On 27 June 2019, the UK Parliament’s legal commitment that all Greenhouse Gas ‘GHG’ emissions should be reduced to net zero by 2050 came into force.
What that actually means, how we are going to achieve these goals, the way in which they will involve the whole of society, and the need for society to be prepared for, and involved in, fundamental changes, are yet to be fully worked out. Political parties have sparred during the election about dates and levels of spending required, but there is far more to do.
Reports on the changes needed to physical infrastructure such as the engineering firm Atkins’ ‘Engineering Net Zero’ point out that it will require a combination of new nuclear power, major increases in renewable energy such as offshore wind, the large scale deployment of Carbon Capture and Storage to Combined Cycle Gas Turbine generation, large scale deployment of a Hydrogen economy, the replacement of petrol and diesel cars, the replacement of domestic oil and gas boilers. For those of us who have worked on past programmes to promote Carbon Capture and Storage and the Hydrogen economy, it is bittersweet to note the opportunities missed in the recent past to make faster progress in those areas.
Climate science is not so much knocking on the door, as hammering at the gate. The World Meteorological Organisation reported on 25 November 2019 that globally averaged concentrations of Carbon Dioxide reached 407.8 parts per million in 2018. WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas noted that -
“There is no sign of a slowdown, let alone a decline, in greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere, despite all the commitments under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. We need to translate the commitments into action and increase the level of ambition for the sake of the future welfare of mankind. It is worth recalling that the last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3-5 million years ago. Back then, the temperature was 2-3 degrees warmer, sea level was 10-20 metres higher than now.”
The UN Environment Programme’s ‘UNEP Emissions Gap Report’ published the next day on 26 November 2019 stated that GHG emissions rose at a rate of 1.5% per year in the last decade. Fossil CO2 emissions from energy use and industry rose 2% in 2018. There was no sign of GHG emissions peaking in the next few years. The longer that such peaking was postponed, the deeper and more drastic the cuts required by 2030 to meet 1.5 degrees C and 2 degrees C targets. The report concludes that dramatic strengthening of countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions ‘NDCs’ made under the Paris Agreement is needed in 2020. Countries must increase their NDC ambitions threefold to achieve well below the 2% goal, and more than fivefold to achieve the 1.5% goal.
That is the task facing the UN Conference of the Parties ‘COP’ 25 in Madrid on 2-13 December 2019, and the 30,000 delegates and 200 world leaders attending COP 26 in Glasgow in November 2020, when the UK and Italy will co-host the next Conference of Parties.
While the challenges may seem overwhelming, the determination to meet them is increasing. On 28 November 2019, the European Parliament declared a climate emergency, and called on the new European Commission to ensure that all legislative and budgetary proposals were aligned with the objective of limiting global warming to under 1.5 degrees C.
At the launch of ‘Cambridge Zero’ on 26 November 2019 by the University of Cambridge, Vice Chancellor Professor Stephen J. Toope issued a call to arms, in dedicating the entire resources of the university to researching and delivering answers to these challenges. It was a reminder that every single discipline, law, arts, humanities, economics and finance, the sciences, can contribute to the common goal, and that is the scale of societal change that is needed.
William Wilson
1 December 2019
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