Subject: Carbon Budgets
Chairman: The Government accepted your advice to commit Britain to an 80% cut by 2050 and of course we warmly welcome that. Within the economy there are going to be some sectors that cannot achieve that 80% cut. Have you done much work on seeing perhaps which ones could realistically be expected to do more than 80%?
Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, Chair of the Committee on Climate Change: Yes we have and I think this is something that we will be looking at in further detail this year, because we will produce a report by December on aviation, where there is now a target that aviation must be at least below the 2005 by 2050. So that is flat at the present level and just mathematically of course the 2005 level is about 35 million tons out of 600 million tons or so, so about 6% of the present level. The total has to come down to about 150/160 million tons. If aviation is flat at 35 million tons, the rest has to come down by 90% or so, not by 80%.
Now there is nothing necessarily wrong with that in theory. I mean the basic theory of an optimal response to climate change should have us cutting emissions where it is easier to cut emissions, and where there are alternatives, and cutting them less in those areas where there are no alternatives.
If we have a certain budget for carbon emissions in 2050, it is logical to use that in those applications where there are least alternatives, or where the alternatives are most expensive. But we will certainly with this new target be doing work which says, what is the feasibility of other reductions? Now some of them are possible, for instance in electricity generation, we do believe it is possible by 2050, or even by 2030, we could be cutting grams per kilowatt hour not just by 80% but by 90% or even more.
I think electricity is one area where you can have long-term vision of the almost total decarbonisation of electricity, and of course the challenge at that stage if we achieve that, is then to extend electricity to other sectors of the economy.
So, it is important, I think probably at the moment we would say that there are probably two sectors where if we have a vision it probably is more difficult to achieve radical cuts, it would be aviation, and it would probably be agriculture as well.
But to the extent that you do not achieve 80% in either of those, you have got to achieve more elsewhere, but yes, we will be looking more and fine tuning over the years, the idea of if there are some sectors that don't achieve anything like 80% cuts how do we get other sectors to achieve more?