UK carbon budget: offshoring emissions reductions |
Oscar Reyes | Thursday, 23 April 2009 | |
The UK government has set "the
world´s first carbon budget" which seems to include a
worthy, if tautological, intention to meet its climate change
commitments domestically.
On closer inspection, though, the pledge to cut 34 per cent of emissions by 2022 – modest compared to the 43 per cent recommended by the UK Parliament´s Climate Change Committee - is riddled with so many loopholes that it could be met almost in its entirety without taking any steps to clean up power generation and industry in the UK. One of the key claims made by the British government is an “Aim to meet the carbon budgets announced today through domestic action alone, and consistent with this, setting a zero limit in the non-traded sector on offsetting through international credits for the first budget period.”
This requires some decoding. Although the rhetoric talks of
“domestic action,” the only commitment in this regard refers to
the “non-traded sector,” covering the roughly half of UK carbon
emissions which are not included in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme.
These come from sources that tend to be smaller and
harder-to-measure. The “first budget period” runs to 2012, at
which point UK emissions should be 22 per cent below than 1990
levels. The latest data shows that at the end of 2006 they were
already 18 per cent lower – although not as a result of pro-active
policy measures – and the recession makes this short-term target
achievable with room to spare. Analysis of the effort required in the non-traded sector ... shows that under the projected emissions scenario modelled there is sufficient negative-cost abatement potential available to meet the anticipated shortfall. This suggests that there would be no requirement to use project credits, as sufficient abatement at lower (negative) cost is available. Therefore, under this, there would be no need to use project credits, and subsequently no additional cost of constraining their use
In other words, the UK government is spinning “a restriction on
the use of offset credits in non-traded sectors” as something
pro-active, but its own study finds that “there would be no
requirement to use project credits” anyway. UK installations can buy allowances from participants in other EU Member States and may also utilise up to 91 MtCO2 of project credits over the five year period, which represents 60 per cent of the emission reduction effort required in Phase II.
"Project credits" here are offset credits. Loosely
translated, more than half of the UK´s emissions reductions
obligations can be met outside the EU, and the remainder could be met
elsewhere within the EU, where surplus credits are plentiful thanks
to post-1990 economic restructuring in Central and Eastern Europe and
the current recession. The news is not all gloomy. A commitment of £525 for offshore wind farms is good news, while £70 million for decentralised community low-carbon energy, and another £25 million for community heating are also welcome commitments, if modest to say the least. Overall, though, what the UK carbon budget shows is that talk of a “revised target to reduce emissions to at least 34% below 1990 emissions by 2018-22” is rendered largely meaningless by carbon offsetting. |