Clean

The climate watchdog holding the UK government to account

Published Apr 4, 2024, 4:00 AM

When the UK’s Climate Change Committee was formed in 2008, it both signaled the country’s seriousness about its environmental goals and gave other nations a template for setting their own climate policy. More recently, though, the UK appears to be backpedaling: Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has approved new oil and gas licenses and pushed back a ban on fossil fuel cars. To understand how we got to this contentious moment, and how the UK can reclaim leadership, Zero host Akshat Rathi sat down with the CCC’s chief executive, Chris Stark. 

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producers are Mythili Rao, Sommer Saadi and Magnus Henriksson. Special thanks this week to Kira Bindrim and Jessica Nix. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.

Welcome to zero, I am Akshatrati. For the past three decades, the UK has led the world in reducing emissions. It's still true, but you might think otherwise given the political rhetoric coming from the government in power. One big reason why the home of the Industrial Revolution has been ahead in the race to reign in emissions is the Climate Change Act of two thousand and eight. It bound the government to carbon budgets that forced it to limit how much planet warming emissions it can spew In any five years, each budget is smaller, taking the government to zero emissions by twenty fifty. Those budgets are informed by the science and overseen by the Climate Change Committee. For the past six years, the committee has been led by Chris Starr. As the chief executive of the CCC, He's had a delicate job to do, advising on policies that would put government back on track to meet climate goals, and admonishing the government when necessary. That job has become harder over the past year as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has tried to back peddle on green policies. It has empowered a partisan media to create doubts around the political consensus to Act on Climate Change, something that has been a hallmark of UK politics for the past fifteen years. Stark is stepping down from his role later this month, and I wanted to hear how he has navigated the growing divisions and what might be ahead for his successor That matters a lot with the UK holding an election this year that could determine whether Sunak remains in power or is replaced by a more climate friendly government. We also talked about how the CCC has played outside the UK, shaping the way many governments around the world approached climate policy. Chris, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me action well before.

We come to the net zero and the sort of phase under your leadership at the CCC. The institution itself is sixteen years old. It was created as part of the UK's Climate Change Act, and it was created at a time where all political parties came together to back the Act and back the creation of the CCC. Can you just talk through what made that moment so special given the politics of today which seem a lot more divided.

The Climate Change Act in the UK is the product of a particular period in Britain politics. So the Act was put into low in two thousand and eight, and therefore the work on it was happening in the year prior to that. So if you cast your mind back to British politics, we had a different type of British politics at the time on climate change. We had a feeling that the UK was in the lead intellectually at least on the story of climate change, and the UK could in place this piece of legislation.

But the bill was supported.

By David Cameron's government in preparation a few holdouts, but not many, and that led to a very strong piece of legislation which essentially set out the idea in a nutshell that the government needs to act on this. It's their responsibility to tackle it. They need some rules to do that. But that in itself was not enough that you needed something else to stand over that, which is the CCC, the Climate Change Committee, just to keep providing the evidence, also give the advice on the targets, and then to check the government's homework essentially for Parliament.

And that works.

I think we've demonstrated in sixteen years that it works, not least because we've upgraded the long term target over the time of the Act to a net zero target from what you used to be an eighty percent target, and that I think is a demonstration that politics also comes around eventually periodically to support that. And I think it's important to say that we have these moments regularly in British politics, and I've been in this job during one of them. It's quite you can despair when you see the politics going in a different direction. But my view generally of climate politics is that it's a bit like a ratchet. You get periods of really increasing ambition and then it falls back a bit, but it never falls back to where you started. So I think there is an ongoing progress in climate politics that you can see playing out.

Yeah, it was only three members of Parliament who voted against the Act, more than four hundred who voted for it, and there were a bunch of absenties. Now in the creation you've got the Climate Change Committee. It's an independent government funded but independent body that has goals and policies. Eventually you provide the technical know how of how to meet goals and then policy advice on what needs to be done, but you also act as a watchdog just making sure that the government is actually making progress on these goals. And the advice that you give can have big implications. Right. The straightforward one is governments do what you say, but if they don't, then nonprofits can use your advice to show governments are failing. For example, in twenty twenty two, a number of NGOs sued the UK government for not being on track to meet its climate goals. They won the case and the government was forced to respond. What are other good examples of the impact that CCC's work has had on the UK's that zero trajectory?

