The UK’s Climate Change Act ‘faces a stress test’

So says an ardent fan of the idea of human-caused weather variations, who thinks UK climate laws were ‘once the envy of the world’. But unwelcome reality strikes in due course, because those in charge ‘underestimate just how far-reaching the necessary changes are’. The article tries to make out that a bit more belt tightening will do the trick, which almost certainly underplays the pain ahead if the current over-the-top net zero policies are persisted with.
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The Scottish government’s decision to row back on its 2030 climate pledge illustrates the crux of any target: it’s easy to set one with a big political flourish, but harder to follow through with a careful plan to achieve it, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

Does that mean that targets for reducing the emissions of greenhouse gas driving climate change are worthless? Not necessarily.

There are two types of climate target: the empty promise and the calculated ambition. Only one of these works.

Empty promises abound in climate policy. Such targets deflect criticism—look, they say, we take climate change seriously, we have a strong target. But a closer look reveals, at best, loopholes and at worst, no plan at all.
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The UK’s Climate Change Act, a landmark piece of legislation first introduced in 2008, is the second type of climate target: the calculated ambition. It set a long-term target, amended in 2019 to the more ambitious goal of net zero emissions by 2050.

Crucially, it also set a series of legally binding interim targets or “carbon budgets,” overseen by a watchdog, the Climate Change Committee, which reports progress to parliament each year.

As Scotland’s example shows, however, a rigorous plan still needs to be executed—and governments and firms underestimate just how far-reaching the necessary changes are.

The best laid schemes…
A target must be achievable as well as ambitious. Before the UK set its net zero target in 2019, it asked the Climate Change Committee whether it could be done—and went ahead reassured by the committee’s careful analysis and conclusion that eliminating greenhouse gas emissions is both possible, and also socially and economically beneficial.

This is, perhaps, where Scotland went wrong: ignoring the Climate Change Committee’s advice and setting a more stringent target without quite knowing how it would meet it.

The UK’s carbon budgets may be legally binding, but this doesn’t make them watertight. Governments won’t sue themselves, so the system relies on others to hold them to account—which is exactly what happened in 2022, when three campaigning organizations took the government to court over its inadequate climate strategy, and won.

Although the Climate Change Act is much admired [Talkshop comment – by climate alarmists], it has significant weaknesses that are now difficult to ignore, as my own analysis has shown. Statutory targets are set at the national level only, and the contribution to be made by each sector of the economy, or by local areas, is not specified.

Neither are there clear links to planning or industrial strategy, which is why proposals for coal mines or drilling for oil are being dragged through the courts. Without a step change in climate ambition, future governments are likely to face further legal challenges.

Full article here.