Ministers ‘wilfully ignoring’ public’s role in net zero

The government is afraid to broach the role of behavior change in the decarbonisation journey because of the risk of sparking a “culture war”, according to the head of the Climate Change Committee (CCC).

At Utility Week Live Chris Stark shared his frustration that the government was “completely unwilling” to engage with demand-side solutions and accused it of ducking the issue in recent policy papers.

He shared his fear of a lull in action on net zero before the next election and called for a cross-party consensus on the big calls for the energy transition, such as the future role of hydrogen.

The CCC chief executive also said he expected unabated gas to continue to play a role in the energy system beyond 2035, saying “that’s what an operable system looks like – we can manage those emissions elsewhere”.

Stark was giving the opening keynote address at Utility Week Live in Birmingham on Tuesday (16 May), in which he also called for minimum resilience standards for all utilities.

Addressing the demand-side approach to climate change resilience he said: “My great frustration is that we have a government at the moment that is completely unwilling to talk about this. They are wilfully ignoring it.

“You see that in the approach to transport. Last time they produced a Net Zero Strategy they said quite a lot about transport. This time they’ve been forced by the courts to publish more detail on what they’re actually planning to do on transport and they walked away from all that because it’s culture wars. You see the same thing in diet, aviation etc. That makes everything harder and I also don’t think it’s where people are.”

He addressed the inevitable impact climate change is going to have on infrastructure, citing projections that sea levels could rise by up to 50cm under the scenario of a 2⁰C  rise by the end of the century. Echoing predictions by the World Meteorological Organisation on Wednesday, Stark said the “1.5⁰C that was talked about at COP and that our leaders still talk about is still on the table but it’s mostly living in models now”.

He added: “What is certain is that utilities will have to adapt to climate change. Are we prepared for that? Bluntly, we’re not.”

Increasing the supply of public water is “absolutely vital” he said, bemoaning the lack of action over the past 30 years on building new reservoirs.

“Water resource plans are showing a bit of joined up thinking but we aren’t seeing interconnection between regions. The gap between demand and supply is getting bigger as we go out to 2050.

“There are some credible plans in place to reduce water demand in England and we have statutory targets but I don’t think there’s enough happening on the water consumption issues.”

Stark went on to warn of the lack of data on interdependencies making it difficult to assess the impact of interruptions to energy supplies on other industries and parts of society.

He praised the ambition of government targets for renewables – in all areas apart from onshore wind – but said these in isolation would not deliver a green electricity grid by 2035.

“I question whether we have the right institutions in place to make that happen”, he said. “Do we have a future system operator that has been given the appropriate marching orders? Do we have Ofgem in the right place? Are the asset owners ready to make the investments? Is the supply chain in place? Probably not. We need to have that. We cannot waste another year pre-election pissing about on this stuff. It is fundamental we see this happen for net zero.”

He added: “My worry is that the strategic decisions get ducked and pushed into the second half of the Parliament. My big fear is that we collectively spend the next year taking our foot off the gas instead of collectively agreeing a consensus on this – given most of the political parties are aligned on this.”