Gosh, that's a difficult one to answer quickly. I mean, you've raised one of them. So the watchdog rule is laid out very clearly in the Act, but it's become very important and you write the ng us and others civil society uses ours as a means to encourage more action from the government. I think the bit that's not so well understood is that we have this advisory role. But what's really interesting is that we basically every five years we package up the latest piece of advice. We do a fresh piece of analysis what we call bottom up piece of analysis, and across every bit of the economy to look at how you can decarbonize it. What's been really interesting and I frankly inspirational actually, But the UK Act and that model is that turns out there's a lot more going on than just a piece of analysis when you give that advice on the carbon budget. What we're looking at is a fundamental shift in every corner of the economy, and the private sector has a real interest in that work. And what's happened over the sixteen years of having a Climate Change Act is really interesting. It's not what you see written in the Climate Change Act. We now do a piece of work where we're trying to build consensus sectors of the economy for the transition and the change that lies ahead. And if I take one example of that, when I started in this job, we had a very difficult discussion as an institution with the aviation sector. So it's a high misting sector. We don't have the answer as to how we can get to zero emissions, certainly not by twenty fifty, and we were essentially in opposition with that sector because we were a threat. We in recent years have turned that into a much more productive discussion with aviation sector. We're essentially saying to the aviation sector, look, here's how we see the path ahead for aviation emissions. We also agree on a lot of the technologies that the aviation sector itself will deploy to make aviation more efficient.

That basically means the aviation.

Sector, when we produce our report, will say we agree with the CCC, now please put policy in place to support it. And that is a very powerful message to government. And I suppose I didn't anticipate that when I started this job. And it's not just an aviation You see that in the energy sectors, you see that in the industrial sectors. You even see that in one of the hardest areas.

Which is buildings.

There is a lot of consensus now behind the analysis that we produce, and that's how change happens. Essentially, that we've become much more of a change agent than I think was envisaged when the Climate Change Act was first written. But we've got to wear that very carefully. We are not advocates. There is a line that we must never cross in the CCC between advice and advocacy, and one of the challenges of my job is to make sure that we're policing that line carefully.

We walk close to it, of course, but we can't cross it.

That's a less appreciated advantage of having a body like the CCC, But at its core, from a public perspective, you still remain an advisor and a watchdog. And while you're independent, even though you're fully funded by the government, your advice and your reports on progress on government can ruffle a few feathers. But in doing your job over the last six years, you've also lived through increased political polarization on the net zero issue, and that shows up not just in the politics but also in the media discourse. Places like the Daily Mail has been using CCC's advice is people have to now give up meat because the CCC says so, or the Telegraph has been trying to find emails about CCC's bias on certain topics. So what have you done to be able to stand your ground and continue to have that independence and credibility in this period?

I feel we have a platform and that's legitimate, and that's provided by the Climate Change Act. And the second thing is that I don't think we should use that platform unless we've got analysis to support a statement. So the temptation is to comment on everything, and you're right to raise the newspapers in the UK particularly we have a particular brand of newspaper, a tabloid outlook on it that leads often to a request for us to comment on literally everything. Most of my job when it comes to comms, as we call it, is saying no to things, actually, but where we have analysis, where we have numbers, where we have a view, I also feel it's legitimate, in fact necessary for us to make sure that people understand that and to project that as loudly as we feel we need to, and that has taken us into different discussions, certainly in the time I've done this job, because prior holders of this job didn't take that view, and I had a chairman, Lord Deebon, John Selwyn Gummer, a member of the Thatcher government and now in the House of Lords, who really supported that view that it was important for the Climate Change Committee to state its view where it had the analysis, but where we don't, we've got to shut up. So and there's lots and lots of areas where we don't have the sporting analysis, and I think that often frustrates, particularly my friend in the green movement, that we go so far but not as far as they might like. And I think that's the challenge really is that our role is only going to be defensible if we stick to our knitting, as we say in Scotland, and stick to where we have the analysis. Some of the newspapers in the UK now make me a target is because I'm determined that where we've done the analysis, i will defend it and I'll put it out there, and I am frustrated when there are nefarious interest to take pot shots of the analysis on without the same analytical basis, because I feel it's important that we stand our ground.

