Stark: Big risk that technology fails to deliver transport decarbonisation

The government’s transport decarbonisation plan is too reliant on technological improvements rather than efforts to reduce demand for travel, Chris Stark has said.

Quizzed by the House of Commons environment audit committee as part of its ongoing inquiry into “Mapping the path to net zero”, the Climate Change Committee chief executive warned that decarbonisation of transport “leans on technological improvements and there is obviously a big risk that technology doesn’t deliver”.

Despite this, demand management “doesn’t get a look in” in the section of the transport plan covering aviation.

Responding to a question by Green Party MP Caroline Lucas on surface road transport, which has overtaken power generation as the biggest source of UK emissions, he said: “There’s not much to feel good about, it feels very much like a flat line.”

“Significant improvements” in the efficiency of vehicles, including tailpipe emissions, have been counterbalanced by road transport demand rising “quite markedly”, Stark said.

More broadly, he expressed concern that there had been no discussion in the plan about the fiscal implications of transport decarbonisation, such as changes in fuel duty, the rate of which has been frozen for more than a decade.

And while the power sector had made substantial cuts in emissions, failure to match progress by other sectors put the UK’s chances of hitting the emissions reduction targets in upcoming carbon budgets at risk, Stark said: “If emissions in other sectors remain on the same trajectory that they were before the pandemic, we are going to miss the 6th and the 4th and 5th carbon budgets by really some margin.”

Tom Sasse, associate director at Institute for Government, told the same evidence session that the recently scrapped Green Homes Grant had “fell apart” because of lack of co-ordination between the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy and the Treasury, which needed to be strengthened.

He said: “The current machinery is probably not strong enough for the level of co-ordination required,” giving as an example how Boris Johnson’s proposal to set up a net zero taskforce appearing to have “gone by the wayside” since it was announced in the prime minister’s 10 point plan for a green recovery last year.