November 12, 2024 - 2:30pm
Given that his party promised during the election to make Britain a “clean energy superpower” with a carbon-neutral electricity system by 2030, Keir Starmer’s presence in Baku this week was far from surprising. He travelled for the annual UN climate conference, COP 29, although the leaders of the European Union, China, India, Germany, France and the USA are not expected to attend.
According to his spokesman, the Prime Minister went because “it’s important the UK returns to a position of global climate leadership”, and he wanted to “send a clear signal” that Britain is committed to “ambitious” emissions targets. This he duly did this morning, unveiling a pledge that as well as meeting the Net Zero electricity target, Britain would continue to cut emissions in other fields such as heating and transport. The goal of this plan is that by 2035 the country’s emissions will be down 81% from 1990.
What’s not so clear, however, is whether other large countries whose heads of government will be absent will actually follow the path that Starmer and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband intend to pioneer.
The election of Donald Trump in the US has already provoked loud lamentation from environmentalists. Following years of similar statements, in September Trump described climate change as “one of the great scams”. What’s more, he has vowed to withdraw America from the 2015 agreement made at COP 21 in Paris, which was supposed to bind the world in keeping the rise in average temperatures to 1.5°C above pre-industrial times.
Starmer notwithstanding, it therefore seems certain that COP 29 will not achieve what many green advocates regard as its principal objective: a pledge by advanced nations to increase “climate aid” to the developing world from $100 billion to $1 trillion or more a year.
Trump’s return is not the only flaw in the never-ending COP process. Nine years after COP 21, it’s worth examining what some of the world’s biggest emitters have done with their own energy systems since the “historic” Paris agreement, bearing in mind that Britain accounts for just 1% of global greenhouse emissions.
Since 2006, China, the world’s second-largest economy, has been emitting more carbon dioxide than any other nation — almost a third of the planetary total. In 2020, President Xi Jinping promised that Chinese emissions would peak by 2030, and reach Net Zero by 2060.
However, Beijing has been approving and constructing new electricity power plants that burn coal — the world’s dirtiest fuel — with abandon. Since the beginning of 2022, China has granted permission for new coal power plants with a total capacity of 218 gigawatts (GW) — more than five times the UK’s average total demand for electricity. Britain now has no coal-fired power stations at all, and while China’s emissions continue to increase, the UK’s have fallen by 46% since 1990. By the end of 2023, almost half of the newly-approved Chinese coal plants were already being built.
India’s promises have been just as empty. In 2022, its government submitted a document to the UN setting out its policy to promote a “healthy and sustainable way of living based on traditions and values of conservation and moderation”. Whatever that may have meant, India has also been building and commissioning new coal-fired power stations with enthusiasm. It currently has new plants in its pipeline with a combined capacity of 46GW, about as much as the UK’s peak total demand on a freezing winter’s day, and has said it will not eliminate but double its coal production by 2030.
The list of countries which have added to their coal-fired power supply since Paris is long. It also includes Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Senegal and Kazakhstan.
There is, of course, a reason why China and other countries like coal-fuelled electricity: it is relatively cheap. That means they can use it to make and sell products such as solar panels to their more environmentally-aware customers, such as Britain. China controls more than 80% of the global solar-panel market, whereas Britain’s last solar factory closed in 2013 — thanks to Chinese competition.
Then again, Britain already has the highest electricity prices in the developed world, with the cost to industrial users rising 124% in the last five years to reach a level 50% higher than in France and Germany — and four times as much as the US. In China, one kilowatt hour of electricity will cost a business just 7p, but in Britain the going rate is three and a half times higher at 25p. This before any of the new government’s green measures begin to take effect.
Starmer is not the first British prime minister to go to a COP promising “climate leadership”, nor the first to promise that cutting emissions and relying on renewables would lead to energy security, prosperity and jobs. He may learn the hard way that if other, much bigger emitters fail to follow his lead, the political cost may be incalculable. The benefit to the planet, though, would be almost negligible.
Tickets are on sale to Exposing Net Zero Myths on Wednesday 27 November at the UnHerd Club.
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SubscribeI think everyone remembers the recent floods in Spain. Slightly fewer remember the drought that preceded it.
But even fewer are aware that in the fight for clean nature and at the behest of EU environmental services, Spain had previously blown up 102 dams so that rivers could flow as in prehistoric times, and fauna and flora could flourish next to them.
Interestingly, not so far from Valencia, the dam that saved the nearby city remains intact. It was built by the Romans 2,000 years ago. These cruel slave owners believed, shame on them, that people are more important than fish when it comes to life and death.
Ah but the photos made such excellent propaganda for the cause of the climate emergency and our boiling planet.
Starmer, the saviour of our planet! Surely the rest of the world will follow his wise example!
Has Keir Starmer ever influenced anyone ? At least in the direction he intended.
The “let’s says as little as possible” 2024 election campaign says otherwise.
As does the “stop Brexit” campaign.
He’s just a rather more intelligible – semantically correct – form of word salad than Kamala Harris. But the message is still garbage.
He managed to influence 20% of registered voters to vote for his party in the General Election- that was all it took to secure him an overwhelming majority of seats in Parliament.
I very much doubt there were significant numbers of people who voted Labour in the recent election who wouldn’t have done so if a rubber plant had been leading the party.
Influence, there was none
A rubber plant is leading the party.