Now, you do this for government, but if you look at your own work, those are very good lessons to have, which is you want to be backed by data, have clear communication, give options, give advice and not be an advocate. Very important lessons in divided times. But how effective has that strategy been, especially in the recent years. Right even though the UK can legitimately claim that it has reduced the most emissions among large economies since nineteen ninety, the CCC has been warning the UK government for a few years now that it's not on track to meet its end of decade goals. And despite those warnings, Prime Minister Rishisunak has approved new Orlean gas licenses, delayed a ban of fossil fuel cars, and even approved a new coal mine. So all things said and done, the cecc provides advice and then the government doesn't follow it. So is the era of climate consensus over? And is CCC's credible advice now not worth what it used to be.

I don't think the era of climate consensus is over. There is always a risk that it might be soon, though, and I think we've got to keep thinking about that. We've got a general election coming up in the UK at some point, probably this year. I don't think climate change itself will be an electoral issue, the manner in which we approach net zero might be, and that is probably the first time that's been the case. And I still believe there is a political consensus behind net zero and behind addressing climate change. But I also believe that the minute that you get complacent about that, you risk losing it, and you've got to keep remaking the arguments for the age. So we're in an interesting moment where I feel the narrative has shifted on net zero, and of course that's a political concern, but political concerns eventually turned into concerns in the real economy too, so we need to keep working at this. My own view on net zero is we're probably past the point where net zero itself is enough as a reason to do something.

In British politics, there.

Was a period in the early part of it where once we'd established net zero as the goal, you could simply slap net zero on a program and say that's why we're doing it, and that would be enough to earn it political support in the government, certainly within the government, So your policies coming out of government solely for the reason they suppy to net zero. And the next stage of this, I think is probably to use net zero or climate as almost a secondary concern and get into the question of why you might want to do something else first and for there to be a benefit to net zero too. You know, the set of issues that we face as a country when it comes to the economy are driven by the usual concerns about jobs, investment. They need to regenerate parts of the UK. You can use net zero as a way to think that through. We need jobs in places that have suffered from not having investment in industry up and down the country outside of the southeast of England, and we need to do this for those reasons and it will help net zero. So we can look at the places of the UK where we will develop green industries, low carbon industries. We should do it for that reason, and net zero is a secondary concern. You can extend it further. There are people in this country quite rightly who worry about things like energy security, in fact, more fundamentally the security of the country. We need to do the right things to develop an energy secure country and help net zero. You can extend that further. People cared deeply about landscape beauty in this country, as they should. We should be developing beautiful landscapes, rewilding, supporting regenerative farming, doing all those things and helping net zero. One of the most interesting things I've done in my six years in this job was the Climate Assembly, which was a process, a hugely interesting process commissioned by the Select Committees in the Commons, six Select committees in the Commons. Just after the net zero target was set. They asked a question, look, how can we understand what voters think? Were people in this country, citizens of the country think about net zero? And the Citizens Assembly that we did on that was fascinating because we gathered together one hundred or so people of very different views, and some of them really didn't care too much about climate action, and in fact, we overstated that in the group that we had those views. What's interesting is many of the people who don't care about climate change do care about some of the other things I've talked about, energy, security, landscape, beauty, jobs, And I think we're in a world where the evidence was there in that assembly that if you go hard at those topics and then tell them that this is also good for the climate, it actually increases their support for that action. So we're missing a trick, I suppose, if we're not speaking to people who have different values and outlooks on this.

More from the conversation after the break. I actually attended one of those sessions of the Assembly in February twenty twenty, just before the COVID lockdowns began, and of course some of that assembly then went virtual. But you once told me a story about anonymous in that very assembly. What was that story.

