Politicians who oppose action on net zero will make their constituents poorer by driving up energy bills, Britain’s climate chief has warned critics.
A report released by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) on Wednesday laid out how changes in homes, cars and diets could help the country hit a target of cutting emissions by 87 per cent in 15 years’ time.
Andrew Bowie, the acting shadow energy secretary, claimed the report showed meeting climate targets would “come at an eye-watering cost to the British people”.
Emma Pinchbeck, the chief executive of the CCC, said: “The really important thing that politicians should understand is if they don’t elect to enable that spend [to reach net zero], to create the markets of the private sector, to make electricity cheap, then their constituents will be worse off in 2050. It’s absolutely crystal clear now.”
She said that a household with a fossil fuel boiler in 2050 instead of a heat pump would face an energy bill about £750 a year higher, while drivers of petrol cars would pay £700 a year more than electric car owners.
She said: “The [energy] price cap went up again this week. It went up again largely because of our exposure to gas demand. I find it incredible that politicians would be considering this [net zero] as a net cost instead of seeing the potential for their constituents to save money.
“All we can do is present politicians with numbers and I have definitely presented them to the shadow secretary of state.”
The CCC report, the seventh carbon budget, found the cost of reaching net zero was 73 per cent lower than it was five years ago. Meeting the target by 2050 is expected to cost about £4 billion a year, or 0.2 per cent of GDP over the same period, the group said.
Pinchbeck said the the main takeaway from a “citizens panel” of 26 people convened by Ipsos for the CCC was that people want to help meet net zero. “They’re up for it. They’re worried about it, but they really don’t understand what they’re being asked to do. And that is the primary barrier,” she said.
She said that Britons had little interest in a culture war on net zero. “The British public are environmentalists. That’s a really strong British instinct. And actually, when you poll centre-right voters and conservatives, they’re often more so. Theresa May [legislated] for net zero, Margaret Thatcher was the first prime minister to talk about climate change. The conservative instinct is preservation,” she said, suggesting that was why some Tory voters had switched to the Liberal Democrats in last year’s election.
Ministers have insisted airport expansion can only go ahead if compatible with the UK’s carbon targets. But, speaking on the day that Gatwick was given a “minded to approve” letter by the transport secretary for a second runway, Pinchbeck said the government was yet to ask her advice on the impact of more airport capacity.
The CCC, an independent public body, suggested a return flight from London to Alicante in Spain could increase by about £150 by 2050 to meet the cost of decarbonising planes. However, Pinchbeck said the true hike would be smaller because of competition between airlines.
On the same day as the committee’s new report, BP abandoned its green targets and scaled up oil production. Pinchbeck said that oil and gas productions faced declining demand for oil over the next 25 years because of the growing switch to electric cars. “So I would question a business model built only on continued oil and gas,” she said.
She is a former chief executive of the industry groups Energy UK and RenewableUK, Pinchbeck owns an electric car and is in the process of getting a heat pump installed in her home. “I made my husband go on honeymoon by train, I buy my clothes second, we buy secondhand stuff for the house,” she said.
However, she said she had made those changes because they mattered to her, and the committee was not telling people how to live their lives. “We want people to have better technologies when they’re coming to replace things [cars and boilers]. You can still eat meat. You can still fly. You can do a lot of the things that I think the environmental movement has historically said [no to].”
