UK’s ‘green day’: is net zero achievable?

The government has unveiled its “Powering up Britain” plan to increase the country’s energy security and deliver net zero by 2050.

The revised strategy, dubbed a “green industrial revolution” by ministers, includes dozens of measures, from increasing UK wind, solar and nuclear energy to investing in carbon capture and storage. Energy Secretary Grant Shapps also plans to extend the scheme to offer households £5,000 towards the cost of a new heat pump, insulate 300,000 of the poorest-performing homes and stand by the proposed 2030 ban on new petrol and diesel cars.

But critics say the announcements are made up of rehashed policies and lack new funding.

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What did the papers say?

Today’s plans “quickly drew criticism from Labour”, said the Independent. What was billed as the government’s “green day” turned out “to be a weak and feeble groundhog day of re-announcements, reheated policy and no new investment”, said shadow climate secretary Ed Miliband.

Other “campaigners and critics suggested ministers had missed the chance to pursue a more radical green industrial strategy”, added the paper.

Under Theresa May, Britain became the first major economy to enshrine a net zero target in law, promising that by 2050 the amount of emissions produced by the country would be the same or less than the emissions removed.

But net zero “finds itself taking a back seat to Rishi Sunak’s tougher-sounding promise of ‘energy security’ for the nation”, said Politico. Sources say his newly created Department for Energy Security and Net Zero seems keen to emphasise the first half of its brief and “reluctant to trumpet the second, fearing a Tory backlash”, the news site said. “Former Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage, a perennial thorn in the Tory party’s side, is also campaigning against net zero.”

And the reality is that today’s announcements were “forced, in part, by the government’s previous failure to hand in its homework”, said Politico. They were published in response to a High Court ruling last July that found the government’s original flagship climate plan was not detailed enough to show how net zero would be achieved.

The Climate Action Tracker, last updated in October, found that the UK would “remain off-track to meet its climate targets” unless it addressed key “policy gaps” such as improving energy efficiency in homes, reducing demand for the most polluting goods, increasing uptake of heat pumps and ending the development of new oil and gas reserves.

What next?

Friends of the Earth, which brought the legal challenge against the government in the High Court last summer, is “poring over” the new strategy “to see if it still fails to meet legal obligations to cut carbon emissions”, said Sky News. Katie de Kauwe, a lawyer with the environmental group, told the broadcaster that sufficient plans and policies to reach net zero were a legal obligation, not “some sort of wishy-washy requirement”.

The new plan comes in the wake of the European Commission’s Green Deal Industrial Plan and Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a $370bn green investment package that vows to subsidise domestic companies investing in net zero. As these two industrial giants engage in a “transatlantic arm-wrestle over the technology, investment and skills needed for net zero, the UK has effectively said it cannot compete”, said Sky’s business correspondent Paul Kelso.

Writing in The Times today, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt acknowledged that the UK’s approach would be “different”, saying: “We are not going toe-to-toe with our friends and allies in some distortive global subsidy race.”

But his fellow Tory MP and former Cop26 president Alok Sharma told The Guardian that “what we still need to see is that big bazooka moment, commensurate with the scale of the challenge”.