Israel will cut carbon emissions by 85% from 2015 levels by the middle of the century, its government says.
Its prime minister said the decision would help the country gradually shift to a low-carbon economy.
Targets include cutting the vast majority of emissions from transport, the electricity sector and municipal waste.
But critics want more ambitious targets for renewable energy and bigger economic incentives for change.
The world has already warmed by about 1.2C since the industrial era began, and temperatures will keep rising unless governments around the world make steep cuts to emissions.
But Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said the move would lead to a “clean, efficient and competitive economy” and put Israel at the forefront of the battle against climate change.
Israel’s targets were in line with the 2015 Paris climate agreement – a legally binding international treaty on climate change adopted by nearly 200 countries.
It aims to keep global temperatures below 2.0C above pre-industrial times, and if possible below 1.5C above pre-industrial times.
Israel signed the Paris climate deal. It has set itself an interim goal of cutting emissions by 27% by 2030.
Under President Donald Trump the US pulled out of the deal but President Joe Biden has recommitted to it.
Jude, from Hebden Bridge, said he wanted to lobby ministers about the need for a carbon tax when he arrives in London.
A petition, urging a parliamentary debate on a carbon tax, was launched in February by the Zero Carbon Campaign.
The government said it was committed to cutting emissions by 78% by 2035.
Jude was inspired after reading the book Dire Predictions, which he said offered solutions to climate change including a carbon tax.
Jude’s family have described him as a “determined child”
He then read about the Zero Carbon Campaign’s petition.
“I am hoping to get this petition to 100,000 signatures so it can get debated in parliament,” he said.
“It would make businesses think it will cost them more money to use fossil fuels and non-renewable options than to use green or renewable alternatives.”
Jude’s mother Sarah said the trip would be the family’s summer holiday
The government has been examining the relationship between tax and the environment, including a carbon tax.
However, following the consultation it ruled out a wider carbon tax in favour of a UK Emissions Trading System.
Responding to the Carbon Zero Campaign petition a spokesman said: “The government remains committed to maintaining an ambitious carbon price to ensure that polluters continue to pay for their emissions.”
Jude came up with the idea to walk to London, inspired by an uncle’s friend who cycled around the world, to help raise awareness.
“I also read about a boy who cycled from Palermo in Sicily to England to try and raise awareness for refugees,” he said.
He said he intends to walk 10 miles (16km) each day for 21 days and hopes he can inspire other young people to take on their own challenges.
His mother Sarah said: “He is quite a determined child.”
She added they had been lent a campervan and were also staying with people along the route.
Australia has the potential to develop a substantial offshore wind energy industry from scratch, with abundant resources available near existing electricity substations across the continent, according to a new report.
The Blue Economy Cooperative Research Centre said Australia was yet to capitalise on significant offshore wind capacity despite the International Energy Agency nominating it as one of the “big three” likely sources of renewable energy globally alongside solar and onshore wind.
It found more than 2,000GW of offshore wind turbines – far more than Australia’s existing generation capacity – could be installed in areas within 100km of substations. Environmentally restricted and low-wind areas were excluded from the assessment.
Sites that have traditionally been electricity generation hubs, such as the Hunter and Latrobe valleys and Gladstone, were found to be particularly suitable as they were close to transmission grids and had strong offshore winds at times when solar and onshore wind output was limited.
Dr Chris Briggs, research director at the University of Technology Sydney’s Institute for Sustainable Futures and a contributor to the report, said there had been a view in the energy industry that offshore wind energy would not play as significant a role in Australia as some other countries due to the availability of much cheaper solar and onshore wind energy.
He said that was starting to change as people recognised the scale of the clean energy transition required and what offshore wind could deliver. “The combination of the scale, falling cost and the development of floating wind turbines means it has come into focus,” he said.
Briggs said offshore wind could be built on a much larger scale than solar or onshore wind – up to 2GW for a project – and could generate more electricity per megawatt of capacity. “This could be very valuable in the late 2020s and 2030s as we see coal plants retiring,” he said.
The project’s leader, Dr Mark Hemer of the CSIRO, said offshore wind could be particularly important under “energy superpower” scenarios that involved mass electrification of industry and transport and hydrogen production for domestic use and export.
The report said there were 10 offshore wind projects with a combined capacity of 25GW in development in Australia, all at an early stage. The most advanced is the $10bn Star of the South – a 2.2GW windfarm planned for between 7km and 25km offshore in South Gippsland.
The federal government is yet to finalise the regulatory framework necessary for an offshore wind industry to develop. The report said it could help develop an industry by supporting the technology through the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, incorporating it into planning for the national hydrogen strategy, and considering allocation of marine space in commonwealth waters.
The work was partly funded by the maritime, electrical and manufacturing unions. They called on federal and state governments to take immediate steps to support the development of an industry, saying it had the potential to create jobs for workers in fossil fuel industries.
