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Emissions Impossible
United Kingdom and Australia Far From Decarbonization Targets
by Roger Pielke, Jr.
After initially reviewing the ambitious emissions reductions targets in three countries – the United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia – Roger Pielke, Jr. returns to the numbers and parses each nation’s “success.” In two of the scenarios, the UK and Australia, reduction targets, again, hardly seem realistic at this point. Only the United Kingdom remains to deal explicitly with what will be an inevitable failure of target setting. Australia is halfway there and Japan used the occasion of Fukushima to justify a climate policy reset. As long-term trends in the energy economy suggest, decarbonization targets are as fanciful as ever.
While I was working on The Climate Fix I published several peer-reviewed articles on climate policies in the United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia. In recent months I have updated these analyses and will summarize the updates here.
United Kingdom
In my 2009 paper (here, open access) on the emissions reduction targets mandated by the UK Climate Change Act, I wrote:
Given the magnitude of the challenge and the pace of action, it would not be too strong a conclusion to suggest that the Climate Change Act has failed even before it has gotten started. The Climate Change Act does have a provision for the relevant minister to amend the targets and timetable, but only for certain conditions. Failure to meet the targets is not among those conditions. It seems likely that the Climate Change Act will have to be revisited by Parliament or simply ignored by policy makers. Achievement of its targets does not appear to be a realistic option.
In a recent update to this analysis I wrote:
If the UK is to hit its 2022 emissions target, then assuming a 2 percent annual GDP growth implies a rate of decarbonization of the economy of 4.4 percent per year over the next 9 years (for 1 percent annual GDP growth it is 3.3 percent and for 3 percent GDP growth it is 5.4 percent). Since the Climate Change Act was passed in 2008 the UK economy has actually decarbonized at a rate of 1.1 percent per year.
The magnitude of the challenge can be seen in the graph at the top of this post, which shows how much carbon-free energy the UK would need if it is to meet the 2022 targets of the Climate Change Act. Even though the proportion of carbon-free energy in 2012 is the highest since 1965, that proportion would have to more than double in less than a decade while retiring an equivalent amount of coal (i.e., almost all of it). Read more …
