The Climate and Nature Bill

By Paul Homewood

Time for a closer look at the Climate and Nature Bill, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago:

https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3707

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Just to recap, this Private Members’ Bill aims to lay down statutory obligations to reduce UK emissions in line with the “1.5C” objective , supposedly agreed at Paris in 2015. In particular, it would also mandate that all consumption emissions are included in the provisions, not just territorial ones. This would mean that imported emissions along with shipping and aviation have to be counted in our carbon budget allowances.

The Bill deliberately avoids specific numbers for emission targets; as it points out, what matters is cumulative emissions, not annual targets. But the Bill’s campaign group, Zero Hour, make it clear that UK emissions would quickly have to fall to a tiny fraction of what they are now.

And they also reveal that territorial emissions, the only ones counted in our Carbon Budgets at the moment, account for little more than a half of total emissions:

https://www.zerohour.uk/

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We can, however, flesh out some of the numbers.

Zero Hour, for instance, reckon that our projected carbon footprint for 2020 to 2050 is more than double the 1.5C based target:

https://zerohour.uk/downloads/ambition-gap.pdf

In total emissions terms, 49 tonnes per capita equals about 3381 tonnes, and 110 tonnes equals 7590 tonnes, both over the full 30 year period. The former works out at just 112 tonnes a year on average.

We don’t have the latest official data for imported emissions, but Zero Hour believe UK total emissions are probably around 800 Mt. At that rate, our total allowance would be more than used up between now and 2030!

The official Fifth Carbon Budget, which covers the years 2028-32, is set at 345 Mt a year, while the Sixth from 2033-37 goes down to an annual figure of 193 Mt. Remember that neither of these include imported emissions.

It is therefore glaringly obvious that both those budgets will have to be slashed to near zero, if the Bill is passed into law. This quite simply would be impossible in such a short time scale. Even Miliband has been forced to accept that we will still need gas power for the next decade or more. Homeowners will still need to heat their houses with gas and there will still be millions of cars, lorries and buses on the road using petrol and diesel.

Zero Hour say that the Fifth Carbon Budget is already 36% too high for the 1.5C target – in other words it must drop to 254 Mt a year, less than a third of current total emissions. This is plainly not achievable in the space of just five years.

Given the sheer impossibility of reducing territorial emissions to such a degree in the next ten years, the axe would have to fall on imports. There would have to be a virtual ban on all imported goods and food, and even that would get us nowhere near mandated targets.

So what would such a ban look like?

Food

Let’s start with food.

The UK produces about 54% of its food consumption, with imports amounting to £21 billion last year. Imported food would have to be one of the priorities of an emissions mandate, given that our total consumption of food accounts for a third of UK emissions.

Quite how would manage to feed ourselves with half of our food supply gone does not seem to have occurred to the authors of the Bill. According to Zero Hour, we would have to survive on “low carbon fruit, veg, nuts, pulses and grains”!

No doubt a lot of what we eat is not exactly nutritious, but I don’t think the public would welcome a return to Second World War style rationing, which would be necessary.

Given that the UK livestock industry would have to be shutdown too, and arable farming decimated by the inevitable ban on fertilisers, both in the pursuit of Net Zero, people will literally starve to death.

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Imported Goods

In 2023, the UK imported £581 billion worth of goods, including these key sectors:

Imports of cars will, of course, be a non starter, given their carbon footprint. Even European made ones will still be built with high carbon footprint steel, plastics and rubber along with batteries made in China. Equally of course, UK made cars will rely on imported steel, as our steelworks will no longer be able to supply a high enough quality. They already rely on imports of many components. As a result the UK motor industry would quickly collapse.

We will become a modern day Cuba, with thirty year old cars clogging up the roads.

Then there’s important stuff like electrical equipment, industrial machinery, computers, specialist metals and so on. We tend to import much of this because we don’t have the specialised expertise and equipment necessary. In a sane world, countries import what they cannot make as well themselves, and specialise in what they are good at instead.

Without access to the best equipment and technology, the UK economy would quickly go downhill.

In addition, raw materials, though less visible, are also of vital importance – chemicals for example. The Bill demands that the production and import of fossil fuels be ended “as rapidly as possible”, which begs the question of how we will make all of things that are a part of everyday life, but which need fossil fuels for their manufacture.

Forget the idea that Europe might become miraculously carbon free any time soon, and that we could import from them. Most of their steel will still come from blast furnace iron, gas and coal power will still be significant, and the continent will carry on importing much of what it needs from Asia.

But what about the UK manufacturing all the things we currently import?

Zero Hour blithely talk about “new jobs in the low carbon economy”. But you cannot simply set up whole new industries at the flick of a switch.

How, for instance, will we be able to build the factories needed without access to cement (too carbon intensive) or steel? And where will we get the machinery to fill them with, given that we cannot import it and do not have the manufacturing capacity ourselves? Then there are all of the diggers, bulldozers, dumper trucks and other construction equipment needed, all running on diesel.

We would also need the appropriate expertise and skilled labour, which we probably don’t have now.

Perhaps the biggest irony is that Ed Miliband would not be able to import solar panels from China, or components for his beloved wind farms.

It is crazy, but also frightening, that 192 MPs actually plan to vote for this Bill.