Earlier this week I imagined, not altogether seriously, how Boris Johnson came to create his Ten Point Plan for the climate, or the Green Industrial Revolution, if you like. At the time there was no detail other than the Prime Minister’s article in the FT and a shortish press release. Now the Government has published its booklet, there is now some flesh on the bones, to explore.
Firstly it would be churlish not to welcome some of the big announcements. Plans to bring forward to 2030 the date after which vehicles running on petrol or diesel are of course good news – aside from the fact that hybrids, which run on petrol or diesel, can continue to be sold. A big increase in the number of electric vehicles on the roads is planned…. more of which later.
There is also good news in the Government’s plans significantly to increase offshore wind power, as a source of renewable electricity; and to increase the number of charging points for electric vehicles. Indeed the booklet (as the Government describes it – isn’t it a Green Paper?) has a number of these laudable plans included within it. And plans to introduce ground and air-source heat pumps at scale, to replace fossil gas heating for residential buildings is certainly to be welcomed.
But there are some more problematic proposals, such as nuclear power. Does anyone know when Hinkley Point C is actually going to produce any electricity? The date keeps being pushed further and further back – with the latest date for finishing as 2025. The paper suggests it will be up and running in the “mid-2020s”, giving some more wriggle room. Meanwhile the Government recently announced it was forging ahead with Sizewell C nuclear power station, using the same troubled design as Hinkley C. There is still no long term solution to the problem of nuclear waste.
What about Hydrogen? The Prime Minister somewhat flippantly suggested we could be using this highly flammable gas to cook on in the future, but how would it be made? The paper proposes the development of projects that produce Hydrogen as a “low Carbon” fuel. Low Carbon is code for “slightly greener fossil fuels” and may involve some sort of technofix to mitigate the Greenhouse Gas footprint, for example the fabled Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) – where Greenhouse Gases, mostly Carbon Dioxide, are captured at the point of emission (such a power stations) and pumped into subterranean spaces where they can be stored forever more. A lot of people are placing a great deal of hope in CCS, but it has yet to be proven to work at the scale needed. Much much more investment will be needed if CCS is going to make a useful contribution to climate action in the timescale needed.
A much more promising approach to Hydrogen is to create it using purely renewable energy, so called Green Hydrogen – as opposed to the low Carbon, but still fossil0-fuel derived Blue Hydrogen. There is an effectively limitless supply of electrolyte (sea water) so applying electricity from wind farms or solar, could produce all the Hydrogen anyone could ever need, with as near to a zero climate footprint as makes no difference. The Business Department BEIS has funded a project called Gigastack developing the technology to produce Green Hydrogen – but the funding is minute – just £7.5M from a £90M fund from which most of the money has gone to fossil Hydrogen projects.
One interesting omission, which will annoy the National Farmers Union, is that the 10 point plan fails to mention anywhere the production of gas from anaerobic digesters (AD), mainly from digesting crops grown specifically for this purpose. The NFU have put all of their chips on a big expansion of biogas from “crops to AD ” (paid for by generous subsidies from the taxpayer), coupled with carbon capture and storage, in their plan for farming to achieve net zero by 2040. This is just as well, as to provide biogas to replace fossil gas for every house in the UK (excluding industrial use or in power stations) would require nearly twice our entire arable farmland area.
Point 5 – Green Public Transport, Cycling and Walking is perhaps the most exciting of all the proposals, with plans to invest billions into electrifying the train network, city transport, zero carbon buses – plus properly segregated cycle lanes and low traffic neighbourhoods. Once the initial wave of excitement passes, it is important to look at the track record of this Government and its prior incarnations back to 2010. Rail electrification has stalled since then. Traffic volumes have increased. The size of cars has increased dramatically. The Covid pandemic has driven a stake through the heart of public transport and it will take something dramatic to get people back to using it again even after we have all been vaccinated. Cycle lanes and low traffic neighbourhoods that have been introduced this year have generated a vicious backlash from the motoring lobby. For these things to really happen, the Government will need to mandate local authorities with the powers – and duties – and the funding. Otherwise it will be another well meaning pipe dream to add to the pile. It’s not as though this is new, after all.
What about the actual Green of Nature? Much energy has been expended lately among Quangos, think tanks and NGOs talking up “nature-based solutions” to impending climate chaos. Simply put this means encouraging natural processes to better absorb all those Greenhouse Gases we – and that is we, as in the Industrialised North, have been merrily adding to the atmosphere over the past 200 years (but especially the last 40).
This bit of the Plan is a bit thin, to be honest. The now well-worn 30,000ha of new tree planting target is wheeled out – and of course this comes with its own special set of problems, as I illustrated recently. It was also evident that the the Department in charge of writing the plan, BEIS, had not really checked what they had written with Defra, the Environment department. BEIS must have picked up on Defra’s plans to create new Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and National Parks, and decided that this in itself would lead to lots more carbon being locked up – in trees, presumably. The two are at present unrelated. Creating new AONBs and National Parks will not lead to any additional carbon being absorbed, unless their remits are drastically changed. Turning the Chilterns into a National Park, for example, will not lead to it being covered in trees – at least not any more than are already there. Plenty of those are currently being chopped down, thanks to HS2.
BEIS also got confused when considering flood defences, thinking that this should be included under the heading “protecting our natural environment.” In most cases the opposite is true, with hard engineered flood and coastal defences, and the dredging that goes with them, actively damaging the natural environment to protect human habitation. Natural flood management was alluded to, but of the £5.2Bn budget for flood and coastal defence mentioned, only a few million has so far been allocated to natural flood management projects.
So much for the detail (and yes I have skipped over some of the points in the name of brevity). What about the fundamentals?
