How to Re-establish the UK’s Lead on Climate Change
Former chair of the Committee on Climate Change Lord Deben believes the country can get back on track to net zero and regain its status as a global leader.
When Glasgow hosted COP26 in 2021, bringing together 120 world leaders and more than 40,000 participants, the UK was seen as a world leader in the battle against climate change.
Two years earlier, then prime minister Theresa May had positioned the country at the forefront of the sustainability agenda as the first major economy to pass a net zero emissions law. In 2020, her successor Boris Johnson launched a 10-point plan for a Green Industrial Revolution.
However, subsequent Conservative prime ministers – Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak – “didn’t understand the urgency”, according to the Rt Hon John Selwyn Gummer, Lord Deben, Conservative Party peer and former chair of the UK’s Committee on Climate Change (CCC) from 2012 to 2023.
The committee’s most recent report, published in July, called for swift action to achieve the UK’s 2030 target of reducing carbon emissions by 68% compared to 1990 levels.
Speaking at the World Coffee Innovation Summit London, held in mid-October, Lord Deben outlined three immediate actions needed to get the UK back on track and reposition itself as a world leader.
First, it must reduce and ultimately suspend production of fossil fuels. “The previous [Conservative] government’s decision to extend oil and gas licences in the North Sea was wrong and I fought against [the Offshore Petroleum Licensing bill],” Lord Deben said. “We must leave carbon in the ground.”
The new Labour government is already moving to reverse the decision. In its first 100 days, it announced plans to launch a consultation later this year on the implementation of its manifesto pledge not to issue new licences to explore new fields.
The second thing the UK must do is implement an in-depth, step-by-step transition plan.
While the Conservative government introduced net zero as a statutory requirement five years ago and committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 100% by 2050, it has been twice taken to the UK High Court for failings in its climate strategy. In May, the court found the government’s inadequate climate strategy to be unlawful for the second time. Lord Deben was a principal witness for the prosecution.
“The new government must rectify this and produce a detailed, complete programme showing how it will reach net zero by 2050,” he advised.
In September, the Labour government announced plans to set the UK’s nationally determined contributions for 2035 between November 2024 and February 2025. In addition, the government is due to agree the seventh carbon budget in 2025, which will cover the period from 2038-2042.
The third issue the country must tackle is the decarbonisation of its power system. While the current government has committed itself to a deadline of 2035, Chris Stark, former CEO of the CCC, is leading a new government unit called ‘Mission Control’ to deliver the results five years earlier.
“I hope we can achieve this goal,” said Lord Deben. “This will help to re-establish the UK’s global leadership position.”
Exposing ‘big oil’
Lord Deben was the longest serving Secretary of State for the Environment the UK has ever had (1993-97), and has 16 years of top-level ministerial experience in government, including as Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (1989-1993).
“Back then, I wouldn’t have believed that we would come so far in international collaboration on climate change, such as the Paris Agreement,” he said. “However, we still haven’t done enough and the effects of climate change are so much more dangerous than we thought.”
In retrospect, one thing that he wished he could have done better is to expose ‘big oil’, such as ExxonMobil, for their role in consistent lobbying to block or undermine effective climate policy.
“These companies, with their money and their friends, have pushed back the battle against climate change,” Lord Deben said. “They have done severe damage to the world and yet we are still dealing with them.”
He pointed to ExxonMobil’s plans to open a new pipeline to carry aviation fuel from its Fawley refinery to London Heathrow airport, enabling a potential 140% increase in capacity for the next two decades.
“The UK policy for net zero means aviation will be using less fossil fuel in 10-15 years – that’s absolutely in our targets. What companies like ExxonMobil do is completely different from what they say,” Lord Deben said. In 2022, ExxonMobil committed to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions for operated assets by 2050.
On the path to decarbonising the electricity grid, Lord Deben believes that nuclear should be part of the power mix. However, he criticised energy provider EDF’s under-construction nuclear station, Sizewell C, for being an outdated model.
He also disagreed with concerns raised around base-load electricity protection, which is the amount needed to guarantee power to homes and businesses during the course of the day. “The number of times that the wind doesn’t blow or there is no light in the UK is limited,” he explained. “Therefore, as we develop our renewables ecosystem, including hydro and energy interconnectors, balancing the energy grid becomes much easier.”
