The failure of the Climate Change Act: ten years on

The Climate Change Act is ten years old. It was passed in a different age. David Cameron had been hugging huskies to de-toxify the Tories. It was a year before the Copenhagen Climate Conference. ‘Fifty days to set the course for the next 50 years,’ Gordon Brown declared. China and India’s veto put paid to that, but Britain is still lumbered with a law that puts huge economic power into the hands of an unaccountable body, the Committee on Climate Change, which entrenches climate policy unilateralism. However much greenhouse gases the rest of the world puts into the atmosphere, the Climate Change Act compels Britain to almost completely decarbonise.

Jim Callaghan once told his policy chief Bernard Donoghue that the one thing he’d learnt from his years in politics was that when the two front benches agree, you can be sure they’re wrong. Snow fell gently from the sky as 465 MPs voted in favour of the third reading of the Climate Change Bill.