Chris Stark, Committee on Climate Change: Coronavirus and Net Zero

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Chris Stark: Hi everyone, it’s really good to see you again virtually.

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Since the Assembly last met face-to-face in Birmingham, we’ve all been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. This is obviously a health crisis, but it will also change the context for the question the Assembly is considering: How should the UK meet its net-zero greenhouse gas emissions target.

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We are all going to have different views on the implications of the coronavirus – and the measures that the government has introduced to control its spread. You might for example be thinking about how risks like these are managed in the future – or you might also be thinking differently about the role the government is playing during the crisis. I’ve certainly been having some of those thoughts – I’m sure you have too.

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A very important thing to say before we kick off on this is that there are no direct links between coronavirus and climate change, but the extent of change that we’ve seen to our way of life in the last couple of months means that there are links to what you’ve been discussing.

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So what we wanted to do is to give you the chance to discuss all of that, and to let Parliament know what you are thinking, as part of this process.

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So on to slide two. I’m going start our discussions on this issue by running through the three aspects of the situation you see here – and crucially how that might affect the way that the UK reaches net zero emissions:

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Firstly what has actually happened during the lockdown? So what has the government done, what impact has that had on us? What impact has there been on emissions and the climate?

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Secondly how might lifestyles change, be changed in the future by all of this? I’ll offer some reflections on how that could happen, what lifestyle changes there might be and how that might affect the Net Zero target in the future.

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Thirdly, rebuilding after the pandemic. How might the government approach the task of rebuilding the economy and society as the restrictions are eased. How might those steps help or hinder the Net Zero goal?

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Let me look at each of these in turn, so on to slide three.

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Firstly, what has happened during the lockdown?

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We’ve obviously seen a very urgent need to slow-down infections of Coronavirus and that’s what’s led to the very tough measures introduced by the government a few weeks ago. The ‘lockdown’, as it has become known, is designed crucially, to reduce the contact we have with others, but it’s also having some major impacts and causing some major changes to the way the economy works and to our society. All of us have had to change how we work, how we travel, how we live in our homes, what we buy, even what we eat.

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So the first observation really is that the government has ‘stepped-in’ in quite an extraordinary way to our way of life, so we’ve seen some remarkable changes - they’ve acted very swiftly to introduce new measures that are very tough new laws to stop us coming into contact with one another so often. And the government in general is doing remarkable things including keeping money flowing in the economy – with new payments payments to people so they can keep earning when they might otherwise have lost their jobs; and new financial support for the self-employed and small business owners.

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What we’ve seen in the last few weeks might have changed your view about what the government can or should do.

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The second observation is that people in the UK are having to suffer a lot of new hardship – either from Coronavirus itself or from the lockdown measures.

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Many of us sadly have lost loved ones during this crisis. And many more of us are feeling the strain of not seeing family members or friends. Some people have also lost their job or had their livelihood substantially curtailed. And although many people do support the lockdown measures, there are some who strongly resent the restrictions that have been placed on their lives.

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Some new worries have also emerged during this crisis – particularly about our food supplies and our food system. Many of you will have experienced problems in the supply of food to shops recently and shortages of some products. All of that has highlighted to some at least our dependence on imported food and other products.

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The third observation is that the lockdown has also had a pretty dramatic impact on many of the things that cause greenhouse gases. Now we can’t say yet what the full impact of the lockdown will be, but I’ll highlight some of the most important impacts for you today.

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Now we are travelling much less than we used to. So we aren’t using fossil fuels for transport as much. Air travel has been dramatically reduced. There are much fewer road journeys by car at the moment. Overall, use of motor vehicles during the lockdown has more than halved.

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That’s led to, amongst other things, much cleaner air in our cities and towns – and a big reduction in transport emissions overall.

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The country’s demand for electricity has also fallen during the lockdown – particularly because many businesses aren’t open and aren’t consuming that electricity. That means less electricity overall needs to be generated – and that wind and solar and nuclear power are now making up a greater proportion of all the electricity being used, and that’s because the National Grid always tries to use first – before other forms of generation. So emissions from electricity generation are down overall and we’ve even seen the longest ever run of days without burning any coal to make electricity in the UK.

