If the scenes from Siberia, Greece, Canada, Germany and elsewhere haven’t acted as a wake-up call for the world’s leaders, I don’t know what will. As the IPCC report makes clear, man-made global heating is an undeniable fact.
This is something I have stated myself in Parliament several years ago now, before XR had come into being. You can watch my speech herI believe (and have said for many years, including long before I became an MP) that climate change and antibiotic resistance are the two greatest threats to humanity. That's why I introduced, as Cheltenham's MP, a Bill to Parliament which legally committed the UK to reach Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050. I chose that date because that was the timeline provided by the IPCC in 2018 as necessary to keep to the Paris climate target of 1.5 degree heating. I was grateful to the Climate Coalition for judging me the winner of their ‘MP Climate Action’ award at the Green Heart Hero Awards in 2020, for being the MP who took more action than any other to tackle climate change in that year.
On the question on what we are doing right now to make a difference, I would mention the following:
1. The UK has reduced GHG emissions faster than any other G7 country – cutting them by around 45% on 1990 levels
2. Our country is removing dirty, polluting coal from the energy mix by 2025 – at a time when other European countries continue to rely heavily on coal for thermal power stations
3. We set the world’s most ambitious climate change target into law of reducing emissions by 78 per cent by 2035, compared to 1990 levels
4. We have set out a Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution lays the blueprint for how the UK can forge ahead in eradicating our contribution to climate change and achieving net zero.
The Plan referred to above is available in full on Gov.uk:https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-ten-point-plan-for-a-green-industrial-revolution. A written ministerial statement has also been published on this matterhttps://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statements/detail/2020-11- 18/hcws586if you would like to read more.
Doing my best to summarise the document, the Plan spans clean energy, buildings, transport, nature and innovative technologies. It will mobilise £12 billion of government investment to create and support up to 250,000 highly-skilled green jobs in the UK, and unlock three times as much private sector investment by 2030. The plan covers a wide range of sectors. I won’t list them all, merely mentioning by way of example that it includes a project to produce enough offshore wind to power every home, quadrupling how much we produce to 40GW by 2030, supporting up to 60,000 jobs. The Plan also includes an aim to created 5GW of low-carbon hydrogen production capacity by 2030, and we are aiming to develop the first town heated entirely by hydrogen by the end of the decade.
I would also just mention carbon capture. We plan to become a world-leader in technology to capture and store harmful emissions away from the atmosphere, with a target to remove 10MT of carbon dioxide a year by 2030, equivalent to all emissions of the industrial Humber today.
There is much more I could mention – including relating to the fundamental priority of restoring biodiversity – where much good work has been done. Using our overseas territories (e.g. Ascension Island) an area of ocean the size of France is now protected from exploitative fishing. That is actively reversing some of the damage that industrialised fishing has done to the oceans.
Our country has shown leadership on this issue. Indeed it was a British Prime Minister who was the first to use the platform of a speech at the UN to highlight the pressing threat of climate change. That was in 1989 – as I’ve indicated already, we have decarbonised faster than any other G7 country. But we can’t do this on our own. We are only responsible for 1% of global emissions. For China the figure is closer to 30%. Unless the mega-emitters (China, the US and India) raise their game, this battle will not be won. As the table below shows, our emissions per capita are lower than Canada, the US, Russia, Germany, China and Italy.
So we will need to coax, cajole and persuade other nations to follow our lead. Here at home we too will have to make tough decisions, including on the rollout of technologies to replace fossil fuel home heating systems. Avoiding those tough decisions is not an option – for us or the rest of the world.