The UK's independent Committee on Climate Change told the government Monday that by 2020, it should cut its emissions of carbon dioxide 42% below 1990 levels if a new global deal to abate the effects of climate change is reached by 2012. That is a tough goal. In a report that gave the UK a large set of recommendations for action, the committee also said the government should allow new coal-fired plants to be built only if they are retrofitted with carbon capture and storage equipment by the early 2020s. If the deadline is not met, the suggestion is, plants may have to face harsh limits on hours of operation.
The committee's CEO, David Kennedy, told Platts' Emissions Daily Monday that the recommendation means the market must not be permitted to control when CCS technology is deployed.
"You don't want the use of conventional coal to continue," he said, "because the idea is that the carbon price [under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme] will be too high in the future for coal emissions. You might say leave it to the market and investors to retrofit plants in accordance with the carbon price, but there's too much uncertainty about what the price of carbon will be in the 2020s. The best thing to do is to recommend that we only allow new facilities to be built if they are CCS ready."
The government did not react immediately to everything in the report. But Ed Miliband, secretary of state for the Department of Energy and Climate Change, responded to its setting of carbon budgets. "We will give the report the in-depth consideration it deserves before responding in full, but I am pleased to say that from 2009, carbon budgets will take their place alongside financial budgets, and become pivotal to policy decisions within the UK," he said.
The report came out the same day the UN climate change conference began in Poznan, Poland, where negotiators from around the world will try to set the stage for next year's meeting to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. Experts on the process said nothing major was expected from Poznan, but some progress could be made toward articulating what some called a "vision" for cooperation. Without knowing what the US will do on climate, however, it will be difficult to get very far. President-elect Barack Obama is to have representatives there as observers, but there is still a long way to go before the US has policy in place.
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