The flaw in Britain’s net-zero plan

The COP26 summit is unlikely to be an outright flop. There has been no shortage of drama, with speakers seeming to compete with each other to see who could use the most histrionic language. Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, went so far as to compare the attending leaders to Nazi appeasers. He later apologised.

Some progress, albeit small, is being made. A hundred countries have been persuaded, some on the promise of sweeteners worth £14 billion, to sign a pledge to end deforestation by 2030. Brazil, the most important of all, is among them. India has agreed, for the first time, to set itself a date for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions — although its target, 2070, is two decades beyond what the United Nations would have liked. Most leaders at Glasgow will be dead by then.

One thing is unlikely to have changed by the end of the two-week conference. For all the pledges made and aspirations expressed by countries around the world, Britain will remain one of a tiny handful of countries to have turned its carbon-reduction pledges into law. Almost all the others will do as they have previously done and allow themselves some wriggle room. Pointedly, China’s short-term carbon-reduction targets are expressed ‘per unit of GDP’ — emphasising that it has no intention of sacrificing economic growth on the altar of tackling climate change.

This leaves Britain with a very serious problem: what to do if some of the technology which will be required to reach net zero disappoints? It is very noble to want to set an example to the rest of the world by legally committing yourself to eliminating carbon emissions. It will not look so clever in, say, 15 years’ time if we are still struggling to store copious quantities of energy generated on sunny and windy days for sunless and becalmed days when our wind farms and solar farms are generating next to nothing.