Paddy Crumlin, the national secretary of the Maritime Union of Australia, said the development of an offshore wind industry would give seafarers and offshore oil and gas workers an opportunity “to transition into the important work of delivering Australia’s clean energy future”.
Offshore wind is more advanced in countries with limited capacity to develop renewable energy on land. The report said 2030 targets for offshore wind energy totalled about 200GW, including 60GW in the European Union, 40GW in Britain and 12 GW in South Korea. Japan plans to reach 45GW by 2040.
A report by BloombergNEF and Bloomberg Philanthropies this week found Australia increased support for fossil fuel by 48% between 2015 and 2019, the largest rise in the G20.
It said most of the support had been delivered in the form of tax breaks to oil and gas projects. They included tax capex deductions for mining and petroleum operations, fuel-tax credits and reductions in fuel-excise rates and offset schemes. Australia “lost out on nearly US$6bn in foregone taxes” over the five years, it said.
The Bloomberg report did not include the Morrison government’s support for a “gas-fired recovery” from the pandemic. The government dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars to gas projects in the May budget, including up to $600m for a new power plant in the Hunter Valley that experts say is not needed.
If some politicians are to be believed, taking sweeping action to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement would be calamitous for jobs in the energy sector. But a study suggests that honouring the global climate target would, in fact, increase net jobs by about 8 million by 2050.
The study – in which researchers created a global dataset of the footprint of energy jobs in 50 countries including major fossil fuel-producing economies – found that currently an estimated 18 million people work in the energy industries, which is likely to increase to 26 million if climate targets are met.
Previous research suggests that pro-climate polices could increase net energy jobs by 20 million or more, but that work relied only on empirical data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and generalised the results for the rest of the world using a multiplier. But the data varies dramatically across regions, driven by differences in technology and rates of unionisation, among other factors. For instance, extracting 1m tonnes of coal in India takes 725 workers, versus 73 in the US.
The latest analysis, published in the journal One Earth, combined such employment factors across a global dataset (including key fossil fuel, non-OECD economies such as Russia, India and China) with an integrated assessment model, which combines climate and economic estimates to predict the costs of climate change.
“This dataset makes the analysis more grounded in … reality, rather than using a multiplier,” said one of the study’s authors, Dr Sandeep Pai, who led the analysis as part of his PhD at the institute for resources, environment and sustainability at the University of British Columbia in Canada.
Under the target scenario of global temperatures being held well below 2C of pre-industrial levels, of the total jobs in the energy sector in 2050, 84% would be in the renewables sector, 11% in fossil fuels, and 5% in nuclear, the analysis found. Although fossil-fuel extraction jobs – which constitute the lion’s share (80%) of current fossil fuel jobs – will decline steeply, those losses should be offset by gains in solar and wind manufacturing jobs that countries could compete for, the researchers estimated.
However, while most countries will experience a net job increase, China and fossil fuel-exporting countries such as Canada, Australia and Mexico could have net losses.
Undoubtedly, there will be winners and losers. The winners will be people who take these jobs in the renewable sector, and there are the health benefits of fresh air and cleaner cities – but there will also be people, companies and governments who lose out, said Pai.
“That’s why … we want to work towards a ‘just’ transition, make sure nobody’s left behind,” he said. “The point is that unless politics and social context of different countries align, I think this technological transition will not happen soon.”
Johannes Emmerling, an environmental economist at the RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment in Italy, another author of the study, acknowledged that the analysis did not account for the gaps in skills.
People working in the fossil fuel industry do not necessarily have the expertise or the experience to carry out jobs in the renewable sector, but given that there are few estimates of jobs as the world aims to forge a greener future, the focus was on firming up estimates, he said, adding that skills were the next avenue of research.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos does not appear best pleased with Richard Branson stealing some of his thunder with the Virgin Galactic launch: Branson went 53 miles (85 kilometers) into suborbital space on Sunday while Bezos has a self-funded trip to space planned for July 20. Bezos published a document comparing his Blue Origin to Branson’s Virgin Galactic, including its impact on the ozone layer.
Source: Blue Origin
The fine print at the bottom notes that “a liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen rocket engine (which Blue Origin uses) has 100X less ozone loss and 750X less climate forcing magnitude than an air-launched hybrid engine (which Virgin Galactic uses).”
But what is the carbon impact of a flight? Neither Blue Origin nor Virgin Galactic has been particularly transparent about the carbon footprints of their ventures, and all we can do is guess.
Virgin Galactic
Virgin Galactic has only said that it is equivalent to a business class return ticket on a transatlantic flight, which the Financial Times calculates to be 1,238 kilograms of carbon dioxide per person.
Source: Virgin Galactic
A much earlier article in the Wall Street Journal suggests that it is higher:
“According to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s environmental assessment of the launch and re-entry of Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft, one launch-land cycle emits about 30 tons of carbon dioxide, or about five tons per passenger. That is about five times the carbon footprint of a flight from Singapore to London.”