2Tier is a rubber plant? I never knew
And the establishment and the chattering classes refer to such
As Great British Democracy
It’s much easier to list the countries actually following through on COP
climate change pledges – Western Europe and Australia. What have I missed? Trudeau talks a big game in Canada, but emissions haven’t actually dropped and the whole program will be scrapped when he loses the election later this year. Any emission reductions in America can be attributed to the fracking boom.
Very confused article. If the UK wants to de- growth under Labour by going in for Net Zero thats it’s choice.
Why should India make a pretence? It has done a lot for NDCs by pumping up solar energy projects, but it certainly won’t become even more dependent on China by ruining it’s manufacturing with Net Zero targets not achievable.
Using terms like ” empty promises” is hypocrisy on the part of the writer.
Starmer is either a liar or a fool.
The idea that you can have net zero and growth was always highly suspect, now it’s an absolute non-starter. Growth requires investment and when Trump turns on the oil tap in the US, closely followed by Canada – once the laughable Trudeau is gone – every available penny of investment capital will be sucked out of Europe and the UK into North America.
Last Tuesday’s result means that Labour’s entire agenda is toast. They’re too dumb or too brainwashed to understand that so we’re all condemned to sit and wait for the inevitable crisis and IMF intervention.
Liar or Fool? Both??
TBF, to judge by the sheer economic illiteracy of the budget, he may actually believe this stuff.
Nobody is going to follow Britain’s climate leadership as this leads inexorably to blackouts and bankruptcy. Our emissions have fallen since 1990 because we’ve outsourced most of our manufacturing to the coal-powered Far East. If we achieve an 81% reduction by 2035 it will be because we have the world’s most expensive energy and not because we’re paragons of Net Zero virtue.
Politics is a funny business. Politicians like Keir Starmer think they are saving the world, when all they are doing is adding their own hot air. The problem of climate change is a real one, and people are right to be concerned about it. But there is no magical solution.
Politicians and governments can’t change the laws of nature, including human nature. When they try, they do harm, not good. They need to stop trying. Make government small, not big. Let us live our lives the way we choose. Give us freedom, don’t force us to run in a herd.
There is a magical solution: nukes. Unfortunately the elites won’t adopt it because they need problems more than they need solutions.
Britain’s technological inventiveness created the modern world. We should just get on and invent fusion reactors. And keep it to ourselves.
What a complete and utterly shameful act of propagandist and destructive environmental article this
The propaganda is a shamefully take straight out of the Nazi’s propaganda Minister Goebbels play bookk
In that as Qoute from that Nazi
It is not what you tell the people what is important , It’s what you Don’t tell them that’s off the highest
Order
Unquote
I so easily could have driven a horse and cart straight through the door you stand in by stating simple facts you have deliberately you omitted
However I regard your scribblings so abysmal that replying to refute you would be a utter waste of time
Give us the “facts” then
Ok some basic simple ones
Carbon takes upto 28 yrs from release to commence warming effect and once up there continues to warm for thousands of years
Upto 1957 96 % of all carbon released was by Western Nations
China at that time was responsible for’s less than 1%
The above clearly demonstrates all I say in my original post
Whilst this article cleverly attempts to place most of the blame upon China
The USA / Head of population is by far the largest polluter today and has been so since 1880
Not my words next but those of the head of UN climate change
Without China it is physically impossible for targets to be met
Another one for you
One of the World’s richest Men
And his private jet emitted more carbon in 2023 than 3.8 million internal combustion engine cars
I could fill hundreds of pages to completely trash this atrocious article
Shame on you and the Author
Literally everyone that doesn’t agree with me is a Nazi. Of course.
You imbecilic clown who knows not of what they speak
Why does Starmer think that the world is looking to the UK for leadership?
The fight against climate change, if you believe the science, and if you believe the consequences will be as bad as the most alarmist voices say, is still a fundamentally unsolvable problem, because it’s always been the prisoner’s dilemma on a planetary scale with the added complications of national/racial/ethnic/religious animosities and geopolitical competition thrown in for good measure. In theory, if everyone cuts emissions, we all enjoy a cooler and more habitable planet, but every individual nation has a strong incentive to break the rules to benefit their own people and their own geopolitical power.
Anyone with half a brain and a basic understanding of human psychology should have known there was no way this scheme was ever going to work under anything less than a total global authoritarian government. The environmentalists only realistic hope has always been to play the Saturday morning cartoon villain and, to quote one such humorous villain, “try to take over the world.” Failing that, It was always a question of who’s gullible enough to follow the rules and who isn’t and how long it takes people to realize this was all so much pie in the sky.
Americans might support emissions reductions if everyone was on board, but they’re not going to impoverish themselves for the sake of some overall goal of racial fairness or globalist ambitions. Most of the reason Americans rejected the Kyoto protocol was on account of ‘developing countries’ wanting exemptions for themselves based on their current lack of industry and the historic injustices done to them. Americans flatly rejected that logic and Kyoto was DOA in this country. In Paris, India and China changed their strategy. Rather than trying to guilt Americans into the scheme, they simply made promises they never had any intention of keeping about their own admissions and helping the developing world. They intended to flout the rules because there was never any enforcement mechanism nor any power capable of imposing its will. They knew they could get away with it because really who could stop them. Was the US going to have a war with every violator? Of course not. They simply hoped that the fear of climate change and a sense of colonial guilt would last long enough to provide them a decisive advantage…and somehow, against all common sense and logic, it worked. It’s a testament to the stupidity of our leaders that such a bluff was actually successful.