Stark words on urgent need for climate action in post-Covid world

The chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) talks to Utility Week about how coronavirus will affect the transition to net zero and whether behaviour changes adopted during lockdown can be sustained. Chris Stark looks at lessons from the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and areas where a post-pandemic UK can immediately get back on track to decarbonisation.

Like many of us, Chris Stark has been wrestling with a profound lifestyle change over the past month.

In a normal week, the CCC chief executive gets up before the crack of dawn on Tuesday to board the 5.30am train from Glasgow to London, leaving behind his family, including two small children.

Since the coronavirus lockdown started though, he has been shepherding the climate change watchdog from his Glasgow home, while helping look after his five and eight-year-olds .

The “biggest impact” from the crisis on the CCC so far has been the time swallowed up by childcare, which has knocked out about 20 per cent of his organisation’s capacity, he estimates.

Overall, the 40-strong CCC team has moved “seamlessly” to remote working, Stark says, although its analysts have had to get used to not being able to collaborate by grouping around one another’s monitors and scanning spreadsheets.

The reduction in operational capacity is not the reason for this week’s announcement that the CCC is postponing the publication of advice to government on the sixth carbon budget, says Stark.

This document, which will outline the extent of emissions reductions that the UK will need to achieve in the five years from 2033 to 2037 to keep on track for the 2050 net zero target, has been pushed back from September to December.

Rather than publishing the document early in order to inform the government’s policy preparations for the COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow – the postponement of which was announced a fortnight ago – it will now appear on its original schedule at the end of the year.

The CCC needs the extra time to digest the economic shock caused by the coronavirus crisis, says the 41-year-old: “This is about being responsive to events. This (coronavirus) is not a minimal impact and we all need to get to grips with the long-term impact of what is playing out.

“We have an important year ahead of us, so we want to give ourselves as much time as possible to get on top of that.

“This will also be the period when we will be recovering from the Covid crisis, so it’s really important that we reflect on the impact before we offer that advice.”

Carbon crash

One of the very few upsides from the current crisis is that global emissions could be set for a 10 per cent reduction this year, which Stark describes as “unprecedented”.

But while less carbon is being pumped into the atmosphere, the overall level of the greenhouse gas has still been increasing, he points out.

“Atmospheric carbon levels keep on increasing so the climate keeps changing and the planet keeps warming. This (crisis) is utterly fundamental and yet changes very little about the dynamics around climate change.”

While it has postponed its work on the sixth carbon budget, the CCC has set itself a new task, which is to prepare advice for the government on how its coronavirus recovery plan can support the transition to net-zero emissions by 2050. This fresh advice will be published during the next few weeks, says Stark.

“The immediate priority of government is this tragedy but eventually thoughts will turn to what follows the pandemic: there are lots of reasons to think that a course can be steered through this.

“We have to get to net zero so let’s get back on track to that.”

But Stark is “very suspicious” about the risks of taking the wrong lessons from what he describes as a “very odd moment”, when governments have consciously decided to switch off large chunks of their economies.

“This doesn’t provide us with a prescription on how to tackle climate change,” he says, adding that the nature of the package of any stimulus will be different to that launched following the 2008 financial crisis, which he observed at close hand as an official at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

“The government had taken an unprecedented role in the economy so that will have to be unwound in a safe way. Providing the right kind of stimulus for employment and economic activity is different this time around.”

One risk he expects, based on the evidence of previous shocks, is that it will take a long time for oil prices to recover, easing the pressure to switch to lower-carbon fuels. However, the flipside of this is that oil companies will have little incentive to explore for dwindling new oil supplies, which may increase appetite for low-carbon projects.

And while the post-2008 recession recovery saw a rebound in emissions levels, the government is better prepared for the transition to net zero than it was then, Stark says: “There are lots of reasons to think that a course can be steered through this.”

Green infrastructure focus

The “number one rule” should be to avoid locking in fossil fuel-based infrastructure, which is incompatible with the net-zero target, he says. The second should be to prioritise the provision of green infrastructure.

“Government borrowing is near 0 per cent and we have a shovel-ready list of low carbon infrastructure projects that we didn’t have in 2009.”

Energy offers opportunities for bringing forward low-carbon infrastructure that is relatively cheap and can be delivered quickly, Stark says: “Onshore wind fits that and there are lots of projects ready to go.”

Another is electric vehicle charging infrastructure, he says: “We are on the horizon of a world where some low-carbon technologies are cheaper than high-carbon ones. It makes sense to accelerate programmes of public investment that would hasten that transition.”

But perhaps the biggest opportunity to supply a post-Covid crash green stimulus is in energy efficiency.

Stark says that the CCC is likely to push for a major package of energy efficiency measures, which failed to figure in last month’s Budget despite a Conservative manifesto pledge to spend £6.2 billion on such programmes during the current Parliament.

But the decline in oil and gas prices means that any such programme will require a strong steer from the public sector, he says: “The crash in demand means that fossil fuel prices will almost certainly remain low for a very long time and that is going to reduce the economic rationale for energy efficiency.”

Ignoring this issue would be short-sighted on economic as well as climate change grounds because fossil fuel prices will increase when recovery takes places, saddling households with high energy bills.

Stark is “very cautious” about the notion that state intervention will be an easier sell in a post-Covid world, which has seen a dramatic expansion of government activity from housing the homeless to paying private firms’ wage bills.

But the ground has shifted in this direction, he acknowledges. “Society has got to grips with a far greater degree of intervention than we have seen before.”

Change becomes the status quo

One of the reasons for delaying the publication of the sixth carbon budget is to gauge the extent to which such changes in attitudes, seen during the lockdown, persist in a post-Covid landscape.

“We might be looking at a world where behaviour changes are more radical than we thought,” he says.

“I am very interested in looking at how behaviour has changed during the lockdown and what is going to stick after this. The longer the lockdown goes on, the longer behaviours might permanently shift.”

This matters for the CCC because of the impact that reduced commuting could have on long-term emissions reduction.

“The general rule is that the longer something goes on, the more we get used to it and accept it. In any moments of change, we tend to emphasise the negative aspects of that change, like going for a pint after work. There comes a point when that change itself becomes the status quo. Were that to happen you might see a far greater degree of homeworking after this.”

One shift he is “fairly sure” about is that there will be a desire for less reliance on imported energy following a crisis which has exposed wider concerns about dependence on overseas supply chains.

While at pains not to be seen to be drawing comfort from the crisis, he acknowledges it could deliver some valuable lessons.

“There are lots of reason to be concerned about climate policy coming out of Covid but most of the shifts playing out will probably have a positive impact.”

Pointing to recent figures showing a record share for renewables in UK electricity generation, he says: “We have had a little glimpse of what the world might look in the future with lots of renewables on the system. The proportion of electricity supply by renewables has gone up during this period because demand is suppressed. This is what the world might look like if we keep at it.”