Q&A

Yesterday the Committee on Climate Change published its recommendations for how the government should implement the requirements of the Climate Change Bill to introduce legally binding carbon budgets for the next 15 years.

I have to declare an interest in this subject – when I worked at Friends of the Earth we wrote the first report  calling for carbon budgets to be introduced, as long ago as March 2005. Then while working in Government I was lucky enough to be involved in writing the concept into the Draft Climate Change Bill which has just been finalised and become an Act.

The UK needs its own legislation because there is insufficient clarity at an international level about what it is each country is required to do to combat climate change – the Kyoto Protocol currently runs out in 2012 and the EU’s policy package has still to be agreed and is anyway contingent on a new global deal being reached. So in this policy vacuum the UK has been merrily drifting along – doing some bits and pieces to try to incentivise and disincentivise various things - but failing overall to deliver a sustained reduction in emissions across the economy as a whole. The Climate Change Act was designed to create both the impetus and the tools for the UK to act, decisively and unilaterally, in pursuit of a low carbon economy.

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