Royal Society Response to UK Climate Change Review. (March 31, 2006)

    Following is the strongly worded media release from the President of the Royal Society of London in response to the UK government's review on climate change.

28 Mar 2006

 

The Royal Society tells the UK government just what it thinks is wrong with its policy on climate change.

 

...Lord Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society, said:

 

"In this review the Government appears to be pinning its hopes on measures that haven't delivered in the past, such as its policies on energy efficiency, which makes it difficult to have confidence that the projected emissions reductions will be delivered.

 

"2010 is just around the corner and clearly much work will need to be done if the Government is even to meet its revised target of cutting emissions of carbon dioxide by 15 - 18 per cent by this time. To meet this we will have to cut our emissions by around 5 - 8 per cent in the next 4 years a challenge that is underlined by the fact that the latest UK figures show that our emissions of greenhouse gases are still going in the wrong direction.

 

"Furthermore, the cuts in UK carbon dioxide emissions achieved to date have largely not been the result of the Government's climate change policies. Instead they are due to changes such as the liberalisation of the gas market in the 1980s which led to a move away from coal and oil burning for electricity generation and a reduction in heavy industry.

 

"Given that road transport is responsible for a huge proportion of the UK's carbon dioxide emissions 25 per cent of the total in 2003 the review's commitments in this area are unconvincing. It is not clear that they will deliver the kind of emissions reductions described.

 

"The Royal Society has recommended that the Government should associate a cost to the emission of carbon dioxide regardless of source transport, domestic and industrial either through the introduction of a carbon tax or an auctioned emissions trading scheme. This would encourage the development of cleaner technologies and a move away from carbon based fuels in the overall energy supply as well as promoting energy efficiency measures.

 

"It is significant that the Government is going to miss its target of cutting carbon dioxide by 20 per cent by 2010 both because the Prime Minister has taken an international stand on climate change and because this is a long race that must be started well.  We must act now. Because of time-lags in the climate system we are setting in motion today a series of potentially very serious consequences that will be played out at a future time, when there will be little that can be done to prevent them.

 

"More intensive efforts to meet these targets will stimulate new technologies which would be intrinsically beneficial to this country and beyond."

Additional material from the Royal Society on matters of climate change and energy production can be found at http://www.royalsociety.org/landing.asp?id=1278.