Yeah, one of the members of the assembly. We didn't name them, but within the assembly we had we knew who everyone was. One of the members of the Assembly wished to go unnamed. Even in the physical meetings. And his name was Anonymous, and he was quite an interesting chat because he was definitely fearful of a lot of the things that come with net zero, fearful of the people who might implement those things, and are maybe not fearful suspicious of the reason for all of this, I might say, maybe a slight paranoia about that, the role of government and all of this. Now, there are many many people out there in the UK and around the world who take that view. What was interesting the set of things that Anonymous was interested in are things like nuclear power, the nation's security. He didn't wish to see changes to behavior, didn't want to see any of that push through policy, and I think there's a big wedge of people living in the UK who feel that way. If, however, you frame up what's necessary for net zero in the right way for him, he was very supportive of it, really really supportive. When you say to him, look, nuclear is a big part of the mix potentially in the future, Okay, I support that. And if you say to them, look, if we take that particular strategy that will be more beneficial to the climate than this particular strategy. He would typically choose the pro climate strategy as a preference. The public support for it is there. We're actually trying to do something that every country in the world will need to do and therefore is a broader set of concerns about trade and competitiveness and how the economy works that really will matter, and we in the UK and really needed to provide a template I suppose for other countries to do that, and that argument. I think we've won that, but we need to keep winning it if we want other countries to follow suit.

And you mentioned Lord Davin, who was the former chair of the CCC. He had said that last year lost its leadership on climate and if that's the case, then there's likely to be a change in government. Say a Labor party comes in power here in the UK, what would be your advice to Labor so that the UK can regain the leadership on climate.

So in this podcast, I will not predict the outcome of an election, but I'm happy to speculate. So in fact, most of the things that we can speculate about, it doesn't really matter who the government will be because after the general election, whenever it is, let's assame, it's the autumn. Nothing changes. We are still in the same position, and you're right. Lord Deben made great play of the fact that he felt the UK had lost its climate leadership. The reason he said that is not because of looking backwards where the UK is, because the UK has done more than any G seven possibly in a G twenty country to decarbonize itself, genuine decarbonization, not squeezing out carbon to other parts of the world. This is actually decarbonization, particularly through what we've done in the power sector. When you look at that record as a very strong record. His view on that comes to the fact that that's not the outlook the Climate Change Committee takes. We don't project forwards. What we do is project backwards from a position of hitting the targets, and this idea of instead of forecasting, we are hindcasting. We're standing in twenty fifty and we're looking back to where we are today. We know that we've hitting at zero in this world, and we're asking ourselves a different question, which is, well, what would we be seeing if we were on the right path to that goal? What do I wish in twenty fifty that we'd done sooner to get ourselves on this low cost pathway with the minimum of friction with the maximum of advantage and we're not seeing those things today and that's the key thing the government. When we hosted COP twenty six in Glasgow, my hometown, we set a goal for twenty thirty to reduce emissions by sixty eight percent from the nineteen ninety levels. You can use that as a marker for where we need to be. We would need to on recent progress. We need to increase the pace of decarbonization in every sector, accept the power sector. So take the power sector out of it, because we know we're doing okay on that. Look outside that, beyond the POWA sector. We've got to quadruple the pace of decarbonization over the next six or seven years if you want to hit that twenty thirty goal. We are not seeing a policy package that will deliver that. And that in Lord Deebn's framing also my own, is climate leadership. It's about where you want to be in the future, it's not where you've been in the past. And real climate leadership is scaling up the policies now to deliver that and encouraging the private sector response that comes with it. And I suppose my final point on this is that other countries will beat us at this if we don't get at it. My biggest frustration as I leave this job is the one I came in with when I started, is that we cannot seem to see that it's happening. The transition is underway, and the biggest risk to us is that we miss out. I think actually that we don't get on board with this, and that quadrupling of effort is a way of framing the set of things that you would want to see happen in the broader economy anyway to be on board with this transition, to be in the lead of a pack of countries that will see the benefit of this.

First, a lot of your work is technical, but you have to figure out a story that you tell after doing that technical work that would land with policymakers, that will land with the public. So in China, it's BID the largest electric car maker, or COTL, the largest battery maker. In the US, it's Tesla, well, until recently, the largest electric car maker in denmarket's austered. We can go through a list of countries that have these national champions that are bringing jobs, that are bringing economic advantage, that are playing a trade advantage. The national champions enable those countries, those politicians in those countries to tell a story of success, of being able to show exactly what leadership could look like if we applied what Tesla has done in the US to other sectors of the economy. Even though the UK does have some leadership on things like doing grids with high renewable penetration, there isn't a national champion. Do you think we're missing a storytelling ploy in not having a national champion.

