Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change announced last Friday the UK’s ‘Road to Copenhagen.’ With a strategy that is ambitious, effective, and fair the Government believes that we can make great headway coming into the Climate Change Sumit and achieve a robust (i.e. staying below a 2°C rise in global temp) climate agreement that all (relevant) countries agree to. Well, no counter arguing from me on that point.

The target the world needs to achieve by 2050 is a 50% reduction in GHG emissions. However, for the developed countries it has to be 80% for us to have a 50% chance of staying below a 2°C rise. A rise above 2°C will create (it is predicted) an irreversible climate change escalation with consequences we have never faced before. With such a dire outlook beckoning I must say that the targets and plan by the UK is amiable. Secretary Miliband even says the policy covers aviation, shipping and deforestation which have failed to be included in much of the previous policies.

There are some issue we have to consider however. Starting domestically, the Road to Copenhagen report has a five-page dedicated section to the role of technology in reducing GHG emissions. That should be encouraging, especially since the Government has noticeably failed elsewhere in appreciating the capabilities of technology. The Low Carbon Industrial Strategy for example represents an exceptional policy convergence on an almost unprecedented scale but somehow fails to explicitly acknowledge neither the role of ICT nor the promotion of a carbon market. The Digital Britain report on the other hand has completely failed to align with a low carbon agenda. The Copenhagen report does mention the need for a carbon market, but fails to significantly promote the role technology has to play. What’s more is the Carbon Reduction Commitment which Intellect believes “could be particularly bad for IT companies who take on the energy liability of other organisations when IT functions are outsourced to them. These processes will probably be carried out far more efficiently but the IT company will in effect be penalised for growing it’s business and saving energy.” And this is a mistake.

I am wondering why none of these strategies clearly link in to each other or why they have not realised the benfit that would arise from promoting a leading role for the tech insutry. In essence these inspiring policy agendas are, it appears, departmentalised from one another. And that is another mistake.

Nonetheless, the plan is more ambitious than anything else we have seen and will hopefully pressure other countries to follow suit. Pressure that is desperately needed since the upper levels (the ones we on minimum need to feel comfortable) of EU commitments rest upon other countries’ commitments to GHG reduction. And that is where the international politics of climate change will let us down again. As I have written elsewhere, to reach an international agreement (that actually tackles the issue in its entirety) is near impossible, but Copenhagen will have an agreement but how effective it will be remains highly uncertain. The highly praised American Clean Air and Security Bill (a cap-and-trade scheme) if passed could deliver emissions reductions equivalent to at least 4% on 1990 levels… the EU target is minimum 20% reduction on 1990 levels. Anyone see an issue here? What will Obama’s green stimulus package and budget do to rectify this, well there is no real targets set in either so who knows?

Technorati Tags: CRC, DECC, digital britain, Government Policy, LCIS, Road to Copenhagen, role of technology

Tags: CRC, DECC, digital britain, Government Policy, LCIS, Road to Copenhagen, role of technology

This entry was posted on Friday, July 3rd, 2009 at 10:52 am and is filed under Energy and Environment, Private Sector, Public Sectors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.