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Good points in the Zero Hour initiative of the Climate and Nature (CAN) Bill

The Zero Hour briefing documents

• make a strong case for climate change being an overriding priority
• clearly state a target limit for global warming (1.5°C)
• emphasize the importance of adhering to the UK's per capita share of the global carbon budget for 1.5°C
• emphasize accounting for all the CO2 emissions that the UK is responsible for, including from imports and aviation
• expose serious flaws in the UK Government's Net Zero 2050 strategy, namely the failure to reduce emissions faster than the global average (as specified in the Paris Agreement), and the failure to properly account for emissions embedded in imports.

Serious flaws in the Zero Hour initiative

Understating the urgency of climate action
In 2021, the IPCC said [1]:

"unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach"

Numerically, the urgency of climate action is given by

• the short time before the UK's per capita carbon budget is exhausted at current emission rates:
• including imports, the UK's carbon budget for 1.5°C runs out in 2026 [2]
• excluding imports, the UK's carbon budget for 1.5°C runs out in 2028 [2]
• the size of the emission cuts needed to stay within the carbon budget, i.e. of the order of 20% per year [3].

The Zero Hour documents do not mention the 2026 date. There is a mention of the 2028 date for exhaustion of the UK's carbon budget excluding imports, but this is only in the Appendix of the Ambition Gap document [4], and is not in other documents, e.g. in the approaches to MPs. The imminent exhaustion of the UK's carbon budget is such a crucial point that it should be highlighted everywhere.

The size of the emission cuts needed (of the order of 20% per year) is not stated in the Zero Hour documents in numerical terms, just in text such as "a pace unprecedented in peacetime" [4], which is open to wide interpretation. This is a serious omission.

Controversial carbon accounting: omitting emissions from imports in calculating the UK's cumulative CO2 emissions
The Zero Hour briefing documents emphasize the the importance of counting all CO2 emissions including those generated in the production of imported goods (termed "consumption emissions" rather than "territorial emissions"), but the wording of the CAN Bill specifies that only territorial and aviation emissions would be included in totting up the UK's cumulative emissions in order to keep within a fair carbon budget. This would mean that, including imports, the UK would take about 40% more than its fair share of the global carbon budget for 1.5°C. If other countries followed suit, the total additional global emissions would be an extra 40%. This would lead to global warming of 1.6°C, not 1.5°C.

There are several arguments in favour of including emissions from imports in carbon accounting. A principal one is that this is in line with the UK's international commitments since Principle 2 of the Rio Declaration is "States should ... discourage or prevent the relocation and transfer to other States of any activities and substances that cause severe environmental degradation ..." [5]. So the transfer of much manufacturing from the UK to abroad that has taken place for several decades goes against the Rio Declaration, and should not be ignored.

Lack of transparency over carbon accounting
There is inconsistency in terminology in the Zero Hour initiative e.g. "total carbon footprint" is used in the Ambition Gap report [4] to mean including emissions embedded in imports, but in the CAN Bill, "total emissions" is used to mean excluding imports. It seems likely that many readers will be unaware that this is what the Bill intends. Whether or not imports are included is such a crucial point that this exclusion from Zero Hour's calculation of the UK's cumulative emissions should be prominently and explicitly stated.

Advocating inadequate action
Zero Hour documents fail to highlight the scale and speed of changes needed throughout society to achieve the emission cuts effectively promised in the Paris Agreement, e.g. an immediate end to leisure flights. It is not good enough to say that changes will be decided in consultation with a citizens' assembly without giving any indication of the radical transformation that is needed.

There is a common misconception that a gradual decarbonisation is all that is needed - even The Guardian is still promoting flights to Japan, India and South America for holidays. Zero Hour is adding to this misconception, leaving an information vacuum where the Government can continue to freeze fuel duty, and invest in unproven technological "solutions".

The proposed Zero Hour procedure is that the CAN Bill will progress through Parliament during 2025 as a Private Members' Bill, and that once passed the Government would have 12 months to present a plan, i.e. potentially in 2026. This would mean that of the 2 years to when the UK's fair carbon budget including imports runs out in 2026, all of the time would be spent in drawing up a plan. (And of the 4 years from now to when the UK's carbon budget excluding imports runs out in 2028, half the time would be spent passing the Bill and drawing up a plan.) This timescale is nonsensical; the planet needs radical action now, not in 2 years time. Everyone who cares about the climate should be saying this.

Conclusion

The Zero Hour initiative understates the urgency of climate change, and advocates an inadequate timescale of action. This makes it a part of the spectrum of climate denial of climate advocacy groups (implicatory climate denial [6]), and means that the CAN Bill should not be given unqualified support at present.

References

[1]	IPCC Press Release (2021) https://un-spbf.org/event/ipcc-press-release-climate-action-cannot-wait/
[2]	Carbon budget calculations for the UK https://www.carbonindependent.org/170.html
[3]	https://cusp.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/WP-29-Zero-Carbon-Sooner-update.pdf
[4]	Net Zero: The Ambition Gap (2022) Zero Hour https://zerohour.uk/downloads/ambition-gap.pdf
[5]	https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/generalassembly/docs/globalcompact/A_CONF.151_26_Vol.I_Declaration.pdf
[6]	Wullenkord & Reese (2021) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494421001365

First published: 1 Nov 2024
Last updated: 12 Nov 2024