Helm Talks - energy climate infrastructure & more

The new EU climate change package sets the pace for others to try to match in the run-up to COP26. It has a central architecture, built around carbon pricing. The two key components are the widening of the scope of the EUETS to bring in other sectors, and the carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM). After a shaky start to carbon pricing, the EU has now made it the central game in town, gradually...

With just 29 years to go to the 2050 target date, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has done a great service in making a stab at the scale of the changes needed to tackle climate change. Assuming an 8% fall in global energy demand, and 2 billion more people, it projects a fall in the use of fossil fuels, from 80% of world energy to just 20%, including the almost complete eradication of coal, a...

We are not short of ambitious carbon targets. We have a 78% reduction target for 2035 – just 14 years away – and 100% by 2050. So far, the focus has been on low-carbon electricity generation and electric cars. Heating has been the missing and much harder part – huge amounts of energy, very seasonal and mostly gas. There are options: heat pumps, some hydrogen, municipal heating schemes and so on. W...

Post BREXIT, the first trade deal has been deliberately designed to put grit in the wheels of trade with the EU. Now comes India and Australia and the US looms, all part of the new Global Britain. As with almost all trade deals, agriculture tends to be a big issue despite its relatively small part of the economy – just 0.6% of UK GDP. Much of it is simply uncompetitive. Sheep farming in the hills...

It is simply not good enough to reduce terrestrial carbon production emissions to net zero by 2050 on a unilateralist basis, and to expect that this means we stop causing climate change. It doesn’t. It could even make matters worse – the quickest way to get carbon territorial emissions down in the UK would be to complete the closure of the steel industry, the remaining oil refineries, the car indu...

The hype around COP26 is getting out of hand. The excitement is palpable - the US and China, and then the other world’s leaders are all, if one believes the spin, going to come up with targets that add up to 2˚C maximum global warming. It will be a triumph for Boris Johnson. We have been here before, at Kyoto, Copenhagen, Durban and Paris. What happened? The concentration of carbon in the atmosphe...

Is economic growth possible? Is it even desirable? Lots of environmentalists think we have to get off the growth conveyor belt, seeing it as a road to environmental ruin. They see limited natural resources coming up against unbridled consumption, and think it will all end badly. They have a point: consumption is unsustainably high, and we are living beyond our environmental means. But two differen...

Carbon offsets are all the rage. As companies declare their net zero targets, they are reaching for offsets to make the numbers add up. Landowners see carbon farming as a new revenue driver. The missing bit is any serious attempt to do the valuations properly, and to avoid greenwashing and all the reputational damage it could cause. The key steps to valuation are: establishing a natural capital ba...

The government has been kite-flying proposals for beef and dairy carbon taxes - to signal to environmentalists that it is “on their side” and to see how big the lobbyists’ backlash will be. The Climate Change Committee says we should eat less meat, and hence what better way to do this than put a carbon tax on it? The National Farmers' Union (NFU) counters that any such tax must first be internatio...

Once upon a time, developers applied for planning permission and they either got it or not. Now they have to deliver Net Biodiversity Gain, a very limited application of the polluter-pays principle. They should have to show Net Carbon Gain, compensating for the carbon emissions caused by building works and by the buildings. That way, there is some chance that building 300,000 houses a year could b...

Boris Johnson, like David Cameron, has started out talking the green talk. Standards here in the UK, post the BREXIT transition, are going to be higher. Net zero is embraced wholeheartedly. But one month into the brave new world, how is it going? There are some straws in the wind: the decision to allow the use of neonics, and ensure that no flowers blossom for a considerable period afterwards; not...

At the end of 2020 the government and the Climate Change Committee produced a blitz of documents. We had the Ten Point Plan, the National Infrastructure Strategy, the Energy White Paper and the Treasury’s interim report on its Net Zero Review. Thousands of pages. But what do they tell us? Are they good answers to the challenge of our unilateral net zero target? Is the strategy coherent and cost-ef...

The Climate Change Committee, in its 6th Carbon Budget, tells us that the answer is not very much, if anything, once fuel savings are taken into account. Is this really true? Could the conversion of our entire economy – energy, transport, heating and agriculture – be switched from a carbon-intensive one to zero within just 30 years at little or no cost? If it is true then we can look forward to th...

In the UK and the EU, grand Ten Point and Green Recovery Plans are all the rage. In the UK, everything adds up to 10; in the EU it was 20, with its "20/20/20 Climate and Energy Package". They tend to be popular, especially if every technology and lobby gets a prize. There are some advances: this time in the UK, “nature” makes an entry at no. 9 in the latest equivalent of the pop charts. The intere...

In November 2021, world leaders will gather in Glasgow to try once again to crack climate change. It is a formidable task: none of the previous agreements, including Paris in 2016, has made any difference to the march upwards of the carbon concentration in the atmosphere - 2 parts per million every year since 1990. After the 30 wasted years I describe in my book, Net Zero, why would anyone expect...

The big focus in the net zero debates so far has been on emissions – in particular emissions from coal- and gas-fired power stations, and from vehicles, aviation and shipping. That really matters, but it is only half the story: the carbon in the atmosphere is the balance of emissions and the sequestration of carbon by nature – by trees, grasses, vegetation, salt marches, and the oceans. By burning...

To meet the net zero target by 2050 a carbon price is a necessary (but not sufficient) part of the decarbonising policy architecture. Its time is coming: after the transition ends with the EU, from 1st January 2021, the UK will have its own carbon pricing mechanisms. This podcast explains why a carbon tax is better than shadowing the EU ETS or inventing a new UK ETS. It tackles the carbon border a...