Hitting net zero by 2050 will be too late to save the planet, say activists. Greg Jones talks to three of those campaigning for utilities to take drastic action to cut emissions.

With environmental concern growing in the public consciousness, the past six months have seen a flurry of high-profile protests and legislative action from the government.

In the final throes of her premiership, Theresa May sought to establish a legacy outside of Brexit by committing the UK to be the first major economy to set a net zero greenhouse gas emissions target, aiming for 2050, as recommended by the Committee on Climate Change (CCC).

The pledge has been advertised as an opportunity for the UK to lead the way on this most pressing of issues, hopefully inspiring governments, citizens and companies around the world to be more ambitious about cutting emissions.

However, some claim that net zero itself is too late. Notable climate activist group Extinction Rebellion, whose large-scale protests piled pressure on the government to declare a climate emergency, lamented a lack of ambition in the target. The group demanded the date be brought forward to 2025, with co-founder Gail Bradbrook saying we have left it so late that “we have to step up in a semi-miraculous way to deal with this situation”.

Describing the CCC’s recommendation as “an important – albeit small – step in the right direction”, Extinction Rebellion say it is “vital” for the 2050 target to be brought forward. The CCC has said that globally reaching net zero by 2050 would provide a 50/50 chance of keeping temperature increases below 1.5C – a level considered safer than the 2C previously agreed in Paris.

David Joffe, one of the authors on the CCC report, said: “There’s lots of progress that we need to make and need to make quickly. “It’s not impossible to achieve an earlier date but extremely stretching to get to 2050. We need to be realistic about challenges we set ourselves. The call from Extinction Rebellion for 2025 indicates to me they don’t really understand the complexity of the challenge.

“We could have a conversation about 2045, but to anyone who says it can be done earlier, it is really important that they acknowledge the scale of the challenge.”

Around the UK, cities have been jumping ahead on the issue. In May this year, Glasgow and Edinburgh announced plans to reach neutral emissions levels, each hoping to find success ahead of the 2045 target the Scottish government has already adopted. Edinburgh is seeking to reach the mark by 2030, while Glasgow’s ambition is advertised as a more flexible “well before” 2045.

In England, Manchester announced at the end of 2018 a 2038 net zero goal, while Leeds set its sights on the same year in July. Liverpool City has pledged to become zero carbon by 2040. It remains to be seen if these targets creep forward, or if they will be met at all.

The Extinction Rebellion activist

Adam Woodhall, an Extinction Rebellion (XR) activist and speaker, was spurred into action after seeing XR’s protests last November, where members occupied five bridges in London.

Woodhall, who has spent the past 15 years working with businesses as a sustainability consultant, decided to head along to their next event, recalling that the activists were carrying around a coffin with “our future” written on it.

On arrival, he recognised one of the pallbearers, who asked him if he would mind taking over. “So literally not long from arriving at XR, I was carrying our future on my shoulders. That meaningful start was pretty deep for me,” he says.

Since those dramatic beginnings, Woodhall’s involvement has grown. Today, he acts as a tour guide through XR’s east London office, a room he concedes was much messier last week, filled with a scattering of desks occupied by volunteers and laptops. The building itself is bright and airy, within which the rebellion sits shoulder to shoulder with children’s charities and social
enterprises.

Currently, he estimates, he does “pretty much a full working week” for XR, while keeping some of his old clients as a “well paying hobby” that keeps the lights on. Looking at the 2050 net zero target, he supports XR’s call for a change to 2025. He says we’ve already reached 1.1C of warming, and that 1.5C should be seen as an absolute maximum, instead of a target. Even if we reach this mark, Woodhall asserts that “there’s going to be thousands or potentially millions who will die due to climate change”. He says “2025 is the only safe option”, unless we’re willing to risk the lives of our children and grandchildren.

Reasoned unreason

In terms of the organisation’s tactics, Woodhall says that pushing for 2025 is crucial because rebellions are fundamentally unreasonable. They are there to question whether what we have already done is really good enough. He – and XR – believe the answer to that is no. Calling for 2025 will not necessarily convince people to aim for it, but it works to make other targets more reasonable in comparison.

“On a personal basis, if in the next two years we end up with the British government committing wholeheartedly to a 2030 target, and actually then within those two years demonstrating that they’re taking action to do it – so cancelling runway three, stopping any fracking in the UK, other things like that – then personally I would be comfortable with that because it’s a lot better than 2050.”

When it comes to assertions by David Joffe, a team leader at the Commission for Climate Change (CCC), that an earlier target is practically impossible, he sees this as emblematic of the societal structure that has caused the problem. Woodhall calls this a “denial state”, likening it to the years leading up to the Second World War, where the country acted according to a mindset of wanting to avoid thinking about the
possibility of going to war again.