For something that isn’t going to happen very often, that isn’t such a big deal, even if it is nothing more than an expensive joyride. But as in everything else these days, you have to go beyond just the fuel burn.
The Virgin Galactic plane burns HTPB (Hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene) and nitrous oxide, sometimes referred to as rubber cement and laughing gas. HTPB is the main ingredient of polyurethane and is made from butadiene, a hydrocarbon extracted during the steam cracking process used to make ethylene. The heat needed to make the 900 degrees Celcius steam comes from natural gas, and one study estimated there is about a metric ton of CO2 emitted for every metric ton of ethylene, so it probably is about the same for butadiene.1 So that would mean that emissions including upstream manufacturing emissions of the fuel are double, or about 60 metric tons of CO2.
This doesn’t include the fuel used for the big plane that carried the craft up, and of course, it doesn’t include the embodied carbon from building the whole operation.
Blue Origin
Bezos’ New Shepard is a rocket, not a space plane, and needs a little more oomph to get off the ground, so it is running on liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The products of combustion are water and a tiny bit of nitrogen oxide.
Launch of New Shepard. Source: NASA
However, hydrogen has a big carbon footprint of its own. Most of it is “grey” hydrogen made by steam reformation of natural gas, a process that releases 7 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of hydrogen. Compressing it and cooling it into liquid hydrogen is also energy-intensive; in an earlier post, the company making it said it took 15 kilowatt-hours of electricity per kilogram of hydrogen. A lot of liquid hydrogen is made in Texas, where according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the electricity emits 991 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour, or 0.449 kilograms per kilowatt-hour, or 6.74 kilograms per kilogram of hydrogen.2 That totals roughly 14 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of liquid hydrogen.
Compressing and liquifying oxygen is energy intensive too: according to engineer John Armstrong, to produce one metric ton of liquid oxygen (LOX) you need about 3.6 megawatt-hours of electricity. Applying Texas electricity, you get 1.61 kilograms of CO2 making 1 kilogram of LOX.
Source: Reddit
Bezos hasn’t released any details on the amount of fuel it takes to launch his rocket, but a Redditor did some estimates and came up with 24,000 kilograms of fuel. At a 5.5 mix ratio (hydrogen is really light, 1/16 the weight of oxygen) you get:
4363 kilograms of hydrogen X 14 kilograms of CO2 = 61 metric tons of CO2
19637 kilograms of oxygen x 1.61 kilograms of CO2= 31.6 metric tons of CO2
Totalling 93 metric tons of CO2 per launch
None of this includes the incalculable upfront carbon emitted making all the prototypes and infrastructure and the rockets and planes themselves, a Life Cycle Analysis of the whole enterprise would be mind-boggling, but that is another story.
So What’s the Big Deal?
In the larger scheme of things, it’s not much, with Virgin Galactic at 60 metric tons of CO2, Blue Origin at 93 metric tons. After all, a full 777-200 going from Chicago to Hong Kong pumps out 351 metric tons and that kind of flight happens many times per day. It’s carrying many more people many more miles, but the total CO2 emissions from flying dwarf that of these rockets.
It looks even less dramatic when you compare it to the average footprint of the billionaire who could afford a $250,000 ticket; he probably already has a carbon footprint of 60 to 80 metric tons per year flying private between multiple residences.
In the end one can probably conclude that we don’t need fewer rockets and less space tourism, we need fewer billionaires.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced this week that it’s considering drinking water limits for the entire class of PFAS compounds, which public health advocates say are categorically toxic.
The chemicals are used to make products resistant to water, stain and heat, and are known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t fully break down or degrade. They are linked to a range of serious health problems such as cancer, liver disease, kidney problems, heart disease, decreased immunity and more.
Though the EPA announcement marks only the beginning of a years-long process, the move is significant because the agency does not place any limits on PFAS in drinking water, and states’ rules limit fewer than 10 types of individual PFAS compounds.
About 9,000 varieties of the chemical exist, and a growing body of scientific research suggests that the entire class is toxic to humans and animals, and accumulates in the environment.
nvironmental groups have argued for several years that developing rules for each individual compound is failing to keep the public safe.
“With over 1,000 PFAS chemicals approved for use in the United States, a chemical-by-chemical approach to setting drinking water limits would likely take many lifetimes,” said David Andrews, a senior scientist with Environmental Working Group.
A recent EWG analysis found drinking water supplies for more than 100 million people across demographic lines are contaminated with PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, and it is estimated that they are present in 97% of Americans’ blood.
PFAS all share a key trait: they are fluorinated, which helps the chemicals resist degradation, move through the environment easily, accumulate in animals and ultimately cause disease.
Public health advocates say that trait is the basis for regulating the chemicals as a class, or outright banning them, and a drinking water limit would represent a significant step in that direction.
