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By Adam Vaughan

David Tomlinson/Getty Images

It is late and riddled with holes. But UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s 10-point climate plan is still the first big step towards meeting the country’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050 since it was set last year. Johnson claims the plan’s wide-ranging technological fixes amount to a “green industrial revolution” – but is it enough?

The headline policy of banning sales of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030 – a decade earlier than planned – is monumental. It puts the UK 10 years ahead of France and only five years behind electric car leader Norway. Still, in a concession to car-makers, new plug-in hybrid electric vehicles – which still run on fossil fuels and have been found to be far more polluting in the real world than in labs – will be sold until 2035.

The plan rightly focuses on buildings, transport and heavy industry. While the UK has made great strides in cleaning up supply in recent years, phasing out coal and encouraging offshore wind farms, it has stalled in those other sectors. Energy is still a priority, with the two big planks of the new plan being offshore wind power and nuclear power.

There is no mention of the two cheapest forms of clean electricity generation, onshore wind and solar. However, there is £525 million for nuclear plants, mostly smaller ones which are are unproven. Government reports expect the electricity they generate to cost more than large ones, but they may yet turn out to be a good climate and industrial bet.

Meanwhile, some big emitters are virtually absent from today’s plan. Land use, including farming, forestry and peatland, accounts for 12 per cent of UK greenhouse gas emissions. Yet there are no incentives for farmers to curb their emissions, and little funding for those sectors. Shipping and aviation get a mention but no new funding or policies.

In general, the plan’s most obvious shortcoming is money. The 10 points amount to £12 billion of funding in total, but only £4 billion of that is new. The UK government is spending at least £210 billion on covid-19 and £27 billion on road-building in England alone over five years. Caterina Brandmayr at the Green Alliance think tank in London says the funding for walking, cycling and public transport is £9.3 billion short of what is needed for net zero.

It would be churlish not to acknowledge bold new targets, such as capturing and storing 10 megatonnes each year of the UK’s current annual 351 megatonnes of CO2 emissions by 2030, and installing 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to replace polluting gas boilers, up from 27,000 in 2018.

Yet these are mostly just targets for now. The strategies needed to make them more than an aspiration, such as a long-delayed energy white paper, are still missing. Moreover, the UK’s approach to net zero needs to be coherent, avoiding policies that spur high-carbon investments that cancel out Johnson’s plan, which may be presented in the government’s spending review in a week’s time.

Earlier this month, the government said it was even further off track from meeting its 2032 carbon than previously thought, by 331 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in total. Today’s plan narrows that gap, but the government conceded its new measures will only shave off 180Mt/CO2e. For all its failings, it is still a very positive step from a government that has been loud on climate rhetoric but quiet on climate action.

The politics of Johnson putting his weight behind the plan will be important to the investors who will need to pay to make much of it a reality. If the government wants to be taken seriously as the host of next year’s vital COP26 climate summit, this plan needs to be the first of many big steps by the UK.

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