I think you're probably right on that.

It would be so much easier to have a national champion like Tesla to point to, and if you go to Denmark, that is definitely part of the narrative there. And the great advantage in advert commas that the UK has is that our transition from fossil fuels is largely designed or influenced by geology. We have demonstrated to the rest of the world how you develop a renewables based power system and see advantage from that. We're going to run out of gas, in particular from the North Sea over the course of this transition to net zero, and we will have at the end of that depleted oil and gas fields to put something back into So there is an obvious discussion, but what can you do with that? And it takes you quite obviously to storing hydrogen and storing carbon and we need to try that, I think. So there is a potential for the UK to have some proper global leadership again in those areas and to develop those national champions. Trouble with both of those sextes is that the commercial opportunity and it's not quite as clear as it is, for example, in Tesla, and I think it still rests ultimately on policy and that's I think the next Parliament's discussion actually is what do we do about those things?

We're going to need to have them in the mix. Do we see.

Commercial advantage growing out of that? Do we have that kind of national champion that can go into other parts of the of the world.

Well, when Tesla started, or Orsted was created, or BYD was transitioning from being a battery maker to a karme, none of the commercial advantages were quite clear as they are now looking back. But if we stick to advantages that could be brought in other economy advantages, the motivations to stick to net zero while the other priorities which are usually higher on the list for politicians can be met. You've talked about this idea where think about economic policy, the Treasury is so involved in shaping it. Right, it's either the Treasury, it's central banks that will say, while inflation is too high, we're going to ramp up interest rates. That's going to affect how the treasury behaves. There's all this economic financial stuff that enables the politics to happen. Why does the Treasury not think of the carbon budget as something that also needs to be managed?

Right?

It is very good at managing budgets and the Net Zero Act gives the UK a carbon budget. You advice on the carbon budget as the CCC, but why is the Treasury not taking part in those discussions.

So there's two ways of framing the rule of the Treasury in the last six years, let's stick to the time I've done this job. One is that they are a malign force in this and they continue to be a barrier to progress.

The other is the.

One I take, which is that over the last six years in particular, they have dramatically changed their outlook on this and they're on a journey. I'm sure as an institution, if you're not in the treasure I used to work in the Treasury, So if you work in the Treasury, it's an amazingly creative place to be because the leavers are there for you to do pretty much anything in policy terms. Albeit it's a fiscal institution first and foremost.

But if you're.

Outside of that, if particularly you're in the department that deals with climate policy, it looks like it looks like a bit of gunment that holds you up, And it's seductive to come back to that. And no doubt the Treasury has over the years been a problem. But what's happened, I think, and I've certainly worked personally quite hard at this, is to develop the idea that net zero is not the same as other policy objectives. It is more fundamental. It is something that must be done that has a deep implication for the economy. And previously, the time that CCC was created, we would have framed that as a cost that was worth incurring. But increasingly we're now viewing it as a benefit to the economy, and the Treasury I think has accepted that. They've absolutely moved to see it that way. I think I would say on this, and you're right to frame it in the way that you did actually, which is that they care about every budget but one, and that is the carbon budget. And I think it is interesting to think in the next parliament, with potentially a new government, about the way in which the Treasury might be given incentives to think more clearly about that. My main criticism of the Treasury isn't that they're a barrier. The main challenge I put back to the Treasury is that they need to be more responsible for their decisions. So if they I'm going to use a very extreme example here, if they cancel a carbon capture program and they have done because it's too expensive, what do we do instead? And that's the beauty of carbon budgeting is it gives you constrained decision making. We've got to do a thing by twenty fifty and we've got to achieve targets on the way to that. That's carbon budgeting, and what the Turgury has not done is confront the implication of its own decisions. I don't think that anywhere in the world we have a finance ministry that thinks that way, and I think it would be brilliant for the UK to model that.