Developing rules for a small number of PFAS compounds is largely ineffective because industries simply replace regulated compounds with non-regulated compounds that are also fluorinated.
A timeline on when new limits could be put in place is unclear. It has taken the EPA up to five years to determine if it is going to regulate contaminants under the Safe Drinking Water Act, and additional time on top of that to develop the limits. The EPA did not immediately answer specific questions about a timeline.
Straddling the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire, Indonesia is one of the most geologically active countries in the world, with churning molten rock beneath the archipelago triggering about 1,000 tremors a month. The heat generated by movement in the Earth’s bowels can be harnessed. Where water seeps into the ground, it warms up, creating energy that can power homes and industry if you drill deep enough.
In 1904, Italian scientist Piero Ginori Conti became the first person to use this type of energy to power several light bulbs. More than a century later, geothermal power has become an important source of renewable electricity from the United States to the Philippines, but Indonesia wants to rise above them all.
Home to 40 per cent of the world’s geothermal resources, Indonesia’s government has identified more than 300 sites with an estimated 24 GW in geothermal energy reserves—the world’s largest—across islands including Sumatra, Java, Nusa Tenggara, Sulawesi and Maluku. Most of this remains untapped. Three years ago, it overtook the Philippines to become the second-largest geothermal power producer globally. Now, it only tails the United States, which has a capacity of 2.6 GW.
Geothermal plants use steam from underground reservoirs of hot water to spin a turbine, which drives a generator to produce electricity. An inexhaustible source of heat, geothermal is relatively clean and does not emit carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases, doesn’t produce a lot of waste or make a large footprint on land. Unaffected by the whims of nature, geothermal can generate a stable baseload power around the clock to complement more variable output from other green sources, including wind and solar.
Geothermal power capacity in Indonesia, the Philippines, and the United States, 2011 – 2020. The US is the biggest geothermal power producer globally, followed by Indonesia and the Philippines. Source: IRENA
Increasing domestic capacity will also help Indonesia cushion itself from the risks associated with its dependence on fossil fuel imports and associated price fluctuations while reducing fossil fuel subsidies, which gobble Rupiah 70.5 trillion (US$4.9 billion) a year.
Indonesia’s idea to draw energy from the bowels of the Earth goes back to the Dutch colonial era. Trial well drilling began at Java’s Kamojang crater as early as 1926, although it would take several more decades until the first generator was installed to produce electricity. By the mid-1980s, several geothermal plants were in operation and explorations on other islands were underway. In 2018, a consortium of Japanese and Indonesian firms completed the US$1.17 billion Sarulla project in North Sumatra, the world’s biggest geothermal power plant at the time with a capacity of 330 megawatts, enough to power 330,000 homes.
As of 2020, Indonesia had 19 existing geothermal working areas and 45 new working areas, while 14 areas had been earmarked for preliminary surveys and exploration, according to government data. A total of 16 geothermal power plants have been built.
A worker at Indonesia’s first geothermal field, Kawah Kamojang, in 1935. Image: Christoffel Hendrik Japing, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia Commons
Investors stay away
Despite the sheer scale of its potential, the sector has experienced setbacks. The government’s plans for the industry largely hinge on private money, but major policy uncertainties and the government’s adverse pricing regime for renewables continue to deter investors and drive up costs, making geothermal projects less viable.
Due to this poor investment climate, the energy and mineral resources ministry conceded last year, progress on its ambition to install 7.2 GW of geothermal capacity by 2025, a target enshrined in its electricity procurement plan (RUPTL), will bedelayed by five years. It is estimated that Indonesia will require US$15 billion in investment to meet this goal.
If Indonesia doesn’t develop a clearer framework, the sector will find it difficult to thrive.
Septia Buntara Supendi, manager, sustainable energy and energy efficiency, Asean Centre for Energy
The list of market restraints is long. Two key obstacles are the lack of favourable rates for the power that developers feed into the grid and the high upfront risks facing firms in the exploration stage. Drilling wells can be a gamble because companies never know exactly how big a geothermal reserve they will find. This clouds the economics of geothermal ventures.
“Pricing has been a problem for renewable energy in Indonesia, especially for geothermal energy, because the development costs are very high,” Florian Kitt, a Jakarta-based energy specialist at the Asian Development Bank told Eco-Business.
Complicating matters further is that geothermal resources are often found in remote areas, further increasing costs. The government will need to throw other renewables into the mix to achieve least-cost electricity generation, Kitt said.
“The government wants to be a world leader in geothermal energy, and it will eventually be, but right now it makes more sense to look at how to best diversify and green Indonesia’s energy supply to meet demand at least cost. Key is an affordable mix of geothermal, solar, wind, hydro, biomass, and other renewable energy sources,” he said.
Indonesia also hasn’t laid the necessary groundwork to draw investment. From inadequate grid management and cumbersome negotiation practices to poorly designed power purchase agreements, there are myriad barriers the nation needs to tackle, according to an ADB report released last year.