Drawing on his experience, Woodhall comments on the lack of progress thus far, saying that throughout his career the industry mantra has always been that “you can’t push society, because society will just push back”.

In fact, he believes XR has produced evidence to the contrary. He says its activists have shown that society can shift rapidly if presented with the harsh reality of the situation, given the groundswell of support their protests have caused. But this is not enough, he believes, the problem is growing exponentially, and so action to fix it needs to grow exponentially too.

XR has initiated a dialogue about climate change, but it needs to ramp-up action, rather than taking steps incrementally. One of Woodhall’s biggest criticisms of the way climate change is being approached by the industry and by groups such as the CCC is that they are trying to solve the problem with this incremental attitude.

Woodhall is certain that a drastic cultural shift is entirely possible within a short time span. Returning to the Second World War metaphor, he notes that “at the start of the war we were still flying biplanes, by the end there were jet planes, there were rockets, there were nuclear weapons. Because there was a big enough problem, we worked out how to deliver it”.

Although keen to stress we will not be rationing and growing vegetables in our back gardens, he emphasises how swiftly we shifted from denial to acceptance that we needed to co-operate to work towards a common goal on a national scale.

When it comes to preparing for climate change, he says “utility companies have been doing an okay job”, but he “wouldn’t say they’ve done amazing”.

“It’s great that you’re adapting, great that you’re focusing on renewables, but if you want to exist in ten years’ time, you’re going to have to change exponentially, not incrementally,” he says.

“We’ve got all the technology for the UK to be 100 per cent renewable. If we really wanted to, we could do it in ten years flat. We just need the investment and the desire; we don’t even need people to be particularly clever.”

On nuclear generation, in his opinion, Woodhall thinks it is for the best that we continue to use existing facilities because they have already had a great deal of carbon invested in their construction, but they should be phased out as they reach the end of their lifecycle. Despite being low carbon, Woodhall is sceptical about nuclear newbuild like Hinkley Point C, saying it plays along with the old narrative of large-scale, centralised power.

Mixed reception

XR is divisive, to say the least, whether on its methods or the very basis of its protest. Woodhall readily acknowledges this, saying that any protest movement is going to polarise opinion. He describes people as either jumping to join them on the streets the next day or vehemently opposing everything they do.

Both XR and the wider movement of climate change protesters have tended to be characterised as anything from communists to eco-fascists. The Spectator’s Ross Clark has called them “students and left-wing academics” who are “divorced from economic forces”, while in a report for right-wing think-tank the Policy Exchange, Richard Walton described the group as having roots in “anarchism, eco-socialism, and radical anti-capitalist environmentalism”.

Woodhall, who runs his own business and has worked with energy companies, does not quite fit that label. He describes himself politically as “pragmatic”. He says he is more likely to favour certain party’s policies if they “fit with the emergency that we currently are encountering”, rather than committing to an all-encompassing philosophy.

When it comes to perception of the organisation, he believes it should not matter too much, due to the objectives they have. He believes that calling for a citizens’ assembly fundamentally depoliticises them as a movement. The citizens’ assembly is the final of XR’s three demands, which Woodhall describes as “quite unusual”. The other two call for the government to declare a climate emergency and to adopt a 2025 net zero target.

In his view, many activist movements fall prey to constructing long lists of prescriptive goals that only work to divide supporters. XR deliberately avoids this through the assemblies, which circumvent internal disputes about specific policies, such as nationalisation or nuclear power.

The citizens assembly would involve selecting a proportionate group of members of the public through sortition, like jury service. This group would then be presented with the science by climate experts “as it actually is”, says Woodhall. He explains that this means not just the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) average, but the range of opinions and possibilities, which are “from probably disastrous to definitely disastrous, and from we should do something now to we have to do something now or we’re all dead”.

Once informed, the assembly would then vote on a course of action to recommend to the government, which can act on it, in theory, with a mandate divorced from many of the potential political hurdles.

This, Woodhall is certain, would both increase awareness of the severity of the issues and prompt more decisive action. It would be beneficial, even if the assembly does not fully support XR’s view. “It might happen that the citizens’ assembly comes back and goes ‘oh yeah, 2040 is fine’,” he admits.

“I’m confident the citizens’ assembly will move things faster than the politicians will. Whether it moves it fast enough, nobody knows, but I’m very confident that it will move things faster.”

Overall, the key to shifting society to one that is equipped and able to counteract climate change is something Woodhall describes as “magic”.

By this he means “the sort of magic that Derren Brown creates”, where the results are spectacular, but when you break it down and look at the targeted prompts and nudges, the end product is “entirely predictable”.