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And lastly, we are all at home more, as I am today, so more energy is being consumed in the home – be that for cooking, for heating or for the electricity appliances that we have in our homes. That means that emissions related to the home have risen a little at least during the lockdown, possibly by a fifth.

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Overall, when we look at those impacts, we have seen a dramatic fall in UK emissions during the lockdown. We think emissions might have fallen by around a third over that period – and possibly even more than that.

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What might be surprising is how small the impact will be on climate change itself. The steps we’ve seen here in the UK have been replicated in other countries around the world to varying degrees. So global emissions will fall this year, possibly by as much as a tenth. But emissions are still continuing – just at a slower rate. So CO2 is still being added to the atmosphere.

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One way to think about this is filling a bath from a tap. If the tap represents global CO2 emissions, and the level of water in the bath is the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere, we have done is slightly turned the tap down during the global lockdown, but water is still flowing into the bath and the level is still rising.

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So to really slow climate change, the tap still needs to be turned right down – and permanently and that needs to be a permanent change with things like moving from petrol vehicles to electric vehicles rather than the kind of short sharp restrictions that we’ve seen during the lockdown if we want to impact on climate change in the long run.

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So a question to get you thinking on all of that is does the experience of the coronavirus and the lockdown make you think any differently about how the UK should get to Net Zero.

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On to slide four. The big question is how lifestyles might be changed by all of this in the future?

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The changes that we’ve seen to our lives recently are enforced and they intended to be temporary, they’re probably not a useful way to think about how we will address climate change in a permanent sense – but as the lockdown continues – an obvious question is whether any of this is going to have a lasting impact and if so how might that affect the challenge of reaching Net Zero in the UK?

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Now very important to say at this stage we’re not in a position of being able to predict confidently how things will change after this, but I thought it would be useful to offer four perspectives on this, four things to think about areas where we could see lasting changes in lifestyle and how that might affect the Net Zero goal.

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Firstly, remote working, and video conferencing. Many office workers particularly have had the new experience of working from home consistently during the lockdown, using videoconferencing software like this, like Zoom – which we’re using today. Doctors have also moved to offering consultations remotely. These kinds of experiences might make video calling a more accepted practice in the future.

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So, one question is whether this might lead to us commuting and travelling less in the future – and whether that might then reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from surface transport.

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Secondly on air travel we’ve seen a dramatic fall-off in air travel – which has led to some of the financial difficulties that you are hearing reported amongst the airlines and airports. Currently there are travel bans around the world and there are rules on quarantining travellers when they arrive - all of that’s making international air travel particularly unappealing. But in the future we may have enduring worries about these kinds of pandemics that might mean that governments are going to require stricter measures to guarantee the health of travellers by plane. That could curb our air travel and reduce emissions from aviation.

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Thirdly on industries and employment and sadly, one of the lasting impacts of the coronavirus shutdown is likely to be the premature closure of industries and with it the jobs that are in those industries in the UK. One of the UK industries that is probably most at risk at the moment is our oil and gas sector. There is now a really low price for oil because there’s too much global supply and very little global demand. That is going to make petrol and diesel cheap in the short run but it's also going to make it much less appealing for those oil companies in Britain, in the UK, to drill for oil in the North Sea for example.

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There might also be public pressure to make more things that we consume here in the UK coming out of this, especially so we’re not so exposed to the risks of interruptions to importing goods in the future. That could mean higher emissions here in the UK if we produce these things using fossil fuels here in the UK.

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And on road transport – and the difficulty of social distancing and what that will do to public transport. If we face lengthy periods of social distancing coming out of the coronavirus crisis, fewer people are going to be able to use public transport – and many are going to need to look therefore at alternatives for travel. If that alternative is a car, we are going to see new problems of congestion on roads and higher emissions with it.

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So one alternative to all of that is to make it easier to walk or to cycle – or even to scoot. During the lockdown we’ve actually seen an increase in the number of people who have been using bikes for example. One idea is to repurpose more of our road network that we have across the UK to support that kind of travel. Almost half of the journeys taken in towns and cities are for journeys around two miles or under two miles – that could be a good candidate for the kind of journey that you could walk and cycle for instead of using the car.

