Jeremy Corbyn packed a lot into his closing speech at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool earlier this week. He attempted to draw a line under the antisemitism crisis that hogged headlines for much of the summer, opened up the possibility that he would support a workable Brexit deal under May, and pledged to roll back “greed-is-good” capitalism in the UK.
But it was when it came to the environment that Corbyn made some of his boldest claims. If Labour came to power, Corbyn pledged, his party would reduce net carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2030, and, by 2050, it would make the UK a completely carbon-neutral country. Bhutan, a country that is 72 per cent forest and has a population of just 798,000, is currently the only nation that can lay a claim to the carbon-neutral crown.
Corbyn set out a series of ambitious plans, focused on making sure that 60 per cent of the UK’s electricity and heating energy comes from renewable sources by 2030. To get there, Labour plans on shaking up the energy sector, ultimately creating 400,000 new skilled jobs through investment in wind farms, solar panels, and schemes to make homes more energy efficient.
Although we’ve still got a long way to go, the UK has been doing a relatively good job at reducing its carbon output, says Paul McNamee, head of politics at Green Alliance, an environmental policy think tank. As part of the 2008 Climate Change Act, the UK has five-yearly carbon budgets to make sure overall carbon emissions are reduced to at least 80 per cent of their 1990 levels by 2050.
The UK has already met the first two of its carbon budgets, covering the years from 2008 to 2017, but meeting the third, fourth and fifth budgets may prove trickier. “Basically all our success so far have been through energy. That's where we've managed to reduce the carbon – most of that has been through the phase-out of coal,” says McNamee. “That's done all the heavy lifting for our carbon reduction.”
Despite this progress, there have been some sticking points that have held back the transition to renewable energy. In 2015, the then Energy Secretary Amber Rudd ended government subsidies for new onshore wind farms and gave local authorities the responsibility for giving the go-ahead to new developments. “This effectively imposed a moratorium on onshore [wind farms], despite the fact that it's actually the cheapest form of renewable energy,” say Caterina Brandmayr, a policy analyst at Green Alliance.
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Labour’s interim report on its new environmental plans, published this September, outlines the party’s attempt to restart the UK onshore wind industry. If it got into power early next year – whixh is far from certain, given that no election is scheduled until May 2022 – the party would double the UK’s installed onshore wind capacity. This, the report argues, would create 60,000 jobs and end up powering five million homes. The report also projects an extra 120,000 jobs in offshore wind, 70,000 in solar power and 160,000 in making sure homes are more energy efficient.
And investing in renewable energy might help close the productivity gap between the north and south of the UK. “Investing in sectors that can drive the low-carbon transition is a way to future-proof those jobs,” says Brandmayr. And since renewable energy is relatively cheap, switching to greener energy may well help manufacturers cut down the amount they spend on energy and allow businesses to grow or increase their wages.
But, McNamee says, there are other areas that Labour’s report overlooks. The interim report details Labour’s plans for offshore and onshore wind, solar energy and making homes more energy efficient, but it doesn’t have much to say when it comes to electric vehicles or land use – both of which make very significant contributions to the UK’s carbon budget. “If we're talking about 2030, and beyond that to 2050, we need to start bringing these other policy areas in,” says McNamee.
Chief of these is electric vehicles. Labour’s interim report doesn’t set out a stance on petrol and diesel vehicles, which are some of the biggest contributors to our carbon emissions. The government has already set out plans to ban the sale of new diesel and petrol cars from 2040, but Brandmayr says this goes nowhere near far enough. “2040 seems so far down the line that it doesn't really set an incentive for electric vehicle manufacturers to set up camp in the UK,” she says. Norway has already set a far more ambitious target of 2025.
There are also a few more lessons we can learn from other countries own attempts to kickstart the so-called green economy, says Brandmayr. Government procurement – the goods and services bought by the government – can encourage manufacturers to make more eco-friendly products. In the US, in 1994, manufacturers were encouraged to develop CFC-free refrigerators in order to secure government contracts. A similar scheme in Sweden was used to drive innovation in low-carbon construction.
Looking to cities, too, provides some hints about the kind of renewable future the UK could head towards. In San Francisco, all new buildings below ten stories must be built with solar panels in their roofs. In Toronto, a city bylaw passed in 2009 requires the installation of green roofs on new commercial and multifamily residential developments in the city.
In Germany, a subsidy for in-home batteries keeps down the cost of energy storage, while in California smart charging helps even out the energy demand from electric vehicles, Brandmayr says.
It’s these more mundane-sound projects – as well as the big, headline-catching renewable energy targets – that Corbyn will need to start pulling off if his green economy is to truly get off of the ground.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