XR’s opportunity for change is in creating the “circumstances to get those people to make those changes”. It believes it can achieve this by continuing to get everyone from students to pensioners on the streets, glued to buildings, or arrested by police. Such actions bring the issue to the attention of a large number of people, and whether consciously or subconsciously elicit a response that is more often favourable than it is not. In theory, each of these scenes is a prompt in our collective minds, pulling together the circumstances needed to form an overwhelming wave of change.

“Some of the more practical people talk about how we need to create non-linear change to deliver exponential benefits, I just call it magic.”

The renewables expert

Nina Skorupska, chief executive of the Renewable Energy Association, describes the net zero target as “a huge milestone”, but she is concerned by what she sees as a glacial rate of action from the government, “both in terms of setting policy and the appropriate regulations”.

“Things are happening anyway, almost despite the government. Solar’s happened, and people say it’s despite the government, like removing the feed-in tariff (FIT) for renewable technologies up to 5MW and then not having anything to move on.”

The FIT scheme was closed to new applicants on 1 April this year and its replacement, the Smart Export Guarantee, is not launching until the beginning of 2020. The new programme will guarantee payments for excess renewable generation.

A crucial part of the energy transition, Skorupska believes, is interest and investment, which could be marred by unreliable policy support. “What investors need,” she says, “is a smooth-ish transition, rather than this stop/start, stop/start, because it reduces confidence.

“Only the real stalwarts, and the people who are passionate, will carry on, but what we need is for many, many people, and the public, to adopt it.” As we push towards the future energy mix, she believes that “from an economic perspective, there’s not a problem that by 2030 we could have 75 per cent come from renewables, and that would be a mix of more than solar and wind. “Offshore certainly – and hopefully with politics shifting we might have more onshore wind again – but also energy from waste. Collecting our waste and using it as a resource, and other waste streams to make biogas, because that will hopefully help us start to decarbonise out heating requirement.”

On the question of nuclear power, she says “On economic grounds, it’s really difficult to see how you can justify it.” She mentions how ex-secretary of state Greg Clark told Hitachi it would only get £75/ MWh during ultimately failed negotiations on the suspended construction of the Wylfa Newydd nuclear power station.

“Hinkley Point C is still projected for 30 years to be paid at £92.5, so there’s a big gap there, and the challenge on nuclear is that renewable power is getting cheaper.”

An important aspect of the evolution, she believes, will be the future of heat. She would go further than the chancellor and ban connection of all new homes to the gas grid until it had been fully decarbonised. The chancellor has banned gas heating from all new homes by 2025, although gas hobs will still be allowed.

The flexible technology proponent

Sarah Bell, founder and chief executive of Tempus Energy, echoes Nina Skorupska, when she says that putting targets into law without faciliatory infrastructure is posturing.

The net zero goal is “admirable”, she says, but it needs a detailed policy and a full plan of action to be meaningful. Even then, “we are not on track to meet our 80 per cent reduction target, so making a new, more ambitious target seems premature”.

Bell is a polarising figure in the industry because of her hard-fought campaign to get the capacity market suspended on the basis that it rewarded burning fossil fuels rather than saving energy.

She believes that free innovation in an open market could be the biggest driving force in the energy transition, and that current policy works to stifle this. “Change will happen when commercial incentives create an environment that leads to customer adoption of low-carbon technologies en masse. Without policy frameworks that create commercial incentives the targets are meaningless.”

An example of a restrictive policy is the subsidising of fossil fuels in the UK. Bell says the UK has the highest levels in Europe at £12 billion a year. The actions of regulators have also held back transition in her view. She explains that the “energy system regulation needs to change rapidly to enable customers to fully participate.”

Currently, she believes, the powers-that-be are spending a great deal of time, effort and money on holding change back to a slow trickle. For Bell, the result is clear to see: “We’re not transitioning. Not fast enough. Not even close.”

“I’m actually an optimist,” she says, “and I believe in markets. I think if you enable innovators who have solutions to compete, then we will transition rapidly.

“The International Energy Agency came out with a report saying that carbon emissions grew in 2018. No-one in any reasonably sane state of mind could fail to acknowledge that we are not solving climate change. “In order to solve climate change, we would have to have started taking drastic action at least ten years ago. We probably have five to seven years left to take drastic action and we are not taking drastic action.

“Since we live in a mainly capitalist world, it is still too easy for the likes of RWE, Shell and BP to make money out of selling or burning fossil fuels. Real change will not happen until we make it commercially impossible for that to be the most profitable model.

“The truth is that fossil fuels are already being out-competed. Instead of subsidising them, we should let them die so the cheaper, cleaner options get implemented. We have all the technologies we need to solve climate change. We’re just not using them.”