UK Prime Minister to support CCC’s Sixth Carbon Budget

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson looks set to back the Climate Change Committee’s recommendation for a 78% reduction in UK carbon emissions between 1990 and 2035, according to a BBC report.

The initiative is considered very ambitious and would lead the global effort to limit global warning. The announcement is likely timed to coincide with Earth Day on 22 April 2021 and ahead of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in November. The Prime Minister intends to back the CCC’s recommendations announced in the December 2020 CCC Sixth Carbon Budget (2033-2037) which concluded that UK emissions should fall by almost 80% by 2035.

Cutting emissions to this extent would require all UK electricity production to be net zero, and all new cars, vans and replacement boilers to be zero carbon by 2035, the CCC said in December 2020.

The Sixth Carbon Budget report estimated that financial savings from a major investment drive to decarbonise the economy would ‘substantially reduce the cost of net zero’ compared with previous assessments ‘down to less than 1% of GDP throughout the next 30 years’, due to the falling cost of offshore wind and a range of low cost, low carbon solutions in every sector.

New research by Green New Deal claims the loss of 813,000 jobs in the UK over the last 12 months could be offset by around 240,000 green jobs over a two-year period and 720,000 over the next 10 years.

See Petroleum Review’s forthcoming May 2021 issue for analysis of the CCCs’s Sixth Carbon Budget.