Ed Miliband urges UK to enshrine zero carbon emissions target in law

[jwl]

Ed Miliband has called on the UK to become the first country in the world to enshrine in law a target of reducing carbon emissions to zero.

The former Labour leader and energy secretary said Britain should show leadership and send a clear signal to businesses by building on its existing target of cutting emissions by 80% by 2050 under the Climate Change Act.

The intervention, in a comment article for the Guardian, comes a week before world leaders including David Cameron and Barack Obama meet for a landmark climate change summit in Paris. Nearly 200 countries are due to attend the negotiations to thrash out a deal for emissions cuts beyond 2020 and financing for poorer countries to cope with global warming.

“When we did the Climate Change Act [in 2008] it did send a message around the world, and then people did follow. It was Britain saying we’re going to do these big reductions and put it in law. I think there is the prospect of that happening again,” Miliband said.

The Labour MP said he did not want to put a date on when the zero emissions target should be achieved, because that decision should be taken by the government’s statutory advisers. To avoid dangerous global warming, the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change has said emissions must be cut to near zero by the end of the century.

Nicholas Stern, the economist commissioned by the then chancellor Gordon Brown to assess the costs of inaction on climate change, said he supported a target of reducing emissions to zero but would not go so far as to say it should be written into law.

Sir David King, the foreign secretary’s special representative on climate change, said Miliband’s call was important and timely. “It stresses the importance of maintaining all-party political agreement on the commitments of the UK to act on climate change. This has already created the certainty on investments in the new low carbon sector that means this is now the fastest growing sector in the British economy, now employing over 450,000 people in Britain.”

Miliband said the UK’s emissions cuts needed to go from 80% to 100% because it would be required eventually, and would send an important signal to businesses. “We now know we will get to the point where the carbon budget is exhausted. It just makes logical sense for the backstop to be zero, not simply 80%. The 80% target is fine but in the end we are going to have to get to zero, and we might as well start to look at the questions of when and how.”

This summer the government’s statutory climate advisers warned that the UK’s existing carbon budgets could be missed. The group’s chairman John Gummer took the unusual step of singling out Conservative policy changes such as scrapping a target for all new homes to be zero carbon.

But Miliband said he was not interested in political point-scoring in his call for a zero emissions target, which he said was backed by Tory, Liberal Democrat, SNP and Green party MPs.

“I’m not in the business of trying to have a go at the government. Paris is too important. I genuinely hope they will look upon this as a sensible cross-party initiative which they can support,” he said.

French authorities have said the Paris summit will still go ahead despite the recent terror attacks, although authorities have forbidden a planned march that was expected to attract hundreds of thousands of people. Miliband, who attended the last major climate summit, in Copenhagen in 2009, said he was hopeful of a “decent” deal at Paris.

“The stakes are high … it’s very, very important that Paris is a success. By a success, I mean serious commitments from the major emitters, which we have. But crucially with this so-called ratchet mechanism for the ambition to be greater.”

Countries representing nearly 90% of emissions have put forward their climate pledges before the summit, but a UN analysis found they would still lead to temperature rises of 2.7-3C – more than the 2C limit to which leaders have agreed. The EU, China and the US, among others, have called for a five-yearly review mechanism to ratchet up those pledges to meet 2C. “It’s very important we embed that in the agreement,” Miliband said.

He admitted that while the Copenhagen summit had been a setback in some senses, it had also laid some of the groundwork – such as a promise of $100bn a year in climate aid for poorer countries – for any deal agreed in Paris. The Paris conference opens on 30 November and runs until 11 December.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... get-in-law

[jwl]

So presumably, since reducing gross emissions to zero is impossible because, for example, it would involve banning candles and fireworks, presumably this means a zero net emissions target.

Which means he's asking for mechanisms for negative emissions. So... CCS? Tree burial? Some way of burning off atmospheric methane?

What do you think?

[Purple]

What do you think?

I think that the idea is to remove any semblance of a line where you can just say "good enough" and stop trying by presenting an impossible to reach goal. It's the equivalent of a treadmill. He does not expect you to reach it. He expects you to newer stop trying.

