Britain 'won't hit climate targets' while Tories cosy up to fossil firms
Britain won’t hit its climate targets while Rishi Sunak’s government cosies up to oil and gas firms, experts and campaigners have warned.
Energy market experts and climate campaigners called on ministers to spend less time and money on “white elephant” projects like Carbon Capture and Storage and “Blue” hydrogen - both favoured by the fossil fuel industry. And they called for more investment in “unsexy” projects that would cut household bills more quickly - like home insulation and heat pump installations.
It comes after research found ministers - including the PM - had taken 54 meetings with oil and gas firms between January and March, amounting to 20% of all the lobbying meetings for those months. Donors with fossil fuel links helped fund Mr Sunak’s race for Number 10, with more than a quarter of the £530,000 donated to the PM from January to October last year coming from supporters with interests in oil, gas and aviation.
Mr Sunak accepted donations totalling £141,000 in 2022 from supporters with oil and gas ties. Many of the payments were for his failed Ready4Rishi summer leadership bid against Liz Truss. He also accepted the use of carbon-spewing private jets for campaign meet-and-greets.
Last month, while wildfires raged across Europe and the world recorded its’ hottest month ever, Mr Sunak confirmed plans to grant 100 new drilling licenses off the coast of Scotland. Alongside the new drilling, he announced two new Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) clusters, with billions expected to be pumped into the schemes.
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Carbon Capture and Storage (CSS) sees polluting fumes collected either for use else where, or stored underground. But Grant Hauber, a Strategic Energy Finance Advisor at Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), said it would amount to “a rounding error in its ability to remove carbon from industrial, power generation, oil and gas and processes.”
Friends of the Earth’s Climate Co-ordinator Jamie Peters branded CSS “the Marlboro Lights of the fossil fuel industry.” “There’s been so much resistance over the decades from the oil and gas industry for any change,” he told this newspaper. “Talk about being gaslit, the government talking about how digging up new oil and gas is going to help us reach net zero is beyond absurd.”
Arjun Flora, the IEEFA’s European Director said the UK had “too much reliance on CCS for climate mitigation, and the UK continues to move blindly towards increased reliance on fossil gas in the energy mix.”
He added: “This is likely the result of significant lobbying by the gas industry, as CCS remains expensive and unproven at scale. Last year IEEFA estimated that over-reliance on gas could cost the UK economy £100 billion on its path to net zero - a colossal waste of money.”
And he warned: “New IEEFA research to be published next month will show that the UK, perhaps in its rush to show progress on CCS, is funding the wrong types of CCS projects, which would lock in more gas use and exposure to volatile prices, instead of decarbonising existing emissions in the industrial and power sectors.”
The Government has also heavily invested in hydrogen as an alternative energy. But so-called “blue hydrogen” - which is about 95% of the hydrogen currently produced globally, and is favoured by the oil and gas industry - is a byproduct of fossil gas.
Mr Flora said: “By pursuing 'blue hydrogen' production and hydrogen for residential heating, while holding back proven and cost-effective technologies that can wean us off gas imports and emissions, such as onshore wind, building insulation and heat pumps.
The IEEFA, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace all suggested less money should be spent on CSS and more on home insulation and heat pump installations.
“There was up until 2013 a fairly good programme being rolled out,” Greenpeace’s Georgia Whittaker said. “And at that point there was around one to two million houses a year being insulated. Then in 2013, David Cameron decided to ‘cut the green crap’…and now we have energy efficiency and insulation has just dropped year on year on year.”
Ms Whittaker said insulation would have had a “tangible effect” on people’s bills during the cost of living crisis - with up to a £1,000 difference in cost between a well insulated and poorly insulated home. She added: ”Last year with bills being high, with record high inflation, it should have been the easiest and most common sense solution to invest in - yet the schemes that were set up to really help people in fuel poverty have just been absolute failures.”
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A spokesperson for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said: “We are fully committed to our legally-binding target of achieving net zero by 2050 – and are leading the world to achieve it. In fact, between 1990 and 2021 we cut emissions by 48 per cent while growing our economy by 65 per cent – decarbonising faster than any other G7 country.
“However, the transition to non-fossil forms of energy cannot happen overnight and even when we’re net zero, we will still need some oil and gas, recognised by the Independent Climate Change Committee, alongside the necessity, not option, of increasing carbon capture, usage and storage”.
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