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So to sum up on all of this, there are probably two broad questions which you see on this slide that you might want to consider. Firstly do you think lifestyles will change after the lockdown or do you think they will go back to how they were before? Secondly, as the lockdown eases, do you agree or do you disagree that steps should be taken to encourage lifestyle changes like this to be more compatible with reaching Net Zero overall.

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On to slide five. And the last section is about how we rebuild after this pandemic and the Coronavirus lockdown is likely to cause one of the biggest ever reductions in activity in our economy – and sometimes we call that a ‘recession’. Right now, governments around the world and here in the UK are thinking about how they can rebuild their economies. The decisions that governments will take and that businesses will take over the coming period are going to have a lasting impact on emissions – and a lasting impact therefore on our progress towards Net Zero in the UK.

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So some things to consider on this. Firstly, investing public money. Following a recession governments quite often look to invest public money – to provide new jobs, to get the economy started again. That could be investment in infrastructure like transport projects or in broadband projects, or it could be in the energy networks in the streets around us.

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The government could design that kind of investment plan to help achieve net zero overall, for example they could provide investment for renewable energy or for public transport. So that’s something really useful to think about as we come out of this.

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Secondly, using regulations and incentives to encourage investment. It’s not just the government who can spend to get the economy going – it’s also businesses and it’s also private investors. Government can use regulations to influence what things that money is spent on and even when that money is spent– so driving investment towards the things that help to reduce emissions, and away from the things that cause them.

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So just a couple of examples of what I mean by that. Firstly, the government could for example relax planning regulations so that we see new renewable energy projects constructed more quickly – that would obviously come at the cost, the penalty of rushing through consultation with local communities.

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Or, secondly, government could introduce new incentives and regulations to phase-out fossil fuelled technology more rapidly and encourage people and businesses to spend money on replacing them with low carbon alternatives. So one idea is a ‘scrappage scheme’, which is a financial incentive to get rid of an old technology (like a gas boiler or old car) and replace it with a newer cleaner one, like a heat pump or an electric car. That can get the economy going by requiring more of those new technologies to be manufactured, or installed and supplied here in the UK.

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Avoiding ‘lock-in’ of our use of fossil fuels is a really interesting topic as we come out of this. In previous recessions, we’ve seen how governments have turned to steps that have made some fossil fuels cheaper as a way to ease the economic impact of the recession – they might do that by reducing taxes on fuels for example.

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We’ve also seen how governments have invested in projects that can encourage our use of fossil fuels in the future, like road building. So a key question for net-zero is whether we can avoid encouraging those things that lock-in high emissions – and instead, stimulate those things that lock in lower emissions, as I’ve already said, that’s things like renewable energy projects. But one really important example here might be measures to improve the energy efficiency of homes – so things like better insulation in homes or double glazing. Some of you have heard about these things in earlier weekends.

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The fourth issue is industry 'bailouts’. Many industries have been badly affected by the pandemic and the lockdown and they’re asking right now for government support, sometimes we call that government ‘bailouts’. That's including industries that we have been discussing in the assembly that have high emissions, like airlines. Now there’s a great deal of debate about whether it’s right for a government to prop up a company that’s failing in the current crisis. But if governments choose to do that, one approach that they can take is to attach conditions to any bailout or any support that they offer. We’ve seen that in France, for example, where the government there have indicated their support for Air France will be dependent on it meeting new climate targets.

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And the last issue on this slide is about reduced incomes – and pressure that citizens and consumers are going to feel coming out of this.

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As we emerge from the peak of the pandemic, the full scale of the recession is going to become clear, many people are going to see that their incomes have been reduced. One of the debates that we will be having I’m sure is what should happen to taxes in those circumstances. Should they go up to provide money for more public services or is this the time to actually cut taxes so that we get more money put into the economy directly, and people keep more of their income. What’s definitely clear is that some people are going to find it harder to invest themselves. That might well have an impact on some of the things that we have been discussing as an Assembly – for example, electric cars, or making home improvements on energy efficiency.

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There could be steps by the government to make some of those things cheaper – although the question will be obviously whether the public finances are going to be strong enough, for the government to be able to offer financial incentives like that.

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What’s clear overall is that there are some very tough choices ahead for the government so it’s really useful to hear your thoughts on that.

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A question to get you started off on that is whether you agree or disagree that steps taken by the government to help the economy recover should be designed to help achieve Net Zero. So it’s over to you now.