3 October 2020
A good friend of mine recently showed me a letter he had received from Theo Clarke, our MP. The letter was the MP’s response to my friend’s question about the Conservative Party’s commitment to a ‘green recovery’.
According to Theo Clarke, ‘The UK has played a world leading role in tackling climate change and the transition to clean growth’. It is interesting to note that, according to, TheyWorkForYou.com, our MP voted against the bill to eliminate the substantial majority of emission from transport by 2030.
The notion that the UK government is a ‘world leader’ in ‘green recovery’ must be viewed in the context of the Committee of Climate Change Report. This is the Committee’s annual report to Parliament, assessing progress in reducing UK emissions over the past year. It finds that UK action to curb greenhouse gas emissions is lagging behind what is needed to meet legally-binding emissions targets. Since June 2018, Government has delivered only 1 of 25 critical policies needed to get emissions reductions back on track.
Government continues to be off track for the fourth and fifth carbon budgets – on their own appraisal - and the policy gap has widened further this year as an increase in the projection of future emissions has outweighed the impact of new policies.
So much for ‘our ‘world leading role’.
In her letter, in an effort to impress my very intelligent friend, our MP proceeded to introduce the concept of ‘round tables’. When I googled ‘round tables’, I got a selection of brightly coloured coffee tables from Next and Argos, but apparently this is the catchy jargon for ‘group’. The five, ‘new recovery round tables’, according to Theo Clarke, bring together academics and business leaders, no mention of climate scientists or environmentalists, and will develop strategies to produce 140,000 ‘green jobs’ which ‘capture growth opportunity from the shift to net zero’.
Call me thick but I can’t see how this squares with the Committee of Climate Change Report. We are not even on the track, never mind in the starting blocks.
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