We deserve the truth about how the UK will achieve net zero carbon, not more of Boris Johnson’s bluster

The climate column: The public is being misled about the prime minister’s commitment to tackling the climate crisis

The UK government, according to its own advisers, is failing on 17 out of 21 indicators on progress to achieving net-zero carbon by 2050.  This was the key finding in the annual progress report submitted by the Climate Change Committee to parliament in June.  Four months later, on 15 October, Boris Johnson’s government quietly released its response.  But the public is being misled about its commitment, with its endless announcements of cash to be invested in the green economy.

The problem is that usually the sums are either a fraction of what is required, a de-facto cut from what had been previously announced, or are simply the fourth press release announcing the same cash investment. It’s similar to tricks Johnson honed during his time as Mayor of London. He was constantly re-announcing the investment of £1bn in new London cycleways. It sounded impressive. But in the small print, Johnson had added up proposed investments over 10 years to arrive at the figure and he only actually spent a tiny 1 per cent of the annual TfL budget on cycling.

The government’s response to the CCC is full of Johnson’s usual propaganda tricks. One would need an encyclopaedic knowledge to be able to distill the truth from the government’s official response to its failures on the key climate indicators.

Take the gushing Johnson promise to enable every household to be powered with wind energy by 2030 by promising £160m to be invested in offshore wind. But £160m buys only about seventeen 14MW offshore turbines, a tiny fraction of the thousands needed to decarbonise UK heating and transport.  

The report does the same with national cycling infrastructure where it says it is investing £2bn. It boasts that this will enable up to 50 per cent of local trips in our cities and towns to be taken by cycling and walking by 2030. But they again added up five years of investments, which leaves only £0.4bn per year. This is a miserable sliver of the £6bn a year the UN says we should be spending on active travel to get to zero transport emissions. They naturally did not mention the £27bn the government announced for new roads. 

They also boast about the £2bn to be invested in home energy efficiency as part of a one-off Covid-19 response. But they do not note that it does not even compensate for the billions they cut from home energy efficiency since 2015 or match the £9bn promised in the Tory manifesto. This left millions cruelly languishing in fuel poverty. Thousands of Britons suffer premature deaths every winter as a result. An estimated £250bn is needed to bring our housing up to zero emission standards.  

The government points out that it has laudably doubled its contribution to the International Climate Finance initiative. This was set up by the Paris Climate Summit to fund green energy and climate adaptation in poorer countries. It also boasts about ending government support for UK corporations seeking to invest in foreign coal projects. But again it does not mention the billions that the UK government, high-street banks and oil corporations are pouring into new fossil fuel infrastructure around the world. The UK banks alone were projected pre-Covid to be investing on average £75bn into new projects per year up to 2030.  

The response made no mention of the billions the government has been pouring into Argentinian fracking, Brazilian offshore oil fields and Ghanaian gas projects. These were estimated to emit up to 69 million tons of CO2 per annum. This is more than the entire UK electricity grid, but do not appear on the CCC UK carbon emissions budget.

But the cleverest deceit was how it dealt with the CCC’s headline finding that it was failing on 17 out of 21 indicators. It simply deleted all mention of the failed indicators in its response. The failure on the 17 indicators was buried in a classic “Yes, Minister” style sentence saying, “We have heard the strong message from the CCC that progress has been greater in some areas than others”.  

They then added: “We have taken huge strides in bringing forward ambitious net zero policies across all sectors of the economy.” Note the obfuscatory use of the word “policies” rather than “actions”.

This puts the CCC in a difficult position. The government’s response to its report is clearly a farce, but one the CCC cannot point out. The CCC now has to produce the next UK carbon budget by December. It is crucial that this outlines the actual financial investments needed over the coming five years, so that the public can compare what is being invested to what the emergency demands we should spend.  

It must include all foreign fossil fuel investments by UK corporations in the UK’s carbon reduction budget and lay out the crucial role the Bank of England needs to play by immediately regulating to end fossil fuel investments by the high street banks.  

It is time Johnson’s Trumpian bluster on climate inaction was exposed. The public deserves the actual truth so they can pressure him to take the depth of action necessary.