While the adoption of international best practices for planning, procurement, contracting and risk mitigation will likely bring down clean energy costs, the government has not adequately “taken into account the dependency of renewable energy costs on the broader regulatory and commercial environment”, according to the bank.
A recent report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, an independent Canadian think tank, showed that out of the 75 power purchase agreements that clean energy firms had signed with government-owned utility company Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN) between 2017 and 2018, 36 per cent had not reached financial closing, and nearly 7 per cent had been terminated.
New hope
To plug the industry’s funding gap, the government has backed research on small-scale geothermal plants that come with smaller investment needs and risks compared to bigger facilities. The state also provides tax incentives and has streamlined previously tedious permit processes. In remote areas, it has engaged communities to improve public acceptance of geothermal development. Local opposition to geothermal plants has hamstrung projects in the past.
The government’s focus on de-risking geothermal exploration to incentivise private investment has been an important step towards increasing geothermal development, according to Kitt.
But a presidential regulation announced last year that is predicted to revitalise the renewables sector remains stuck in limbo. While a draft is on the table, the different ministries are still debating the budgetary impacts of the scheme as the Covid-19 pandemic continues wreaking havoc on the economy, soaking up government resources.
The regulation is meant to fix the pricing mechanism for geothermal power and mitigate early development risks through fiscal incentives and state-funded well drilling. Under the scheme, energy planners have also proposed a subsidy to close the gap between the geothermal power tariffs and PLN’s basic cost of electricity, a policy previously recommended by the ADB to encourage the state utility to buy more clean energy. At present, caps on PLN’s retail prices act as a strong disincentive for the firm to purchase anything but the lowest-cost electricity, which is typically coal-fired.
“There are massive opportunities in geothermal energy. The sector will be critical for Indonesia to achieve its sustainable energy ambitions,” said Septia Buntara Supendi, manager for sustainable energy and energy efficiency at the Asean Centre for Energy, a think tank based in Jakarta. “But if Indonesia doesn’t develop a clearer framework, the sector will find it difficult to thrive.”
One of the world’s biggest food and consumer goods companies is set to introduce carbon footprint labels on its products for the first time by the end of the year – marking a key moment in the shift to badge products with their cost to the planet, The Independent reveals today.
Unilever, which has 75,000 products including Magnum ice-cream, Pot Noodle, Marmite and Hellmann’s mayonnaise, said that the carbon footprint of 30,000 of these products would be measured within six months, with carbon footprint labels on a select range by the end of 2021.
The labels will be piloted on up to two dozen products in Europe or North America and could adorn packaging in UK supermarkets by the end of 2022. Unilever said it plans to badge its entire product range over the next two to five years and also floated the idea of supermarkets creating “carbon-neutral or carbon-friendly” aisles, just like they have ”vegetarian aisles”, to help consumers make greener choices.
It is the first move by a global player to introduce carbon footprint labelling and could shake up supply chains in the food and drinks industry, causing other companies to fall in line or accelerate their plans. It comes as Boris Johnson’s food tsar, Henry Dimbleby, recommended a move towards consistent labelling that shows the environmental impact of products. The National Food Strategy, released on Thursday, said the Food Standards Agency should work with government and industry bodies to “develop a harmonised and consistent food-labelling system”.
It said: “Creating a simple and consistent method of labelling would ensure that all shops and manufacturers give us the same kind of information about our food. Having to record information about the environmental impact of food production could also influence the way that manufacturers make their products.”
Last month, Marks & Spencer and Costa Coffee agreed to pilot an “eco-score traffic light-style” label on select own-brand products from September. The label, developed by scientists at the University of Oxford and launched by the non-profit group Foundation Earth, will be graded into tiers marked A to G and colour-coded – green for the most environmentally friendly and red the least. It will involve 13 brands, including meat brand Naked, and they hope to follow up the pilot by expanding into Europe next year.
Previously carbon footprint labels have been used only by plant-based companies, such as Quorn Foods and Oatly.
Marc Engel, Unilever’s global head of supply chain, said: “We are halfway to ‘knowing’ what the carbon footprint of our product range is and we think now is the moment to begin ‘showing’. Our market research shows that younger consumers especially are very impacted by climate change and are keen to use their buying behaviour to send a message. We intend to roll out carbon labels on our entire product range over the next two to five years and believe it will transform not only the actions of consumers, but of the thousands of businesses in our supply chain as well.”
Unilever’s move was welcomed by the government as well as early adopters. A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “We support Unilever’s ambitions to include carbon labelling on its products to help consumers in the fight against climate change.”
Pot Noodle is part of Unilever’s vast product range, Source: Independent
Sam Blunt, global marketing operations director for Quorn Foods, said the announcement of labels by the end of 2021 was “exciting”, adding: “A business of that size could really drive things forward and make a big difference, especially if they quickly roll out the labelling across their whole product portfolio.”
