Harvey Phythian analyses the government’s record on the environment
After 10 years in government, the Conservatives have recently tried to represent their environmental policy – and its supposes success – as a natural extension of Conservative thinking. While climate change, sustainability and environmental issues are not generally the focus when the Conservatives talk about the overall health of the country, they bundle their policies in this area with other policy decisions to make them appear more coherent. At the heart of understanding Conservative climate policies and the direction they are taking, we have to examine how the government have framed conversations about the environment and what it portends for the months and years ahead.
The government since 2015 has had a mixed track-record with the environment, particularly when it comes to tackling climate change where its approach has been lacklustre at best. Only since the election last year has the government more explicit and measurable end goals to deal with environmental issues, but even these are limited a few specific areas rather than detailing a comprehensive or sustainable plan. Outside of these goals and promises, the recent House of Commons debate on decarbonising transport has highlighted the government’s tendency to engage in these tasks with a distinct sense of minimum manageability. This comes as a part of a wider ‘business as usual’ policy outlook: where purported stability is the key and more ambitious tasks such as climate policy become subsumed as just another task for the government.
Since 2010, the government’s success in responding to climate change has been alarmingly limited. For a start, the coalition government ceased publishing detailing carbon plans in line with the 2008 Climate Change Act in 2011, and the current government is not on track with its carbon budgets for 2023-27 or 2028-32. To make matters worse, these budgets do not include the new net-zero by 2050 target, which are set to be included in the climate budget for 2033-37 later this year, they follow the Kyoto Protocol targets of reducing carbon emissions by 80% by 2050, rather than net-zero. According to the Independent Committee on Climate Change, reaching net-zero emissions requires an annual rate of emissions reduction that is 50% higher than under the UK’s previous 2050 target and 30% higher than achieved on average since 1990[1].
Given these targets, the government needs to be ambitious in its approach and detailed in laying them out as well as communicating them to the country. However, successive governments have not given us much cause to be optimistic about even greater attention and detail in environmental matters. The tone of the government from 2015 was set in its manifesto, where the emphasis was laid on cutting emissions ‘as cost-effectively as possible’[2]and little else. Much of what came in 2017 was at least an improvement, albeit with the angle that ‘as Conservatives, we are committed to leaving the environment in better condition than we inherited it.’[3]This line from the 2017 manifesto tells us less about environmental progress than how the Conservatives wish to be seen.
The Conservatives also renewed their pledge to plant 11 million trees, as they had promised in 2015[4], but this and other carbon capture ideas frame a deeper problem with the government’s policies in previous years. The government’s approach to emissions targets is directed at taking CO2 out of the atmosphere rather than reducing the amount put into it. Of course, carbon capture and the planting of trees are not negative policies, but they are of limited, short-term value and obfuscate wider problems. The most crucial of these is that the government still, as of 2019 in its net-zero briefing paper, adheres to these insufficiently ambitious policies rather than establishing genuinely sustainable policies of consumption and production[5]. After all, it is fine to say that the government has increased renewable energy resources, but their use made up only a third of all energy supplies in the United Kingdom in 2019, while consumption and production are still major problems, particularly in aviation and dealing with waste[6].
At base, this is because the government has been more willing to react to climatic and environmental issues as they arise than to pre-empt them, and even the few moments of proactivity have turned out to be severely flawed. In its response to the government’s 25 Year Environment Plan in 2019, the Natural Capital Committee underscored that the government had consistently failed to provide clear metrics by which to measure various goals from cutting waste to sheltering biodiversity[7]. The Conservatives summed up for themselves why their approach is flawed in their 2019 manifesto, ‘we believe that free markets, innovation and prosperity can protect the planet.’[8]This wouldn’t necessarily be the worst outlook one could have on environmental management, were it not for the fact that intervention is integral to dealing with environmental issues, and fixating on free market solutions vastly limits your capacity to solve them. ‘Innovation’ and ‘prosperity’ are supposed to seem optimistic and responsible, where they in fact highlight the backward-looking stance of the government. Apart from the aforementioned target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, another projected goal of the government is protection of 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030. Both of these goals may be somewhat defined targets, but the actual policy implementations to achieve these seem vague, with little being gained by approaching how the government envisions reaching them.
A good test case of how the government is handling its commitments in terms of the environment is the recent Commons debate on the decarbonisation of transport[9]. On 5thFebruary 2020, Andy McDonald, then Shadow Secretary of State for Transport asked the House of Commons to acknowledge that, ‘the UK’s transport emissions have not substantially fallen since 1990 and have increased since 2010; and calls on the Government to develop and implement a plan to eliminate the substantial majority of transport emissions by 2030,’ with a mixture of measures proposed. McDonald cited numerous problems with the Conservative approach, especially in transport, ‘This is not year zero. The Tories have been in power for a decade, and some of us have not forgotten the last 10 years of broken promises and empty pledges on transport.’ Such broken promises include cuts in bus funding and services, in rail electrification programmes, support for airport expansion, and major road expansion programmes. McDonald continued, emphasising the lack of leadership and ambition by the government, calling to attention the worrying projections for carbon budgets and that ‘transport emissions were just 2% lower in 2016-17 than 1990-1991, compared with 60% for energy supply and 30% for businesses more generally.’
