John Loughhead, Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy of the UK government, discusses strategies that the UK – which has set the goal of reducing its carbon emissions by 80 per cent of its 1990 levels – has for cutting its carbon footprint. Excerpts:

As compared with many other advanced countries, the UK has done well in combating carbon emissions ...

There are many factors. We have been able to switch our electricity generation from coal to gas. An immense contribution came from this. Then, over the last 30 years approximately, there has been a progressive evolution in the UK’s economic activity. We have seen a diminution in conventional industry, and an increase in new (non-polluting) industries such as financial technology and information technology. Besides, the passage of the Climate Change Act in 2008 made carbon-emission-cut budgets a responsibility of the government.

Because of this, two major things have happened. There was remarkable political consensus to stick to those targets and we have been able to devise means to bring about real change. Widespread adoption of wind energy generation is one. These have been done largely through combined government and industrial efforts. We also benefited by the reductions in the solar PV costs. What it meant was that in the UK we have now commercial solar farms making multi-gigawatt contributions to the UK supply.

Are rooftop solar systems incentivised in the UK?

Yes they are. Preferentially the houses use them for meeting energy needs, but any surplus is simply exported to the grid. The economics of exporting to the grid is not enough to justify the solar PV system so there is another support of feed-in tariff in place. But in terms of the accounting, rooftop solar is regarded as a demand-reduction mechanism. Under the current system, people are incentivised for generating, irrespective of whether you use it for yourself or for someone else on the network.

There is a criticism – even by climate change researchers based in the UK – that the carbon intensity of those products made overseas for use in the UK is not taken into consideration when carbon emissions are calculated...

That is a very valid comment. At the moment, the basis for all international agreements is territorial emissions. The reason for this is that it is very difficult to accurately track and account for greenhouse gas emissions of any particular product whether it is solar panel or a car or beef steak. I would argue that the arrangement we have is not perfect, but it has worked remarkably well. So, anything we do to modify that needs to maintain all the advantages we have already.

Transfer of low-carbon technologies from developed to developing countries has been touted as one way to address this problem...

There are two answers. First, in many cases, these technologies are owned by the private sector. The UK government thinks it is their business to come to some kind of arrangement to make these transfers happen.

Second, however, at the government level, where there is an obvious shortage of ability to exploit some known technology, we are very open to discussing some arrangement that would help. There are many ways of doing it. One is simply transferring the technology. But a government rarely owns a technology. The other is to support the ability to exploit that more effectively.

Yet another option is to work with other governments to develop some equivalent technology. But we all live in a highly connected world. Almost none of the products which are in use currently are wholly indigenous. The question then becomes whether we have fair access to the technology — rather than whether it is indigenous. That is very much the way we try to operate.

The UK has been very successful in bringing down carbon emissions. Almost 32 per cent lower than your 1990 levels by 2017. But how difficult are further reductions?

We have already gone a lot further than many people thought we could go. As we go forward, the pressure and desire to make further reduction would lead to more innovations... we have been very successful in reducing emission from electricity generation, but not all that successful in reducing emissions from transport sector. We have goaded more people to use public transport, but the number of people travelling has increased further. And in that sense the emission levels have remained the same.

Finally, we know we have a big issue in built infrastructure, industrial and commercial operations. So, we are focussing on what we can do to address those challenges. We have an ambition to take our transport emissions down to near zero by 2050. We need to make substantial improvements to our built environment.

We have some thoughts about how to do that. We currently have an emission budget that goes out once in five years. We just finished our second five-year period. About three months ago, we agreed on the budget for the fifth carbon emission period – that is, from 2028 to 2032. A 57 per cent reduction from the 1990 levels. At the moment, we don’t have the technologies and policies to achieve this. But the reason for setting the budget is to lay out the challenge clearly so that different stakeholders can work on it.

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