change was and why it mattered. The failure to act has flown in the face of the knowledge of what that failure will mean for future generations.