Yeah, I mean the Finance ministry is supposed to be able to constrain these things. Right, if money was unlimited, everybody would have candy and unicorns, but we do act as if the carbon budget is unlimited in many places. Now, one thing that we should talk about, which is not UK related but has had massive impact, is the Climate Change Committee after its creation has led to a mushrooming of other climate change committee type bodies around the world. Talk us through some of the examples of where these are, what kind of impact they've had, and how you have worked with many of them, advising them on what your best practices have been and how that's help shape net zero or climate policy in other places.

Yeah, this is something when I took this job I didn't think I would be working on, and it's ended up being one of the most rewarding aspects of my job. So you're right in a sense, the UK is the sort of granddaddy of how you can approach climate change domestically. So we were the first of the major economies to have climate legislation. It's probably still, i think, the most complete piece of climate legislation that you will find. It's quite remarkable actually that economy the size of the UK has it in place, especially given our politics, but it's there. And one of the aspects of that climate change legislation is that there's a climate change Committee. So there's huge interest in that in other parts of the world. I'll give you a few takes on this. I've been involved in lots of things. So if you go to New Zealand, you have essentially almost an exact template of the UK Climate Change Act that has been developed with strong reference to the UK, and we helped establish the Climate Change Committee that there.

Is in New Zealand.

So that's one way in which we can have that kind of influence and it's really rewarding and valuable to see that. But we do more than that. So you can look at places even like Germany. For example, Germany, I remember having a very live discussion in our first year in this job what German climate law could be, the importance of there being an independent authority, and all of that was really the message I was taking out. You go to Denmark, they've essentially copied the UK Act. You can go to Korea has a piece of legislation that looks very similar to the UK's and it has a similar climate Advisory Council in place all of that good stuff. What's come out of this generally is the kind of most interest bit of all in this discussion is that there are lots now of Climate Advisory Councils around the world. We don't have a full number, but there might be as many as thirty. Now. None of them are exactly the same. Many of them are technical bodies like us. Some of them are not so independent, some of them are part of government. Some of them look more like think tanks. But they're all doing a similar job of bringing some independent view of what the transition needs to look like. And in particular they're trying to transcend often the change in Parliament. You need something that looks across for the longer term and the climate transition. That's the nature of climate change, and they all do that in some shape or form.

The Climate Change Commantee might not have as sexy a name as Tesla, but if the UK does have a national champion, I feel like the CCC is one in the transition. Now you're going on to a new job. You're going to be the CEO of Carbon Trust. Tell us about Carbon Trust and why did you choose to go there as your next gig.

I do one thing alone, which is just to look constantly at the transition and ask questions about how it can be achieved. And when you do that that very unique privilege. I definitely have views on how it can be done. And my frustration is that more and more of a time you can see that the action now is in the private sector. And what I want to do is to shift to an organization where I feel I can have more of a role in actually getting the private sector to act on this. So the Carbon Trust is quite an interesting place to go and try and do that.

Karben Trust itself used to be part.

Of the UK public sector and during the austerity years of government it was pushed out of the public sector and it now operates outside of the public sector, working on that transition with corporates, but also doing a set of things that are about forcing the pace of change across various sectors. And it's quite a unique institution because it doesn't have any shareholders.

It's not a charity.

It's a company limited by guarantees, so all the money he generates goes back into the mission to address climate change and that is very exciting for me.

I think we can do something cool with that.

And the other part of it that's cool is that it's global based in the UK, but it's got offices right around the world. And that story that we've just told actually of the relative immaturity of the institutional frameworks and how we address this in other parts of the world. I definitely think the Carbon Trust can help with some of that too. So there's just a set of issues here is a sort of soup of issues where I feel that I can go to the Carbon Trust and try and make more of an impact there, and I'm excited about it. So I'm going to take all this stuff that I've learned from the CCC and try and apply it actively at the edge of government, but definitely focused on that private sector transition.

I look forward to having you back on the show to tell us about what you've achieved at the CAB and Trust. Thank you, Chris, Thanks Cecha, Thank you for listening to Zero. If you liked this episode, please take a moment to rate or review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, Share this episode with a friend or with someone obsessed with budgets. You can get in touch at zero pod at Bloomberg. Dot net zero's producers are Mighty le Rao, Magnus Henriksen and Somarsadi. Our theme music is composed by Wonderly Special thanks to Kira Bindrim and Jessica nicks I am Akshatrati back So