With about a third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions coming from the food industry, according to the United Nations, carbon footprint labels serve as a quick way for consumers to evaluate the climate impact of a product. Measured as a carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) value, it shows the environmental cost from farm to fork, taking into account fertiliser use, energy needs, transport, processing, refrigeration and packaging.
But arguments as to what data to include in the label – as well as underlying concerns as to how accurate that data is – still divide opinion behind the scenes.
The British Retail Consortium, the trade body representing UK retailers, warned that “capturing all the data to generate an accurate and scientifically trustworthy label is complex – and we are not there yet across the full spectrum of retail products”.
Its head of sustainability, Peter Andrews, said: “Take a simple product like blueberries. The carbon impact fluctuates according to whether they are ripened indoors or in a field, which is itself a factor of the weather, which cannot be predicted. A lot of data still needs to be captured before consumers can hold up two bags of rice or two brands of beef burgers and make a robust choice between them based on carbon labels.
“We think carbon labels will play an important role in helping everyone live lower carbon lifestyles, but trust in a label is essential and that means the data supporting it needs to be robust.”
The label itself is contentious and different forms have been floated: either an exact footprint measure stated as a CO2e value – though critics say this could be hard for the public to grasp – or a simpler traffic-light system. The further question – as to whether the label should calculate only carbon emissions or take in wider environmental issues such as biodiversity and water usage – also divides the room. Andrews said: “A single, universal approach to labelling is critical to enabling the public to compare products across different brands. A proliferation of labels would not be helpful.”
But Unilever’s Engel said: “We believe speed is important to generate momentum and we intend to build accuracy along the way. For the data, we will use a combination of industrial averages taken from approved databases together with actual carbon measures where we have them, such as with our Ben & Jerry’s range. We think our labels will be around 85 per cent accurate. Ideally we want a world where a carbon footprint is as simple to measure as a calorie count, but it took 30 years to standardise calories and we don’t have 30 years to standardise carbon labels.”
Unilever is “spending millions on focus groups and consumer feedback” before settling on what form its labels will take. “We’re considering a traffic-light system supplemented by more precise data on the website, but we are still working through the options because it has to make sense to the consumers,” said Engel.
In contrast, food giant Nestle, which has over 2,000 brands in 186 countries, said that to focus exclusively on carbon emissions would be a mistake. Emma Keller, head of sustainability, said: “We shouldn’t only use labels to drive down carbon emissions and forget about biodiversity and animal welfare. It’s in all our interests to have an industry-wide, harmonised approach to labelling that is led by the science and adopted across Europe. We think scientifically robust composite labels will emerge over the coming years and that the Cop26 climate summit in November will accelerate the debate, but that we shouldn’t rush into it. For it to be effective in reducing emissions and providing transparency and agency to consumers, nobody should do this alone or strike out with their own method. Collaboration is essential.”
Defra, criticised by some in the industry for sitting on its hands, told The Independent that it hoped to use its Environment Bill “to seek powers to ensure information about environmental impacts, such as carbon emissions, is provided with certain products” – but gave no timeline for doing so or sense of how such powers might work. Defra added that “the need to regulate will be reduced in those sectors where industry is already taking action”.
Luke Pollard, shadow environment, food and rural affairs secretary, said: “In the middle of a climate and nature emergency, people want to do what they can to help the environment, but at the moment they don’t have the information to make more sustainable buying choices. Labour would show leadership with clearer labelling on carbon and environmental credentials, so people can back the brands and products doing the right thing by our planet.”
Engel said: “We have to accept that governments and regulators are going to be late to the party and take action ourselves.”
Food companies agree that winning over the public is critical if this is not to end in the same way as Tesco’s botched attempt at carbon labelling in 2011. A Tesco spokesperson said: “We trialled carbon footprint labelling and abandoned it after finding they did not influence customer purchasing decisions and that the labels were hard to understand. We learned that we cannot affect transformational change alone and have called for collective action across the food industry.”
Today, a decade later and with climate change rising sharply up the public’s agenda, consumers appear hungry for information. A 2020 survey by the Carbon Trust, which launched one of the world’s first carbon footprint certification schemes, showed that almost two-thirds of adults in the UK support carbon labels with around 80 per cent backing them in France, Italy and Spain. A recent EU study reported that 57 per cent of consumers in the bloc were receptive to environmental claims when making purchase decisions.
Engel said: “Everybody is aligned on the urgency of this as well as the need for collaboration. Our view is the more pilots the better. At the end of the day, we’d have no problem adjusting our label to fall in line with others if it’s for the common good. We’re not trying to be competitive. We win and lose together when it comes to climate change. We agree with Nestle that we need to work together to make this happen, but we need to start now. In the debate between speed and perfection, we are opting for speed and will refine as we go.”
