Household CO2 is 500 years off target

The latest CO2 statistics were published today. Not good news. Residential emissions grew by 3 million tonnes in 2008, despite the economy being in recession for most of the year. This is why we say that current policies are not working in this sector: the average reduction in household CO2 emissions since 2002, when the flagship EEC/CERT program began, is now 0.3% per year, meaning it would take 500 years to achieve an 80% reduction. That's supposed to be our target for 2050, by the way.

You can download the data for yourself on the DECC website. The picture looks better for 2009, but DECC attribute the improvement to warmer weather in 2009 and the full dataset won't be published for another year or so.

£1 billion bank is nothing new

So, yesterday we heard the Chancellor put £1 billion of our money into a green investment bank.

But did you know we already spend much more than this? The Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (CERT) creates an obligation for energy companies to spend money every year to encourage us to buy less energy from them. The cost of this program (paid for by each of us, with small increases in our energy bills) is about £1.3 bn every year. It's mostly spent on subsidising loft and cavity wall insulation and a few hundred million low energy light bulbs.

Unfortunately this very expensive program isn't working: we'll do a post to explain why that's the case later on. I don't know why nobody writes about this in the press.