On the latter point, he doesn’t consider nuclear to be a suitable energy balancer because it must be in continuous operation.
“The thing that worries me about Sizewell is that we won’t need it by the time it is completed [expected in the mid-2030s]. But we’ll have paid for it, so we’ll be using it rather than wind turbines and paying the wind energy firms to turn their wind off,” said Lord Deben. “It’ll be a mess.”
Stranded assets
Speaking later with ESG Investor, Lord Deben stressed that stranded assets – when investment assets become liabilities – will present a significant challenge for investors in the transition to a low-carbon economy.
For example, agricultural assets may be at risk of stranding because of physical climate impacts such as drought and desertification. Not only could this affect the entire supply chain for a commodity type or region, but it could also increase migration from areas that are no longer arable.
Therefore, asset owners should be systematic when looking at their asset portfolio to ascertain whether it is the correct mix for the future, advised Lord Deben.
“In life, and business in particular, one should always be looking for the certainties. Although climate change means that the weather is highly variable, it is clear that climate change is getting worse every year,” he said. “As such, investors need to prepare for this certainty – in terms of both adaptation and recognising that governments will need to do something about it.”
Even if some US politicians overlook the fact that the country has been facing worse weather events than ever before, clearly investors are putting money into solutions necessary to adapt to and mitigate climate change, he added.
Regarding stranded assets, Lord Deben argued that the real estate industry, for one, hasn’t been moving fast enough to take advantage of implementing better protection to enhance the value of individual companies’ portfolios.
In the US states of Florida and California, for example, many homeowners are dealing with a shrinking pool of home insurance providers to choose from or face soaring premiums. Some areas are considered essentially uninsurable.
“The Industrial Revolution wasn’t brought about by inventors of the steam engines and other machines, although that was important. The two things that made it possible was the limited liability company and insurance,” said Lord Deben. “However, climate change makes the insurance industry extremely vulnerable, as it can’t reinsure by moving risk from one place to another. Thus, insurance firms will need to charge much higher fees than anything we’ve seen up to now.”
On the path to Baku
As the world prepares for COP29 in Azerbaijan, Lord Deben believes that the UK has an opportunity to regain its status as a global leader in the fight against climate change.
In his opinion, the upcoming COP should deliver progress in two areas. First, it needs to “ratchet up” commitments, both in terms of increasing pledges from nations who haven’t signed up to enough and holding to account those who have committed to ambitious targets. Countries are to submit stronger nationally determined contributions commitments for 2035, either at the conference or in early 2025.
Second, the conference needs to concentrate on how to finance developing countries’ transitions from where they are today to where they ought to be in terms of net zero targets “without going through a mess in between”. The previous climate finance goal, originally set in 2009, to provide US$100 billion annually by 2020 was repeatedly missed, only exceeding the target for the first time in 2022, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
“The rich countries have got to realise that this is the cheapest way to fight climate change,” said Lord Deben. “They can make a huge difference through investing relatively small amounts of money in developing countries.”
Supporting emerging economies’ transition will work to developed nations’ advantage. “For one, if we don’t do something about climate change, the issue of migration will become almost impossible to deal with,” he added. “While migration is seen as an issue today, this is insignificant compared what could happen.”
It is estimated that Bangladesh could lose 17% of its territory due to rising sea levels by 2050, resulting in the loss of 30% of the country’s agricultural land.
Lord Deben’s biggest concern today is how to convince “otherwise intelligent people” of the urgency of climate change. He pointed to climate-sceptic Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former UK cabinet minister, as well as the two candidates currently vying for the leadership of the Conservative Party, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch.
“It’s amazing how many people just don’t understand or pretend they don’t know. Badenoch said, ‘I’m not a climate sceptic, but I am net zero sceptic’. That is a nonsensical sentence,” he said. “We’ve got to break through their vincible ignorance and make them understand how much we have to do.”
He attributes some blame to a sensationalist – and biased – press, which “feels the need to concentrate on scandals, collapses and things that don’t work”.
“We know that 85% of people want to do the right thing, but they don’t know what that is,” said Lord Deben. “While the previous government refused to spend money on an extensive education programme, that is what needs to be done.”
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