David Brown of Go-Ahead is promising that his company’s bus and train operations will be carbon-free by 2035.
‘Personally, I think that’s quite cool!” David Brown, 60, is beaming like a young boy, having just recognised the bus controller at the terminus outside Victoria station as a colleague who joined London Transport at the same time as him, almost 40 years ago. “People stick in transport a long time. That’s what I love about it. They’re doing a frontline job, I’m just doing mine, there’s no difference really.”
Except Brown is trying to steer not just buses but a multinational transport group as chief executive of Go-Ahead – in particular, to wrestle its emissions down to net zero, as the sector faces up to being the biggest contributor to greenhouse gases. This year he will leave the group – whose operations include Thameslink, Southern and Southeastern trains and buses in London and nationwide – after a decade at the helm.
While Covid threatens to unravel a lot of the work done to build up rail and bus services during Brown’s career, he is clear that climate change is the bigger long-term issue. Transport has far surpassed energy generation as the biggest CO2 culprit – making up a quarter of UK emissions – and last week Go-Ahead made a pledge that its 5,000 UK buses and trains would be entirely zero-emission by 2035, cutting its CO2 by 75%. It aims to hit net zero by 2045, before the national target, by offsetting the remainder.
Although Go-Ahead’s decarbonisation strategy – edged off stage by the government’s, which was published the same day – sets out many ambitions, it admits that many are not in its own hands. So what exactly is the point?
“It’s galvanising 30,000 people to get behind a climate strategy,” says Brown. “It’s a sense of purpose. What we deliver is helping solve climate change problems – if you get people on to public transport you’re taking them out of their cars.” About 55% of transport emissions are private cars, he says; just 3% come from buses, and 1% from trains.
The pledges assume continued government spending on hydrogen and electric vehicles, and subsidy for green operations. Brown lobbied for a change announced in the government’s decarbonisation plan, improving bus operators’ grants for running electric vehicles to 22p per kilometre. “It transforms the economics for investing in new buses.”
A high-speed train belonging to Southeastern, one of Go-Ahead’s rail franchises Photograph: Johnny Green/PA
He thinks there are opportunities for more hydrogen buses, but is cautious: “The capital cost is huge and it’s unknown what the ongoing operating costs and lifetime costs will be.”
Go-Ahead’s north London depot at Northumberland Park will be what Brown bills as “the first bus-to-grid virtual power station”, where electric buses charge slowly overnight, and put energy back into the network from their batteries when supplies are needed, as wind and solar supplies – and prices – fluctuate.
In all this, as the small print of the strategy makes clear, there is a commercial imperative: “If Go-Ahead does not take action on this issue, our competitors will – and those with more climate-friendly reputations could ultimately take market share from us. This would weaken our business.”
Brown happily concurs. “There’s an altruistic view, and a commercial reason for doing it, in terms of positioning. And a people reason: younger people especially are attracted to work for companies who have purpose and are doing the right thing environmentally.”
Right now, though, public transport faces a more immediate crisis, with passenger numbers still only about half of pre-pandemic levels. And there is a renewed focus on the risks with Covid cases soaring, particularly as mask-wearing becomes optional on trains in England.
Brown frowns. “Whenever anyone talks about a tight, packed environment, they talk about public transport – and I want to scream and say hold on, the average journey time on a bus is 18 minutes max, the doors are opening all the time, fresh air is coming in and out, the windows are open on the top deck. You really aren’t exposed as you would be in a packed pub sitting there for two hours, there’s no comparison.”
He doesn’t mention names, but the prime minister, Brown’s former boss when mayor of London, suggested even as he was removing the legal requirement to wear masks that people “might choose to do so in enclosed spaces, such as public transport”.
We used to bring 150,000 people into London Bridge every morning. They’re not coming at the moment.That affects everyone. – David Brown, Go-Ahead
Brown argues: “There seems to be a little bit of demonising it and that shouldn’t be the case. There is no evidence that anyone can catch Covid on a train or a bus, none whatsoever.”
That conviction comes despite the Covid deaths of a significant number of bus drivers. Brown says Go-Ahead believes none contracted Covid at the depot or while working.
Another factor may be at play, he suggests, comparing the clamour to travel abroad on planes, which are more enclosed than buses or trains: “People are choosing to do that because the prize at the end is going on a holiday. They might not be choosing public transport because the prize at the end is going to work.”
He sees a similar phenomenon with rail: “We have much busier trains at the weekend now, people are going to the coast – they love it, they don’t worry about what’s happening in the trains in those circumstances.”
On the mask issue, he says, he wants transport “to be treated the same as other parts of the economy”. If he could choose, “I’d want to say, everyone should be doing it everywhere, in any environment, I want that consistency”. Come Monday, he will still wear a mask. “It’s not protecting you, it’s protecting other people … it’s just a polite thing to do.”
