Ministers are exploring ways to increase pollution “headroom” in the years ahead.
LONDON — Britain’s making progress on slashing its carbon emissions — so now it wants to slack off a little.
Thanks in no small part to Covid, the U.K. cut emissions by more than it was legally required to in the last five year-round.
Now U.K. government officials are actively looking at “carrying forward” these surplus emissions to the next five-year budget period.
It’s an accounting trick that would effectively give the U.K. headroom to pollute more in the years ahead without breaching its own rules.
But climate experts argue it’s a bureaucratic wheeze that could further dent Britain’s global climate reputation — and fails to really factor in how the planet works.
“Cashing in ‘phantom credits’ wouldn’t change our international commitments,” said Dustin Benton, policy director at the Green Alliance think tank. “It just means we’d need to double the rate at which we cut emissions later this decade, making the job much harder.”
The idea is being actively considered inside the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, according to an official familiar with ministers’ thinking and granted anonymity to speak candidly. DESNZ has refused to rule out carrying forward the emissions.
The U.K.’s goal of cutting carbon emissions to net zero 2050 is set by carbon budgets, legally-binding targets for reducing emissions over five year blocks.
Britain overachieved on the last carbon budget, covering 2018 to 2022, by around 15 percent, according to independent watchdog the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), which said this was mostly down to external factors such as the Covid-19 pandemic.
But ministers are already off track to hit the U.K.’s big 2030 emissions reduction target, according to analysis by the same watchdog. The position would be jeopardized further if carbon budgets are weakened “on a technicality,” the CCC has said.
The CCC warned that any attempt to slacken the next budget, which will cover emissions between 2023 and 2027, poses “a very serious risk” to future green goals.
Any decision on carrying forward the surplus has to be made by the end of the month.
Asked about the situation by POLITICO last month, former Climate Minister Graham Stuart did not deny that his old colleagues were mulling plans to carry over emissions. Stuart would say only that he did not want to “reveal a decision [that] hasn’t been made yet.”
A DESNZ spokesperson said the department had “consulted the Climate Change Committee and devolved administrations before taking any decision on whether the U.K.’s over-achievement on the third carbon budget is carried over.”
A decision to carry over the surplus would fit with the government’s “new approach” to net zero, where it has signaled that cutting the financial pressure on households should take priority over hitting narrow climate targets.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak rolled back other key climate deadlines last fall, including a slower transition to new electric vehicles and delaying plans to ban off-grid oil boilers by almost a decade.
Ministers have been here before. The government said it would carry over some headroom from the second into the third carbon budget period, starting in 2019, before then-Energy Minister Chris Skidmore announced the government would not use the surplus afterall.
A second official familiar with government thinking suggested this may be where DESNZ ends up again.
Conversations between DESNZ and the Treasury to square off the plans for the next carbon budget are underway ahead of this month’s deadline, a third official said.
Treasury officials are unlikely to block any carry-over plans, according to one former Whitehall aide. Their view is likely to be: “If we have flexibility, why wouldn’t we retain it?” says Josh Buckland, a former policy advisor at the Energy Department, the Treasury, and Number 10, and now a partner at consultants Flint Global.
Whitehall also risks riling up the devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The central government in London has to consult devolved ministers in charge of carbon budgets in Edinburgh, Belfast, and Cardiff. But none can the block plans.
“They didn’t consult us, but we certainly gave our view, which was in line with the CCC that it shouldn’t be done,” Scottish Net Zero Secretary Màiri McAllan told POLITICO in an interview last month.
Northern Ireland’s Minister for Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs Andrew Muir has written to DESNZ to advise that he does “not see any need to carry forward the over-performance from the third carbon budget period.”
New Welsh Climate Secretary Huw Irranca-Davies said he had not received any correspondence from DESNZ and was still in the dark about any decision.
Potential plans to carry over surplus emissions are already spooking climate experts, however.
“If the government were to effectively slow down the U.K.’s progress in cutting emissions, questions may be asked about how this looks against a backdrop of heat records constantly being broken around the world and an extreme wet winter in the U.K. that’s left crops rotting in the fields, cutting harvests by a quarter,” said Jess Ralston, head of energy at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a non-profit working across climate issues.
She emphasized that the carbon budget “loophole” identified by officials was down to emissions cuts caused by the pandemic rather than “actual, real progress in decarbonizing the economy.”
“The U.K. built up a huge amount of diplomatic respect in tackling climate change, giving it leverage over the ambition levels of other countries — but that influence is rapidly being squandered,” Ralston added.
Additional reporting by Charlie Cooper and Russell Hargrave.
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