[Zaune]

Actually, that sounds like a very New Labour thing to do.

[Grumman]

I think that the idea is to remove any semblance of a line where you can just say "good enough" and stop trying by presenting an impossible to reach goal. It's the equivalent of a treadmill. He does not expect you to reach it. He expects you to newer stop trying.

Fine, I'll just get to work inventing my magical wood unburner. An impossible machine to reach an impossible goal.

[Darth Nostril]

Ed Milliband lost an election to a man who skullfucks dead pigs, why on earth should anyone listen to this pathetic non-entity?

[Zaune]

In fairness, however, we didn't find out about that until somewhat later.

[jwl]

Ed Milliband lost an election to a man who skullfucks dead pigs, why on earth should anyone listen to this pathetic non-entity?

Because if he didn't lose the election (and it was a close thing if you count the possibility of a coalition), he would now be prime minister and in a position to implement this. In fact he was in a position to implement this when he was energy and climate minister, if he had thought of this earlier this may already have been a thing.

[The Romulan Republic]

And to be fair, the pig fucking thing was never proven, though as someone who now routinely and gleefully refers to Britain's PM as Pig Fucker Cameron, I can hardly throw stones on that score.

Edit: Also, didn't the pig fucking thing come out after the election?

[madd0ct0r]

Lots of twaddle in this thread.

1) this is mostly driven by the Paris talks. We have a certain amount of carbon we can burn before we smash through the 2degree limit. We've burnt so much of that budget we are likely to run out before the 2050 target.
2) its slightly driven the conservatives utter failure on this. They've unpicked every policy in a systematic way. from being world leaders We're now going to miss our rages, at the easiest stage of the process.
3) zero net emissions obviously. This does not and never has included fireworks and only includes candles in countries where they are a significant source of light. Funnily enough, that does not include the UK. Domestic, transport and industrial major uses are what we should be looking at.
4) zero net emissions doesn't mean tree burial. There's a certain amount of offsets we can use naturally anyway. There's a chunk more one offs like adding new forest. Carbon capture and storage might even prove effective, although I'm not holding my breath.
5) ultimately, outside of helicopters and off road vehicles, we're going to have to avoid emitting it in the first place. And we need to start working on that now to have a chance of being ready by 2050
4)

[Purple]

I think that the idea is to remove any semblance of a line where you can just say "good enough" and stop trying by presenting an impossible to reach goal. It's the equivalent of a treadmill. He does not expect you to reach it. He expects you to newer stop trying.

Fine, I'll just get to work inventing my magical wood unburner. An impossible machine to reach an impossible goal.

I was just interpreting it. I newer said I agreed with it. The way I see it these sort of measures usually only end up hurting the living standards of the average person.

[jwl]

3) zero net emissions obviously. This does not and never has included fireworks and only includes candles in countries where they are a significant source of light. Funnily enough, that does not include the UK. Domestic, transport and industrial major uses are what we should be looking at.

When I said that I was using an extreme example to llustrate how zero gross emissions are impossible. Neither of these things contribute terribly largely to emissions, but the point is that their contribution is nonzero and they are culturally are difficult to get rid of completely. You can't functionally tell the difference between electricity from a wind farm and electricity from a thermal power station, but tell people they can't set off fireworks on bonfire night and you'll have a problem.

I'm not sure why you think tree burial can't be part of negative emissions. There isn't a massive amount of land area in the UK, so clearing old forest with tree burial to make space for new forest will likely be neccessary is forestry is going to be the main part of negative emissions in a zero-cabon UK.

[Starglider]

Ludicrous unachievable targets is part of the grand tradition of far-left governance. It just needs to be paired up with total pervasive fabrication of statistics and suppression of anyone who questions the official narrative, and it will be fully communist Corbyn approved.

[Zaune]

I dunno about Corbyn, but it's definitely the sort of thing Tony Blair would have approved of.

[Crazedwraith]

Ed Milliband lost an election to a man who skullfucks dead pigs, why on earth should anyone listen to this pathetic non-entity?

Why don't you try attacking the argument instead of the man?

We need to lower our carbon emissions greatly not matter what non-entities suggest it.