Covid, he says, has only accelerated underlying changes towards working from home and ordering goods. “I don’t think we’ll go back to packed trains, because social trends are changing. Commuter journeys are going to become more discretionary.”
But net-zero targets depend on people returning to public transport, rather than the car, he says. “We have to find ways of getting people back on the railways, and we have to tackle the costs, because the cost base is not sustainable now.”
However, he points out that public transport is often seen abroad as part of the “fabric of society”, and subsidised accordingly. ”You need to cut your cloth, attract customers – and you may need government money, because of the social benefits.”
Nowhere is this more apparent to him than in the capital. “We used to bring 150,000 people into London Bridge every morning. They’re not coming at the moment. That affects everyone. The big fear I have for places like London is how do you keep that vibrancy of the city centre, if you don’t have all those people coming in? You need all that activity and buzz – otherwise, you’re just in the suburbs.”
It seems inconceivable to remember, he says, that in the job-scarce 1980s, when he started as a graduate trainee, the discussion at London Transport was about cutting back the Bakerloo and the Northern lines because the population of the capital was in decline.
But without public transport, “it wouldn’t move, it wouldn’t function”. The challenge now for operators, he says, is “making sure that when people do come back, that we’re ready and we’re there for them. If they don’t find that the 7.25am is still operating or we don’t have the same frequency of service, then we’ve got a problem.”
Governments must step up their regulation of businesses to tackle the climate crisis, the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney has urged, because the financial free markets will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions alone.
Carney, who left the Bank of England last year before the first Covid-19 lockdown, is now one of the most influential figures working on Cop26, the vital UN climate talks to be held in Glasgow in November. He is a UN envoy on climate change and Boris Johnson’s finance adviser on the climate.
He said for the world to meet its climate goals, governments would have to force industries to follow clear rules, on everything from energy generation to construction and transport, and set carbon prices that would drive investment towards green ends and close down fossil fuels.
“We need clear, credible and predictable regulation from government,” he said. “Air quality rules, building codes, that type of strong regulation is needed. You can have strong regulation for the future, then the financial market will start investing today, for that future. Because that’s what markets do, they always look forward.”
Without such robust intervention from governments, markets would fail to address the crisis. “It wouldn’t happen spontaneously by the financial sector,” he said. “But we can’t get there without the financial sector.”
People must also press political leaders to act, Carney said. “When people have made it clear they have that objective [of tackling the climate crisis], and if there is public policy that translates those wishes into real action, a price on carbon, regulation of internal combustion engines for example, then financial markets – capitalism – will come up with the solutions to give people what they want.”
Carney argues that countries and companies could still carry on exploiting fossil fuels, despite this advice, if they use technology such as carbon capture and storage, or other ways of reducing emissions. “You have to take it on the specific projects. If [fossil fuel] producers are able, through considerable investment in carbon capture and storage, to get to net zero then that creates some room in the carbon budget.”
In Canada, for instance, where Carney is from and partly lives – and where, according to rumours, he is reported to be considering a political career – he said oil sands producers could continue to develop their high-carbon resources, if they reduce their emissions and Canada can make changes elsewhere. “Canada has an objective of 40-45% down on emissions by 2030,” he said. “I’m not going to dictate exactly how that is accomplished but the critical thing is the aggregate.”
Companies should also be able to use carbon offsets to meet climate targets, Carney insisted. The practice of offsetting – funding the planting of trees or protection of forests, or other projects that reduce carbon, to make up for a company’s or individual’s emissions – has become increasingly controversial. Some fraudulent schemes have been uncovered, in which carbon credits did not exist or did not represent an actual reduction in emissions. Other schemes have been found to fail to protect forests, allowing logging to continue while selling carbon credits based on keeping forests standing.
Carney has drawn criticism from green groups over his support for offsetting, but remains a staunch advocate. “I’m of the view that offsets can play a role because they extend the carbon budget,” he said. “It’s a bit like when we think about people living on a very tight budget. If you can find ways to save a bit of money here and there or earn a bit more money, you do it. That’s what this is.”
Part of the purpose of carbon credits is to protect areas of forest under threat, such as the Amazon or in south-east Asia, with the additional benefits of preserving natural ecosystems and helping indigenous peoples. The world has not yet found other ways of keeping rainforest protected, he said. “We may not like it that it makes sense to have private companies pay to stop [the burning] but it makes a lot more sense to do that and preserve the rainforest than to just let it happen. Unfortunately, we’ve been just letting it happen.”
Despite criticism of companies “greenwashing” before Cop26, and despite his acknowledgment that “we have left it very late” to begin seriously cutting emissions, Carney believes that harnessing capitalism and the power of money will bring about the changes needed in time to avoid climate breakdown.
“With the right regulation, with a rising carbon price, with a financial sector that is oriented this way, with public accountability of government, of financial institutions, of companies, yes, then we can, we certainly have the conditions in which to achieve [holding global heating to 1.5C],” he said. “That’s our objective.”
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