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The relief in Boris Johnson’s face was palpable as he stood behind a lectern at Dudley Institute of Technology to unveil his much-teased plan for rebooting the UK economy in the wake of coronavirus. After more than three months of having to defend the government’s disjointed response to the pandemic in daily press conferences, the prime minister was back on his terra firma: unveiling eye-catching infrastructure projects against a backdrop of high-visibility vests and hard hats.
Johnson’s vision for this post-coronavirus uplift is less of a clean break with the past than his government might hope. Throughout the pandemic, the government has been seduced by solutionism – shiny technological fixes that promise to get us out of a tricky situation. First it was antibody tests, then a vaccine by September, then a contact tracing app that is yet to materialise. Although there is absolutely a place for technological tools in tackling health crises, the promise of a panacea can distract from the gritty work of tackling the problem at hand, and building systems that make us more resilient to crises when the next one appears.
Which brings us to Johnson’s latest set of promises. The Dudley speech outlines a set of new infrastructure projects that the government hopes will propel the country back to prosperity. The list includes £1.5 billion for hospital maintenance and building, £100 million for new road projects, £1bn for schools and a further £1.5bn refurbishing further education buildings. So far so good. (Although those numbers might not be as impressive as they sound).
But the world is facing dual crises: coronavirus and climate change. For months, climate groups have urged the government to use the post-lockdown comeback as an opportunity to refocus the economy towards low-carbon jobs, sustainable housing and clean energy. A so-called green recovery. “We will build better and build greener, but we will also build faster,” Johnson said. Yet, when it comes to a green recovery, Johnson has once again gone for solutionism over substance.
In a speech littered with technological optimism but devoid of meaningful environmental policies, the prime minister seems convinced that the UK can innovate its way out of the climate crisis. “We should set ourselves the goal now of producing the world’s first zero emission long haul passenger,” he said, christening the effort “jet zero”.
Yet zero-carbon passenger planes are still many decades away, if they are viable at all. In 2021, Airbus was due to fly a plane that included one engine that had been swapped out for an electric motor, but this effort was quietly shelved in April and the plane will never see its maiden flight. Right now, we simply don’t have batteries small enough to even consider for powering a passenger plane, so any emission reductions from a power perspective are likely to involve biofuels which currently account for just 0.01 per cent of all aviation fuel used today.
The coronavirus pandemic has already shown us what might be the only realistic hope for reducing aviation emissions in the medium term: flying less. Before the pandemic set in, emissions from aviation had been steadily rising year-on-year and as other industries decarbonise the sector could end up using as much as 27 per cent of the carbon budget remaining for us to stay under 1.5C of heating, according to a 2016 analysis from Carbon Brief. Instead of pinning our hopes on zero-carbon planes that may or may not be possible by 2050, we might instead focus on high-speed rail and electric car infrastructure that can reduce our emissions from travel today.
Elsewhere, Johnson’s speech is sprinkled with references to technologies that will save us from the climate crisis. “We in this country have the knack of innovation,” Johnson continued. “We lead the world in [...] the long term solutions to global warming: wind, solar, hydrogen technology, carbon capture and storage, nuclear.”
Things don’t quite stack up here either. Is the UK really a leader in nuclear energy? At the moment nuclear energy makes up around 20 per cent of the UK’s electricity production, but by the early 2030s just one of the UK’s seven nuclear power stations will still be operational, while plans to construct three more stations have already been shelved. Only one new reactor, Hinkley Point C, is due to come online over this time.
While the UK’s electricity production is becoming less carbon-intensive on the whole, some energy experts fear that without new nuclear reactors the country will be short on stable, low-carbon power. And as for carbon capture and storage, as Adam Vaughan at New Scientist has noted, the technology is still seldom used outside of a few small pilot projects including at the Drax power plant in North Yorkshire.
Although plans for 4,000 zero carbon buses and new cycleways are a positive step forward, Johnson’s speech offered very little that would achieve the dual aims of creating new low-carbon jobs and reducing the country’s carbon footprint. It was a speech that was big on headline-grabbing promises, but offered precious little in terms of progress.
The speech made no mention of plans to insulate homes, which was a £9.2bn pledge in the Conservative manifesto. In its 2020 progress report, the Committee on Climate Change noted that action on buildings – which made up 18 per cent of 2019 emissions – has been inadequate. Since the Climate Change Act was passed in 2008, there have been nearly two million homes built that are likely to require expensive retrofits to make them zero-carbon in the future.
The speech also made no reference to taking new homes off of the gas grid, and connecting them to low-carbon forms of heating and cooling. Bringing the UK’s housing stock up to zero-carbon standards would be a huge job-creator and a boon for our climate goals, but this dull-but-necessary task didn’t make the cut for Johnson’s ‘New Deal’.
Instead, the prime minister has proposed an economic recovery that puts unproven future technologies centre stage and kicks other initiatives into the long grass. The lessons of the coronavirus crises, it seems, are yet to be learnt.
Matt Reynolds is WIRED's science editor. He tweets from @mattsreynolds1
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
