Isramart : Government admits Britain will fail to meet 2010 carbon emission target

Isramart news:
Britain will fail to meet its 2010 target for cutting carbon dioxide emissions, the Government admitted yesterday.

The target of a 20 per cent cut in 1990 levels of CO2 by the end of this year is likely to be missed by a wide margin.

By the end of 2008, CO2 emissions had fallen by only 10 per cent. The figure is 13 per cent if it includes carbon credits bought from emission reduction programmes overseas.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: “We are not going to meet the 20 per cent target this year. The 2010 target was always designed to be stretching and has helped to drive the progress that has already been made.”
She said that the Government would be focusing on achieving other targets with much longer timescales. It has committed to cutting greenhouse gases by 34 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050.

Environmental groups have said that it is much easier to focus on long-term targets because ministers can put off making difficult decisions.

The 2010 target was first announced in Labour’s 1997 election manifesto and has been repeated many times by ministers since then.

Overall emissions in Britain of six greenhouse gases fell by 1.9 per cent in 2008, according to figures published by the department yesterday.

The decline was partly due to the recession reducing demand for energy and partly a result of the continuing trend of manufacturing moving overseas to China and elsewhere.

A University of Oxford study last year found that emissions had risen by 19 per cent between 1990 and 2003 if all goods and energy used in Britain and emissions from travel were taken into account. The department’s figures exclude emissions from the manufacturing of goods destined for Britain but produced overseas. They also exclude emissions from international aviation and shipping.

The department said that the decrease in emissions in 2008 was partly the result of continuing to switch from coal to natural gas for making electricity. But emissions from households rose by more than 3 per cent, as people used more fossil fuels to heat their homes.

The six greenhouse gases declined from 640.5 million tonnes in 2007 to 628.3 million tonnes in 2008, while CO2 emissions dropped from 543.6 million tonnes to 532.8 million tonnes.

There were decreases in emissions from energy supply, transport, businesses and industrial processes.

Overall, the figures are slightly better than the results for 2007, in which carbon dioxide emissions fell by 1.5 per cent and output of greenhouse gases, including methane and nitrous oxides, was down by 1.7 per cent.

Britain has exceeded its target to cut the six greenhouse gases by 12.5 per cent on 1990 levels as part of the Kyoto climate treaty.

By the end of 2008, emissions in Britain were 19.4 per cent below 1990 levels without emissions trading or 22 including emissions trading.

The provisional figures for emissions in 2009, which are likely to have been affected by the recession, are published next month.

Tim Yeo MP, Chairman of the Environmental Audit Committee said: “These figures show that the UK is at last moving in the right direction on carbon dioxide. Not that Ministers can take much credit — much of the reduction in emissions during 2008 was sadly due to the recession.

“The creation of the Department of Energy and Climate Change, since then, has finally shifted the Government’s climate programme out of neutral, but years of stalling means it is unlikely to meet its 1997 pledge to cut CO2 by 20 per cent by 2010.

“The Government must now step up a gear if it is to meet its carbon budgets and deliver on its promise of thousands of new green jobs.”