Grant Shapps, the Secretary of State for Transport argued that there was broad agreement on reaching zero carbon by 2050 and that the government was working on ‘making that legally binding’. This came even though McDonald had pointed out that the carbon budgets set to be missed are also legally binding, so ‘legally binding’ seems to lose some value in this case. Shapps also attempted to emphasise how little the previous Labour government had done with regards to the environment or climate, failing to recognise even his own party’s changes in approach since 2010 as evidence of how far the discourse has thankfully shifted. But what is strikingly worse in this is the fact that Shapps is playing a game of backward comparison rather than trying to lead or push forward in making ambitious changes. The government focus, as Shapps stated in the debate, is on cutting carbon while growing the economy, a loose enough term to involve courting big business while making hollow gestures towards real change in addressing environmental issues.
From this, several issues and possibilities arise for the government going forward. It is clear from the debate cited above that the government, up to now at least, was willing to take gentle and gradual steps along a ‘business as usual’ line, given that every Conservative Member present at the Division on McDonald’s proposal on transport voted against it. However, there are interesting contours as to why the government should want to stand by this, and what problems their framing of environmental issues can cause. From the debate itself, we can see that the government treats industries such as aviation – whose carbon emissions record is the worst, having doubled since 1990 – as independent and relatively ‘free’. Shapps said he had met with representatives of the aviation sector, which ‘has itself signed a plan to get to zero carbon by 2050’ and that he intends to work closely with it’, but crucially this does not address that large-scale changes need to be made. This is especially worrying, given that, in a recent appearance on BBC Breakfast, Heathrow Airport Chief John Holland-Kaye said that in the wake of COVID-19 ‘We need both passengers and goods to be able to travel all over the world to get the British economy firing on all cylinders. We need Heathrow to be flying again.’. If the government allows a massive restart of aviation along these lines, while working with the industry bosses on their terms without pressing the need for environmental regulations, there would be an even greater delay to reaching zero-carbon targets than is already likely.
The monetary commitments made by the government in their 2019 manifesto and in the debate on transport, though promising, seem to again betray that the government is playing catch up. George Freeman, then Minister of State for Transport, said that ‘we want to make Brexit the moment when we step up to our global responsibilities to lead in the decarbonisation of transport and the growth of a green economy’. Indeed, this would have to be so, given that the current EU targets are deemed ‘insufficient’, and the UK would have to massively up their commitments and delivery to keep up with more ambitious targets[10].
Looking forward, the government needs to be ambitious and thorough in its work on the environment if it is to have any measure of success. There needs to be some recognition that climatic and environmental issues cannot simply be part of ‘business as usual’, the failings of the government over the years have shown this, real change is needed. The government has laid a lot of emphasis on its leadership role on the world stage in the now re- 2020 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow. Given the government’s own lack of explicit direction and drive to deal with environmental problems, one can only hope that this is not just a pleasing image for the government to gesture to later in lieu of real change. The government has begun to set targets such as those for 2035 and 2050, but the way these are managed could be improved. Rather than forecasting what may come later on the basis of current policies, whatever they may be, in setting a clearly articulated goal and ‘backcasting’, putting in place sustainable plans to achieve this goal with necessary innovations, the government could make genuine progress[11]. Crucially, we should not see these goals, as perhaps the government is using them now, as fixed end points at which ‘business as usual’ can resume[12], sustainability and its practices are dynamic, so a programme of adaptable sustainable development is needed.
Where the government will take its environmental policy is uncertain in its specifics, but right now the government seems unwilling to change the framework by which they govern to a more sustainable footing. With the European Commission in 2019 finding that the UK had £10.5 billion in fossil fuel subsidies[13], the recommendations of bodies such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are more relevant than ever. Cutting these subsidies, carbon or energy taxes, credit lines for low-carbon production and land management, are just some of many viable ways to reduce emissions and engender sustainable practices[14]. The shift to longer-term thinking and governance would further the economic viability of renewables and sustainable development as fossil fuels are phased out. At this point, it is obvious that such things do not mean ‘business as usual’, they mean directed and ambitious change with enduring commitment, which we will hopefully see if the government wishes to take its ‘leadership role’ at COP26.
[1]https://www.theccc.org.uk/what-is-climate-change/reducing-carbon-emissions/how-the-uk-is-progressing/
[2]Conservative Party Manifesto 2015, p.57
[3]Conservative Party Manifesto 2017, p.40
[4]Ibid, p.25
[5]Sarah Priestley, Net Zero in the UK Briefing Paper, (London: House of Commons Library, 2019), p.18
[6]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/25/low-carbon-energy-makes-majority-of-uk-electricity-for-first-tim
[7]https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/natural-capital-committee-advice-on-governments-25-year-environment-plan, p.17-18
[8]Conservative Party Manifesto 2019, p.55
[9]https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2020-02-05/debates/A10ADCE0-81D3-4233-A290-129D52D34C92/Transport?highlight=transport%20climate#contribution-E87DE2FC-897C-4FD8-934F-E461EAA720CD, Hansard vol. 671
[10]https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/eu/
[11]John Brady, (ed.) Environmental Management in Organizations, The IEMA Handbook, (London: Earthscan 2005), p.40
[12]Susan Baker, Sustainable Development, (London: Routledge, 2006), p.7-8
[13]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/23/uk-has-biggest-fossil-fuel-subsidies-in-the-eu-finds-commission
[14]IPCC, Climate Change 2014, Mitigation and Climate Change Technical Summary