We could have saved sixpence ...

"Mr Rooney, we could have saved sixpence. We have saved fivepence. But at what cost?" - All that Fall, 1957

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Open publication - Free publishing - More carbon census

This month the government published our latest national CO2 statistics. They are quite interesting to look at, you can read the full press release here or just have a quick look at the chart above.

The headline is that CO2 is going in the right direction and everyone is rather pleased. In total we seem to have cut our national carbon footprint by 28%. That's the kind of good news we like to hear, if things are indeed what they seem.

But of course, things are not what they seem. The first big sleight of hand is to have excluded from the data the only 2 major sectors where carbon emissions are growing massively: shipping (up 17% since 1990) and aviation (up 109%). When these are included, the total UK saving falls to 25%.

But 25% is still good right? Well, it sounds good, but what's strange is that a big chunk of this saving (about a third of it, actually, or about 8% points) has been delivered in the last two years. And because the reporting is all a year in arrears, that means between 2007 and 2009. Hmmm. Can anyone think of anything that might have happened from 2007 to 2009 that would have reduced our carbon footprint by about 8%?

So what are we left with? When you include the boats and planes that refuel in the UK and allow for the recession we've just been having, well then you're left with about a 17% saving over 19 years, or about 0.9% per annum. Somehow that doesn't seem so exciting to me.



Here is the data table as published under, I believe, Kyoto reporting agreements. You'll notice it doesn't include shipping and aviation, we had to dig those out of a footnote to come up with the chart above.

Zero carbon homes - good policy, bad politics

Budget day today, and big news on Zero Carbon Homes. The best summary so far was from our friends at UK GBC, who said this at 5.30pm, when all the shouting died down:

“In the space of two weeks, this government has gone from a firm commitment on zero carbon homes, to a watered down policy. A zero carbon home will no longer do what it says on the tin. The world leading commitment that new homes would not add to the carbon footprint of our housing stock from 2016 has been scrapped despite a remarkable consensus between industry and NGOs in support of it. ... it is a backward step by a government that wanted to be seen as ‘the greenest ever’.” 

So, a bit of a surprise then? After all, it was only in February Grant Shapps had said "the commitment to Zero Carbon remains in place - there's no ambiguity about that" and then on 8 March, just a couple of weeks ago, The Carbon Plan from DECC was still saying things like "the government is committed to ensuring that new-build homes are zero carbon from 2016 and do not add extra carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere". So we might have been forgiven for thinking this one was in the bag, right?

But actually, I think not. It was inevitable that the Zero Carbon Homes objective would be watered down in some way, and here's why: this was a policy which genuinely seemed to say "let's incur cost now, so we can create benefits later - we may not be around to enjoy those benefits ourselves, but let's create them anyway, just because it is so important."

Well, I actually quite like the sound of that. And so do a lot of people. But not most people, and what most people seem to want at the moment is growth and less red tape. So from that point of view, Zero Carbon Homes was a good policy with bad politics - and relaxing it was, well, a bad policy with good politics.

Tant pis.

Why the Carbon Census?

So, let's use our first post to answer the first question: why do we need a carbon census? The answer is easy: 27 million homes in the UK; 142 million tonnes of CO2; each of our homes is producing 5-6 tonnes of CO2 every year. That's just from using the gas and electricity that's piped into our homes every day. Altogether home energy use creates a quarter of all CO2 emissions in the UK, more than all road transport combined. It's a huge deal. We definitely need a census. The official emissions statistics are published here for those who are interested.