The well-respected climate thinktank, Carbon Brief, has done the maths and concluded that, adding all of the proposals in this Revolutionary Plan together, gets half way to the 2032 waymark the Government has already set down, on the path to net-zero by 2050.
Perhaps even more fundamentally, the Plan is based on the idea that economic growth will pay for the damage to the environment caused by… economic growth. It assumes we can continue to live our current lifestyles without any changes. It assumes that we can continue to travel just as much in our electric cars as we do in our petrol cars. It assumes we can continue to consume as much stuff as we do now, without any cost.
In this sense the Revolution is anything but, it’s Business as Usual plus a bit of tinkering – and it will not solve our most pressing, or long term, problems.
But that isn’t to say it should be dismissed. It indicates a recognition from within Government that we have serious environmental problems which need to be addressed. And given the backlash against these proposals, from elements of the media and the political right, its intentions should be welcomed. After all it was only a few years ago when Boris Johnson was favourably quoting covid19 and climate denier Piers Corbyn, on how the Sun controls the Climate.
a new nature blog 
Thanks Miles, this is a very helpful analysis. Like you, I welcome the commitment to offshore wind but it poses a similar risk to the target to plant more trees. Just as we need the right tree, right place so we need the right turbine, right place. Our seabirds are already suffering alarming population decreases and there is incontrovertible evidence that offshore wind in important feeding grounds can accelerate the declines. We know the areas to avoid but that hasn’t prevented damaging offshore wind farms from being approved: http://ww2.rspb.org.uk/our-work/rspb-news/news/423661-hornsea-offshore-wind-farm-decision-devastating-for-iconic-seabirds- Mitigating the climate crisis by destroying nature will lead us to the same fate, just by a different route.
This is the best review I have seen of these proposals. Hope you don’t mind me sharing?
Many thanks
please do, Roger
Many thanks for this … great overview.
I can detail the flood control racket a little further as you outline it well … looks like we’re up now to around 4% of flood and coastal defence funds going to Natural Flood Management; some of this well spent (tree planting) but much of it not.
We’ve seen NFM deployed in Gloucestershire with a focus on leaky weirs constructed out of felled timbers – hardly sustainable as they will rot within a few more years (but appreciated in short term they have mostly provided important flood peak moderation downstream). But will the funding be available to replace when required ? Why wasn’t this money spent on something useful and local wealth creating ?
As one local dairy farmer put it when scoping these approaches, a decade ago; would he like a flood attenuating reservoir for some useful pasture irrigation water during dry spells (and other resource gains) – “yes of course” he said, “but THEY won’t allow it”. This wise farmer was absolutely correct.
Just who THEY may be is hard to determine; ever more remote interests but also some daft local ones complicit here, all without much grasp of safe and viable water management.
NFM has been deployed on an opportunity basis; with little understanding of the local hydrology or landowners wishes and other local expert knowledge (1). Raised groundwater flooding has also threatened some properties due to this.
NFM so far has thus been some great Greenwash PR. Obscuring the fact that much more of the flood levy (>96%) is spent mostly on the the process of shooting our potentially useful rainwater around or through our conurbations – out to sea, with civil engineered approaches. So much the better of course to thus help create drought from which these same interests can profit from grandiose catchment transfer & mega reservoir projects.
As one EA catchment manager put it “the super tanker is slow to turn”. It certainly is, if not actually stuck on the rocks and sinking fast.
This is all part of a wider perspective that Monbiot called out as “corruption” in discussing the catastrophic decline in UK river water quality (2). In our increasingly diabolical society, if not corrupt certainly corrupted attitudes prevail.
Our landscapes, since the Enclosures and no doubt long before, have thus been treated by our elites as simply a ‘wealth extraction opportunity’…
(1) https://www.stroudnewsandjournal.co.uk/news/lettersextra/14273279.readers-letter-proper-discussions-would-have-averted-damp-squib-of-a-policy/
(2) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/12/government-britains-rivers-uk-waterways-farming-water-companies
With respect to the longevity of NFM measures in your area, the only way of which to determine how long they will last is by trial and error.
With nature unless it is well researched it is very difficult to determine how long your structures will last. In theory the more small structures you place, the less reliance there is on one particular structure, even if the odd ones fail.
Hopefully the government can allow and find some amount of funding to be distributed to researching into such a little known area that could be beneficial in many areas in the country!
‘Trial and error’ of the well understood natural process of seasonally wetted wood rotting quickly is hardly responsible for use in active flood measures – where catchments are steep and people’s homes are exposed to the inevitable failures downstream.
Our Government, in almost all respects of river & agri/environmental management is horribly corrupted; by a myriad vested interests enabled by ignorant bureaucrats & politicians (apparently informed by a ‘wicked echo-chamber’ created by often mercenary academia).
In the case of Natural Flood (Drought) Management, this was all resolved and proposed decades ago by self funded community groups, in UK and elsewhere (eg for Stroud District Council, 1993, http://www.water21.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Water21Scheme.jpg ). Only permanent structures (or full natural conservation) for attenuation are viable; including of course stable and restored soils.
Do you understand that we could easily double UK food production by simply storing all excess floodwater for irrigation within permanent structures (and other uses), largely negating all flood and drought ? (Here one UK exemplar, film 20 mins, http://www.water21.org.uk/2012/dawn-to-dusk-2015/ ) This would of course take away a lucrative racket for civil engineering & chemical companies; the outrageous reason we need farm subsidies incidentally (with a million or so farm ponds & reservoirs drained by UKGov during past half century contributing).
And they call it Climate Change ….
We want the former but what we are doing, we get the latter. Thank you!